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Surrendering To M$ Office


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Surrendering To M$ Office
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Mr. X
Member
 
Join Date: Dec 2004
 
2005-05-27, 00:04

Well....I've decided to get out of denial. M$ Office still seems to be the best Office suite around. I think I'm going to finally pick up the education version. I want to be 100% compatible, knowing that everything I create will look the same when opened through email on a Windoze machine. I'm in a new class that requires us to send papers written in Word through email to the instructor.

I know Pages is supposed to be compatible, but.........I'd feel better knowing for sure. Plus, I'm sick of being totally clueless on how to create Excel spreadsheets, use all of the tools in Word, and create a presentation in PowerPoint when I have to use a PC at work. Having Office for Mac would allow me to get good with all programs and always be compatible, no matter where I am.

I've also been quite underwhelmed with Address Book, mail.app, and iCal. Entourage will suit me MUCH better.

Are there any other Mac loyalists who admit they love Office 2004? (It's so hard to do)


My Mac--> iBook G4, 1.33 GHz w/ 80G HD & 1G RAM
My iPods--> 4G 60gb + Shuffle (512MB)
Retired--> iMac G3 DV SE, Original iPod w/ Scroll Wheel, iPod Shuffle (1G)
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Brad
Selfish Heathen
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Zone of Pain
 
2005-05-27, 00:07

I have Office 2004 around for compatibility checking. I don't love it, though. I merely tolerate it for the occasions that I need it. Office's quirks have really annoyed me over the years. That 31 character filename limit in v.X about had me pulling my hair out at times.

The quality of this board depends on the quality of the posts. The only way to guarantee thoughtful, informative discussion is to write thoughtful, informative posts. AppleNova is not a real-time chat forum. You have time to compose messages and edit them before and after posting.
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MBHockey
skates=grafs
 
Join Date: May 2005
Location: New York
 
2005-05-27, 00:12

NeoOffice/J is a free alternative.
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Mr. X
Member
 
Join Date: Dec 2004
 
2005-05-27, 01:43

eehhhh.......I can't do it. I just can't do it.

I downloaded the Test Drive. After about 5 minutes, I started feeling dirty. Everything seems so bloated and complicated. It's probably because I'm used to it, but I prefer AppleWorks' spreadsheet!!!

Also, Entourage made me appreciate how good mail.app, Address Book and iCal really are! I underestimated them.

I exported a Pages document and opened it in Word. WOW! Clearly, Apple has done their homework in compatibility. Even the TABLES created in Pages looked pretty damn good! Seeing how good the exported Pages file looked in Word, I became completely convinced that I don't need Office. There were a couple of MINOR things I needed to fix in the file.

I'm going to purchase the education version of Office, ONLY to export Pages files to Word, view them, make sure everything looks as good, change things when necessary....then send it in email to the recipient. I will also use it to make sure I'm correctly viewing a file someone sends me.

That's it. For the actual creation of any documents, I *still* don't need Micro$oft!


My Mac--> iBook G4, 1.33 GHz w/ 80G HD & 1G RAM
My iPods--> 4G 60gb + Shuffle (512MB)
Retired--> iMac G3 DV SE, Original iPod w/ Scroll Wheel, iPod Shuffle (1G)
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Franz Josef
Passing by
 
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: London, Europe
 
2005-05-27, 03:54

I use Office grudgingly. Keynote 2.0 is to my mind far and away a better package than Powerpoint. Pages doesn't have the full functionality of Word but is much easier and more enjoyable to use. I use Word when I need 100% compatibility. Pages would be an outstanding app if Apple really put their mind to it.

You might be interested in CRM4Mac - www.crm4mac.com - it links iCal, Mail, Address book. It isn't yet Tiger compatible but should be soon. I find iCal very good indeed, particularly if you combine it with MenuCalendarClock - http://www.objectpark.net/news.html
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Gizzer
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Hampshire (the original one)
 
2005-05-27, 05:37

Quote:
Originally Posted by Franz Josef
I use Office grudgingly. Keynote 2.0 is to my mind far and away a better package than Powerpoint. Pages doesn't have the full functionality of Word but is much easier and more enjoyable to use. I use Word when I need 100% compatibility. Pages would be an outstanding app if Apple really put their mind to it.
You may be able to help me then as a Keynote user: I bought iWork because I love the presentations I've seen Keynote do & I thought for the money I'm getting an Apple word processor (Pages) "free" into the bargain.

