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New Version of Microsoft Office for Mac Slated for 2014 Release

Nunyabinez said:
Seeing these posts, I wonder what kind of work MR posters do. I unfortunately produce documents that may be sent to others to edit.

I have to often make presentations on someone else's conference room computer which is not often a Mac.

If you live and work in an insular world where you don't have to interact with other businesses or non-Mac users then maybe these alternatives are possible.

For me, not using Office would be such a pain in the ass that regardless of how poor the software is, I have to use it because it is THE business document format.
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I couldn't agree more. Rightly or wrongly, MS Word and Excel are the word processor and spreadsheet that almost every company has. If you want to be taken seriously in business or as a professional, you need to be able to provide clients / customers with documents in a format they can use and are familiar with. It's as simple as that.

I like how easy things are to do in Pages, but when someone opens that document in Word, the formatting becomes a mess. If Apple wants Pages to be a serious business tool, it needs to address this issue so that documents look exactly the same 100% of the time, every time when you open them on MS Word.

That being said, I now like Word for Mac, and particularly the notebook layout, which Word for windows doesn't seem to have. I hope it isn't removed from the next iteration.
 
Kris404 said:
Visio & Project, please.
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mytdave said:
Nifty. Are Access, Visio, and Project for Mac finally going to be available? If not, wake me up when they are...
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Have either of you used OmniGraffle Pro? It’s potentially a good alternative to Visio assuming interop isn’t a huge thing (per my post here: https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=18870923#post18870923 )

Funny enough in my circles, I actually ran into as many people using it as Visio (even though those same folks are MSO shops). Generally the file itself doesn’t need to be shared in our use-case, just something static (like a PDF), and it does import from Visio and export to VSD XML format.
 
MasterHowl said:
In my experience, MS Office for Mac is a very poor piece of Software.

It comes with so much bloat (all I really want is Word, PowerPoint and Excel!) and it's extremely slow and laggy. It crashes all the time, takes forever to load files, and just doesn't seem like the usual polished "Mac app".

I hope this version is better! (Saying that, the only part of MSO I use is Excel)
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Alumeenium said:
who even buys this junk ?

worst software on the planet
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The Mac version is pure bliss compared to the windows version.... I have my MacBook on my desk at work and beam documents back and forth because I HATE the windows version.

Both are very unintuitive though. Especially with graphics..... one thing Pages used to do very well.

And I buy this junk because I have to use MS Office for work.... but I get it for $10.... so I can't complain.

iWork once was something of an alternative, until the new version....
 
You can just 'feel' the Microsoft love in this thread :D

Like it or not, most businesses still depend on MS Office and until that changes most Mac business users would be happy to see an update to Mac Office.

I could probably live with Pages and Keynote if I didn't have to switch back and forth between OSX and Windows machines, but Numbers doesn't even start to do what Excel has been doing brilliantly for the last 10+ years.

Anything that closes the gap between Mac Excel 2011 and MS Excel 2013 would be worth the purchase price alone, as one of the last uses I have for Bootcamp/VMware is running the latter when the former starts grinding to a halt. You'd have thought running in a VM might at least level the Excel playing field, but no such luck.

Anyway, I think it's great news and will get almost excited about this as I will a new iPhone in the autumn (or fall for my US comrades) ;)

ps: Omni Group provide great OSX alternatives for Visio (OmniGraffle) and Project (OmniPlan) and although they might lack a little compatibility for some of the more complex functions, they're probably more intuitive for doing the basic stuff. Oh, and they are a lot lot cheaper than the MS products!
 
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Here’s an idea Microsoft - why not get the last version working properly first!

I don’t need a new version of Office. All I really need is for 2011 to work properly. Eliminate basic howlers like the contact field names and the fields themselves not matching Apple standards, so that contacts sync incorrectly from address book and iCloud. Make the Outlook database more stable so that it does not crash. Tidy up the icon bars in Word and make the custom templates system more intuitive. I am glad I am retired and so don’t have to use the Mac version of Excel. The macros just don’t seem to work properly and debugging v and h look-up tables is far more difficult than in the last Windows version I used (about 2003), where the error tracking actually worked. Providing a help system that actually helps would be nice. The help index virtually never finds the information you need - thank goodness for Google.

The new version will I am sure, have lots of silly new toys we don’t need but still will not do the basics properly and will cost a fortune. I would like it to be separately priced for each application, as I only really need, Word and Outlook. Not going to happen is my guess.
 
MasterHowl said:
In my experience, MS Office for Mac is a very poor piece of Software.

It comes with so much bloat (all I really want is Word, PowerPoint and Excel!) and it's extremely slow and laggy. It crashes all the time, takes forever to load files, and just doesn't seem like the usual polished "Mac app".

I hope this version is better! (Saying that, the only part of MSO I use is Excel)
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I could not agree more. After the 2008 version it went completely down hill when they replaced Entourage for Outlook.

On some Mac's I still use Office v.X, the first Mac Office version for OSX. That one works fine for most documents and supports most Excel macro's.
 
HenryDJP said:
I don't care about MS Office as much as I used to. Maybe because most of what is done in the business world today doesn't necessarily require using Microsoft's software. Today my entire office is happily Microsoft-free. :)
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our general deployment of PCs now sport LibreOffice or OpenOffice, but there are documents that don't render well, so there are parts of our company with full office. (ie, Excel, Word) of course many of users still sport an access database for their mini reporting needs....

