Said goodbye to MS Office

[hanser]

Love Pages, and have no Problems working with Word documents from collegues, easy Import and Export, no complains. Also have OpenOffice but Do Not Use it much, too Clunky for my Taste.

 

[pgolik]

I really wanted to ditch MS Office for iWork, as the UI is superior and I like the iCloud integration. But currently the only iWork program that lives up to my requirements is Keynote, and that's what I use for all my presentations. Pages - no go because of the lack of full scripting support in the current version, which killed integration with Papers and other bibligraphy apps. Also - no way to make a separate header for the first page of a multipage document (even with sections), so no multipage documents with a letterhead on the first page.
And Numbers has always been inferior to Excel (best of the MS Office apps, IMHO), for example I still haven't found a way to make a bar chart with error bar values specified for each datapoint.
I have LibreOffice to open documents I receive in its format, but I find the UI ugly, and it's slower than MS.

 

[millerj123]

I was using NeoOffice, but kept having problems with it, so I switched to OpenOffice. Even there, I'm using version 3 which has been more stable than the latest. For things like resume's, I try to only make changes in an actual version of MS Office since most of the time that's what's used in business.

 

[whodatrr]

And I think this is key - what business uses.

For someone like my dad, who uses basic Word processor and may need to read a few spreadsheets, MS Office isn't a necessity. He's on a Mac, and the iWork suite is fine for him. However, if he ever needs to distribute documents, for his small business, he knows to export as PDFs.

I work with lots of consultants and contractors, and I've even spent quite a bit of time as a consultant myself. Whenever I see a document come over in anything but standard MS Office format, or PDF, my inner eyes roll. My gut just wonders why somebody is wasting my time, and why they're making me jump through hoops. Sorry, but that' the way I think, and the way most of the people I work with think. We're all very busy and just don't have time to deal with finding an app to view a doc, or with quirky formatting issue that these document types can cause. Furthermore, with our work systems, many of our corporate-issued systems have been locked down by IT. So, even if we wanted to view your off-brand document, we would not be able to install the app own our system, without making a special request to our IT department.

So, really, if you send a doc over in any other format than standard MS Office or PDF, you're being "complicated".

I was using NeoOffice, but kept having problems with it, so I switched to OpenOffice. Even there, I'm using version 3 which has been more stable than the latest. For things like resume's, I try to only make changes in an actual version of MS Office since most of the time that's what's used in business.

 

[EmaDaCuz]

All comes down to what someone needs.
I am OS and office-suite agnostic, so I use what suits me best.
On Windows, at work, I use MS Office as I love the tight integration with OneDrive. Absolutely amazing, and the web version of Office, although limited, works much better than the web version of iWork. Admittedly, I don't like PowerPoint very much, and preparing lectures for my students has become quite tedious. Yet again, for a last second change I just have to access the file remotely and it is ready.
At home, or for non collaborative work, I use Mellel as a word processor. For more complicated projects (I have been trying to write a book for 8 years, now...) I rather use Latex or Scrivener.

As an old Linux user, I tried to love me some Libre/Open/Neo Office, but they were (and probably are) not for me.

 

[pgolik]

For research papers Manuscripts from Papers developers looks promising - I'll give it a try next time I write one (not affiliated with the devs). But it's a specialized tool, no good as a general office wordprocessor.

 

[Ulenspiegel]

I am deeply rooted in Microsoft Office.
I am a senior physician at a big university clinic and I am totally dependent on Microsoft Office.
I do most of my day to day work in Microsoft Office, I write research papers in Word, my doctoral students do a lot of their work in Word and Excel, which I have to be compatible with, I prepare talks and lectures in PowerPoint and so on. For me these are easiest to work with and I am also pretty content with the 2016 versions of said programs.
They work really well for me on my Macs and iOS devices and I can get them for free as long as I am working and teaching at the university, which is another plus. And they are compatible with Papers 3 for Mac, my research library management software (which I also use to create references in research papers).
Honestly speaking, I never really warmed up with the iLife suite.
The only application I don't use is Outlook, which I consider quite horrible.

+1. Microsoft Office all the way and no Outlook for the reason mentioned by Coltaine.

 

[JuryDuty]

What I don't get is how people complain so much about the cost of MS Office? ...

Look at it this way - Apple charges $10mo, just for 1TB of iCloud Storage. Microsoft throws in 5 times that amount, for free, with a 5 user MS Office pack that's still cheaper than iCloud. And no, I'm not a MS fan-boy, but I am starting to get ticked at Apple for pushing us into their overpriced cloud...

This exactly. The $100 it costs me for Office is worth it for OneDrive alone. That's what I'd be paying if I used iCloud, Dropbox, etc anyway. But with this I get a full office suite thrown in that works REALLY well and is FULL featured. I think MS Office and Macs are a marriage made in heaven.