Well so far I just can't get on with Pages & I seem to get things done in half the time with Word, but that's not a prob as I bought iWork for Keynote anyway (although I'm surprised Apple created such an unusable UI for Pages). Now to my HORROR I've just found out that Exposé doesn't work while a Keynote presentation is running. AARRRGHHH!!! Please tell me I'm doing something wrong - hot corners don't work & the function keys don't invoke it either. The thing I loved about Powerpoint is that mid way through a presentation I could Exposé to a different application to demo something to the audience then Exposé back to Powerpoint which carries on where it left off in full screen presentation mode.

Please don't tell me Apple forgot to do this and that i've just missed an option somewhere to allow this! iWork becomes a complete waste of money if Keynote can't do this for me....
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Franz Josef
Passing by
 
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: London, Europe
 
2005-05-27, 06:38

Nope. Keynote overrides Expose - you have to exit and go back in. That aside, I find keynote presentations almost invariably look better. When I have to use Powerpoint I spend alot more time trying to achieve the same level of slickness as Keynote. If it's a big issue for you, feed back to Apple and see what they do next release.

Pages is perhaps about personal taste - it's very rough and ready compared to feature-rich Word (which I've used for many years) but it's much faster for normal use. I store all my personal text docs in Pages and reserve Word for docs I know I'll need to share with Windows users.
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HOM
The Elderâ„¢
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: The Rostra
 
2005-05-27, 08:00

Well, I'll be the first to admit that I really like Office. Sure there is a little bloat, but I've turned off all the things that annoy me and set up it up perfectly. I used to be a hard core Claris guy back in the day, but the Office suite has really come a long way. It never crashes, never hiccups, and is always compatible with Windows.

I still use Keynote 1 when I need to give a presentation because PP's templates have been hit by the ugly stick a few too many times, but I see no need to switch to Pages and Claris, err, AppleWorks' spreadsheet doesn't have the features I need to get work done.

The last straw for me was Mail.crapp. It just doesn't work that well and I've lost too much data too it. I don't trust it and never will again.

The other thing for me is that I recently moved to a BlackBerry and am now on a managed Exchange server for $15/m. This way I get real time syncing between my Mac, my PC at work, and my BlackBerry and I don't have to use the PoS known as iSync for anything.

CARTHAGO DELENDA EST

¡Viva La Revolucion!
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Luca
ಠ_ರೃ
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Minnesota
 
2005-05-27, 08:29

Uh, Mr. X, if you're ONLY going to use it for compatibility checking, why not just download NeoOffice/OpenOffice? They handle files the same way, they're just ugly to work in. But so is Office 2k4, and that is much more expensive.
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kretara
Cynical Old Bastard
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: The Hot, Hazey, Humid South
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2005-05-27, 08:45

I am forced to use office at work. It is so bloated and slow (on a Dual 2.0 G5 with 2GB of RAM).
I have so many problems with excel. Every month I have to export a file from an ancient visual foxpro application into excel format and then open with excel. Everytime I open it with office 2004 all date fields are slightly changed (2005 changed to 2009 etc). I have to either open and save from a windows box or open/save with NeoOfficeJ before I can open it in excel and expect excel to display dates correctly.

Entourage , don't get me started on this POS. The sys admins. decided to move to an AD/exchange structure and they forced me to use entourage. After a few weeks of using this POS I yelled loudly until they opened up IMAP for me so that I could use Thunderbird. BTW, Mail SUCKS!! Entourage got to the point that when I was composing an email the entire program would give me the spinning beachball for 5 seconds everytime I typed TWO TO THREE words in an email. It was taking me forever to compose an email. And, it would just loose connections. Ugh!
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pv2b
Member
 
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
 
2005-05-27, 08:56

Quote:
Originally Posted by Luca
Uh, Mr. X, if you're ONLY going to use it for compatibility checking, why not just download NeoOffice/OpenOffice? They handle files the same way, they're just ugly to work in. But so is Office 2k4, and that is much more expensive.
Did you just suggest he download NeoOffice to check whether a file works under MS Office? Does not compute.
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Brad
Selfish Heathen
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Zone of Pain
 
2005-05-27, 09:02

Quote:
Originally Posted by pv2b
Does not compute.
Yes, but OO is the most compatible suite with Office. So, Checking with OO gives you a very good idea if something will work properly in Office.
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Mr. X
Member
 
Join Date: Dec 2004
 
2005-05-27, 09:53

Thanks for the great replies! I would just rather have peace of mind looking at the exported Pages file in a true Word doc. Also, there will be a few isntances where I have to open an excel file. (Although I'm guessing Neo/Office does the same thing)

I find it hard to believe that M$ made the Office suite as good or better than its Windows counterpart. I just don't believe it.