Also we use exchange as our email server so our email client is ... ba ba baaah... outlook on our windows machines, Mail on our Macs machines for those of us that are lucky enough to use a Mac :)

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Powerbooky said:
I could not agree more. After the 2008 version it went completely down hill when they replaced Entourage for Outlook.
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in my experiance Entourage had more issues than the Outlook replacement, and except for the recent problems with Mail in one of the last 10.8.x updates that broke mail, it used to perform pretty flawless, the latest 10.9.2 has fixed many of those issues with exchange and mail.
 
Crazy Badger said:
You can just 'feel' the Microsoft love in this thread :D

Like it or not, most businesses still depend on MS Office and until that changes most Mac business users would be happy to see an update to Mac Office.

...
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Yep... most businesses "think" they depend on MS Office. Most companies use barely 5% of MS Office / Exchange. This is where MS cashes the most money from companies... all the licenses for software not being used.
 
LagunaSol said:
But everyone said businesses can only function with Microsoft Office? :confused:
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They do, they just do it with Office2000 like my company...

Word2000.PNG


:eek:
 
HenryDJP said:
I don't care about MS Office as much as I used to. Maybe because most of what is done in the business world today doesn't necessarily require using Microsoft's software. Today my entire office is happily Microsoft-free. :)
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One office. One out of 203984832043232432 offices are microsoft free.

Lets be serious, when it comes to productivity software Microsoft still reigns king.

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Powerbooky said:
Yep... most businesses "think" they depend on MS Office. Most companies use barely 5% of MS Office / Exchange. This is where MS cashes the most money from companies... all the licenses for software not being used.
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Can you provide a source on that 5% figure? Because I know for a fact every Fortune 500 company AND Gov't agency I worked for used:

Outlook
Word
Excel
Visio
OneNote
Lync/Office Communicator
Powerpoint


With Access (actually some departments still use this, for whatever reason), InfoPath, and Publisher being the outcasts I fail to see how you get 5%. TBH, I know of more shops that use Google Docs and such for their needs than I do any of the iWork stuff.
 
seecoolguy said:
in my experiance Entourage had more issues than the Outlook replacement, and except for the recent problems with Mail in one of the last 10.8.x updates that broke mail, it used to perform pretty flawless, the latest 10.9.2 has fixed many of those issues with exchange and mail.
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Well, Entourage X had a 2GB database size limit and on machines with limited memory it could crash when its database had become very large.
I use Entourage 2008 now, hasn't crashed or frozen up till now. And I keep on using it because it has way more options for email workflow than Outlook rules has (without using Apple script to compensate). Another missing option... email views where you can merge specific folders/accounts/categories in one view. It's a bit like the smart folders in Apple Mail. Since I have lot's of companies and people to deal with, Entourage really help much more to keep it organized. And last... the user interface is cleaner, nicer and without the unnecessary huge buttons and ribbons.
 
Parise said:
One office. One out of 203984832043232432 offices are microsoft free.

Lets be serious, when it comes to productivity software Microsoft still reigns king.
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That's a pretty arrogant statement. Thanks so much. That type of mentality helps Microsoft maintain the monopoly they have.
 
HenryDJP said:
That's a pretty arrogant statement. Thanks so much. That type of mentality helps Microsoft maintain the monopoly they have.
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What about the opposite mentality that anything not made by Apple is useless? I see evidence of that in this thread too.
 
revenue

This is just MS working the revenue cash-cow yet another time.

It seems that they don't fully fix earlier bugs, and it's years since I have seen a must-have new feature. There's not a lot new you can do with a word-processsor.
 
Sky Blue said:
You may be in luck:

http://www.theverge.com/2014/3/12/5499904/onenote-for-mac-web-clipper-features
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Doesn't matter for me. I absolutely love Evernote. Syncs with my Macs, iPhone and iPad Air. Sorry Microsoft, too little too late. Microsoft's selfishness trying to keep people on Windows machines by keeping One Note away from the Mac ended in a lost opportunity. Evernote has been doing quite well in the Mac and iOS community. Also I love the UI, it's very Mac-centric and with Evernote I don't have to worry about the company holding back on features as Microsoft does to the Mac community.

Another lost opportunity for Microsoft not bringing One Note to the Mac when it should have years ago is Evernote not only works on Mac and iOS but it's also on Android, Windows Phone and Windows 8.1 so there's no concern about working with multiple devices and multiple OS's. :)
 
HenryDJP said:
I don't care about MS Office as much as I used to. Maybe because most of what is done in the business world today doesn't necessarily require using Microsoft's software. Today my entire office is happily Microsoft-free. :)
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What business is that? Children's daycare?

MS Office is still king in the real world.
 
HenryDJP said:
I know what it means.
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I'm not trying to start a childish argument with you man, but the fact is, they don't have a "monopoly". There are plenty of choices out there. People go to MSFT for their productivity software because its tried and tested.

I recall people bashing Google Maps right before Apple Maps came out praising the God's that there is another alternative. Yeah, look how that turned out.

I'm not stating that iWork is Apple Maps. I happen to LOVE it! But as a guy who's worked for companies like Disney, NASA, BOA, and Fidelity it's not suitable for an organization of that size. Number one reason? Everyone needs OSX, meaning everyone needs a 2,000 dollar computer. Even the data entry types.
 
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