Does anyone like the calendar (and its features) in Entourage better than what iCal has to offer?


My Mac--> iBook G4, 1.33 GHz w/ 80G HD & 1G RAM
My iPods--> 4G 60gb + Shuffle (512MB)
Retired--> iMac G3 DV SE, Original iPod w/ Scroll Wheel, iPod Shuffle (1G)
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kretara
Cynical Old Bastard
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: The Hot, Hazey, Humid South
Send a message via AIM to kretara Send a message via Yahoo to kretara  
2005-05-27, 10:05

When I can get entourage working, and keep it working, I use the calendar and like it better than ical. The big reason that I like it better than ical is because other people at work can look at my calendar and any meetings that I get invited to via exchange will auto send me an email, once I accept the meeting it will be auto-populated in the calendar.
ical seems to be a personal calendar while the calendar with exchange/outlook/entourage can be both a personal and business calendar.
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ezkcdude
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: Jan 2005
 
2005-05-27, 15:32

Until we live in a world where Word is not the de facto standard, to my mind, it always ends up being a pointless and futile effort to try other word processing programs (except LaTex, which is essential for some purposes :smokey: ). No program is fully compatible with Word, and if it is necessary for you to share your docs with other Word users, you might as well use it yourself. It ends up being more of pain to make others play nicely with Word than actually sucking it up and using Word in the first place.

As for Keynote vs. PowerPoint, that's a different story . I have switched to Keynote, not only because it's vastly superior, but I don't really care what anyone else uses. I make presentations for myself to give "in person", so to speak, and not with the possibility that someone else will need to edit.
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Chinney
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Ottawa, ON
 
2005-05-27, 21:41

MS Office is software most of us hate to love and love to hate. I use it every day on both PC (work) and Mac (home), and I recognize its capabilities, but I dream of a day when another Office suite becomes the de facto standard. Overall, I have to say I respect it, although aspects of it really are not that well designed and some simply don't work very well.

That being said, kretara's experiences seem a bit extreme. I think that, for all its faults, MS Office works considerably better than what he indicates. There must be some problem with the set-up there.

When there's an eel in the lake that's as long as a snake that's a moray.
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Dorian Gray
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Paris, France
 
2005-05-28, 00:04

Like many people I bought Office 2004 for Mac to ensure worry-free compatibility with popular Windows files, but I have to say I have been very disappointed with it. So much so that with hindsight I would not have purchased it. It is the only piece of software I regretted buying.

I think many of its problems stem from legacy issues, which seem to afflict most Microsoft products. Word's user interface is a decade-old design, and it really shows in comparison to new apps like Pages. Getting pretty much anything done in Word is more complicated, unintuitive, and time-consuming that it should be. The problem is not solely that Office has so many unnecessary, redundant, and to be fair, business-orientated features that a slick interface would be impossible. It's also that Office is so ubiquitous that pretty much everyone out there has been exposed to it, and those people have become familiar with Office's convoluted procedures and now think of them as par for the course. When faced with new and better concepts like Pages, they think "weird" rather than "efficient".

As for performance, anyone who doubts that Office is a bloated piece of astonishingly inefficient code has not checked their Activity Monitor. Project Gallery, which sits there doing absolutely nothing while awaiting user input, sucks about 7% CPU time on my 1.2 GHz G4 (with Processor Performance set to Highest). A new Word document, again just sitting there, uses up to 10% CPU time. 30% is not uncommon when actually doing something. Excel (by far the best Office app) guzzles similar time. Word also has a bad habit of freezing momentarily while you're typing. I'm not sure if Murphy's law plays a role in this, but it usually happens while you're holding down the backspace key, forcing you to release the key until real-time response returns (a couple of intensely irritating seconds). I have a 300,000-word 500-page Word doc (4 MB) that I work on almost daily, and each time I open it Word pegs the CPU at 100% for literally fifteen minutes. This is just absurd: the doc has one font and no graphics. Spell-checking is turned off (because Word stupidly rechecks a document's spelling every time you open it). I also have to repaginate almost every time I open it, but not quite every time (just to make things confusing). Random resource consumption patterns plague Office at every level, so if you like understanding what your computer is actually doing, you will have serious issues with Office! (And also serious issues with battery life if you have a notebook.)

So many people are familiar with Office's workflow that perhaps there are valid reasons for Microsoft to avoid a drastic redesign now, but I think it would be foolish for a new generation of users to go through the mental contortions needed to master Office when better options are available. I often get simple Word files sent to me as email attachments which should instead be rich-text or even plain-text emails. And 90% of the files I get are for me to read, not edit, so why aren't they PDFs? I avoid sending Office files to anyone except when necessary.
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Chinney
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Ottawa, ON
 
2005-05-28, 09:11

That's a very well thought out assessment of Word.
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Kyros
Member
 
Join Date: Feb 2005
 
2005-05-28, 14:01

I just use Appleworks and save as PDF. If it's being sent to someone who I suspect may not have Adobe Reader, I put the download in my email. I've never had a problem.
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Hassan i Sabbah
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: london and københavn
 
2005-05-29, 03:16

I can understand you using Word. It's the most powerful word processor and if you're dealing with hundreds of pages of text, nothing else will do. Sadly. I've got all the bells and whistles turned off, nothing but the formatting palette open, set to page view, no rulers. It looks kind of elegant. This way I only have occasion to curse it every now and then and it does what I want it do without volunteering to shine my shoes and make me bad coffee.

Entourage? I get the same feeling when I see people using it as I do when I see people eating cold baked beans from the tin. Don't do that to yourself.

gibberish
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rickeyricardo
 
 
2005-05-29, 16:42

Word is 12.6 Mb. Nisus is 27.7 Mb. And Mellel is 29.1 Mb. Now can someone please explain why Word and "bloat" always go together when Word is less than half the size of its main competition on the Mac? Just asking.I think there are a couple of legitimate reasons, but I'm wondering what others are thinking.
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Luca
ಠ_ರೃ
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Minnesota
 
2005-05-29, 16:57

First of all, Word is NOT just 12.6 MB. The MS Word application itself may only weigh in at 12.6 MB, but MS Office uses a ton of support files that are shared among all the Office apps. I'd be interested to see how much hard drive space you use up after performing an installation of just MS Word and no other Office apps. It's probably 50-100 MB. The differences is that Mellel and Nisus are both fully self-contained applications.

Furthermore, bloat doesn't just relate to the size of the application. These days, 12 MB vs. 27 MB means nothing. The real measure of bloat is feature-bloat. Does Word have a ton of stuff that most people find useless? Yes. Does it have a somewhat backwards interface? Yes. That's bloat. Some people really need some of those Word features, but most people don't and would be better off with a simpler word processing program.
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staph
Microbial member
 
Join Date: May 2004
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2005-05-29, 19:20

Quote:
Originally Posted by rickeyricardo
Word is 12.6 Mb. Nisus is 27.7 Mb. And Mellel is 29.1 Mb.
The actual Mellel executable is 2.2MB. Of the rest of the size, 22.8MB is localisations, and the rest are widgets for the interface. A minimum install of Mellel is about 5MB, if you care enough to go in and delete the extraneous localisations.
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Frank777
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Toronto
 
2005-05-29, 20:53

Quote:
Originally Posted by Brad
Yes, but OO is the most compatible suite with Office. So, Checking with OO gives you a very good idea if something will work properly in Office.

It's unfortunate that it seems OO will miss its time to shine on the Mac.

The past year would have been the best time to debut a third party office suite on the Mac. AppleWorks was on death row, Office won't be revved till 2007 and there's no other competition, really.

Unfortunately, OO progress has been too slow. They've managed to eliminate the X11 requirement, but the Aqua interface took too long.

By MWSF, Apple will likely have a spreadsheet component for iWork, and the chance OO would have have to gain marketshare will have passed.

This isn't meant to downplay the hard work the two OO guys have been doing. I'm not a programmer, and so can't contribute to the project.But if I could write code, I'd help.
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spiff
Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: New York
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2005-05-30, 14:05

The only thing I ever use in Office is Word.

Let me tell you, it's slow as shit on my 700 mhz iMac and really starts to choke over a 100 pages. I'd like to use something else but I finally Word set up just the way I like it and it's actually very functional still despite being so slow.

If Microsoft would just optimize the thing better it would be great. It runs well on PCs which really angers me. Damn you M$.
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InactionMan
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: May 2004
 
2005-05-30, 15:07

I only use Word for compatability on my Mac. The wierd thing is, Word is always compatabile with other version of Word. It happens at work a lot that someone will send us something from an older verion and it'll be a little off on our end. Not drastically, just some odd spacing issues and other badness. The same crap I use to encounter when PC users would send me WordPerfect documents and I'd open them with ClarisWorks.

Someone else already said, but I repeat, if it's only meant to be read why are people sending as a word document? Send it as a bloody PDF. If the recipent doesn't know what a PDF is or for some odd reason doesn't have Acrobat on their PC they shouldn't be using a computer.
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intlplby
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: Dec 2004
 
2005-06-02, 01:03

instead of sharing word documents with people there maybe a better option.....

Acrobat 7 professional now allows you let standard users make comments......

export the document as a PDF and move it into acrobat pro.... then change it so standard uses can comment on it......

as long as they have Acrobat 7 standard installed then they they can then return commented documents back to you

by using PDFs you don't need to worry about what product you work in .....
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Franz Josef
Passing by
 
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: London, Europe
 
2005-06-02, 01:17

Quote:
Originally Posted by InactionMan
I only use Word for compatability on my Mac. The wierd thing is, Word is always compatabile with other version of Word.
Similarly Powerpoint. Over the weekend I was writing 2 presentations, one in Keynote, one in PP (it's a long story why I was doing it like that). Exported the Keynote file as PP so that I could present on PP on a Windows laptop. Saved the PP presentation (and ran compatibility check - all clean for all versions PP for both Mac and Windows). Tried to use both presentations 2 days ago. The Keynote presentation worked fine on the Windows laptop - all the fancy icons etc looked great. The original PP presentation wouldn't open - I had to use a flipchart and pen. I was amazed.
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intlplby
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: Dec 2004
 
2005-06-02, 02:32

if you know you are going to be using a PC to give your presentation another alternative to keynote and powerpoint is PDFs....

i occasionally use InDesign and produce a presentation in that... the formatting and alignment tools allow for some really nice layouts and what's more is you can get some attention by using a format that is different from the typical landscape dimensions in both keynote and powerpoint. ..... i personally find that a square format can be a refreshing change from the typical format landscape format..

you don't get the luxury of transitions or animations, but if you are on a mac and going to give a presentation on a PC you are probably better off in acrobat 7 than in powerpoint. .... i would say that more than 50% of the time people could not open their powerpoints on the machines hooked up to the projectors available at my university last semester... and all those people had used a PC to make their powerpoints..... heck, most of my teachers couldn't get it to work most of the time...

by using slide links you can easily allow for a nonlinear format presentations...... i.e. link that jumps to an appendix slide or series of slides and then a link on that slide that jumps back to the original point in the presentation.

using PDFs also allows you to avoid missing typefaces.... you can embed the typefaces used when exporting to PDF and when you open on the PC you don't have to worry about the look and feel changing...... PDFs when exported to 72dpi screen resolution tend to be smaller than powerpoint files....

you can also email people, passworded pdfs, so if you give a sensitive presentation and someone requests a copy, you can send them a passworded one.
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AWR
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: State of Flux
 
2005-06-09, 03:14

Interesting thread; thanks for everyone's detailed opinions.

As a PC user I have come to believe that MS Word is the worst program that I have ever used and rivals Windows in its obtuseness. Stupid and unreliable, it makes me yell at my computer screen at least once a week like I have Tourretts.

That said, Excel is one of my favorite programs. It is quick, easy to use, powerful, stable...

Now switching to a Mac, I was concerned about (1) word processing which I have to do at home on occasion (and it has to be right and compatible with PC Word) and (2) spreadsheets, which I love to use for all sorts of things. I look foward to trying iWorks' spreadsheet.

Edit: I have just discovered that there is no spreadsheet bundled in iWorks. Why does Apple have AppleWorks 6.2.9 and iWorks?

The thoughts on this page have given me some ideas and some comfort. Thanks again.

Last edited by AWR : 2005-06-09 at 04:06.
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