JayAgostino
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Do you prefer the functionality of Microsoft Office, the convenience of Google Workspace, or the design of iWork?
What is your favorite office suite?
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dukebound85
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office mainly due to its near requirement in workplace
Eric
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Gotta go with MS Office, the Microsoft stack has pretty much been my bread and butter over the last 20 years or so, have to show them some love here.
Going to have to go with Office. It's pretty much a standard everywhere. iWork isn't bad if you're just using it by yourself, but as soon as you need to start sharing documents with others, it's Office.
Colstan
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When given a choice in the matter, I choose iWork. Most of my family uses hand-me-down Macs that I no longer use, so we tend to use Apple's solutions amongst ourselves. Most of my friends and family that have switched to Mac come from the Windows world, where they automatically assume that Microsoft Office is a must have. For some people, that is true, but most regular users don't even utilize the full functionality of iWork. I tell them to give it a couple of weeks, and if they still need Office, then I can help them with that. Thus far, the vast majority have been fine with iWork, thus avoiding the bloat that comes with Office, along with the Microsoft tax that they didn't realize was optional. There will always be certain situations that will require Office support, but for the most part, iWork is plenty capable.
Herdfan
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Got my daughter to learn Keynote. Her school presentations looked much better than her classmate's Powerpoint ones.
JayAgostino
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I'm surprised to see that nobody has voted for Google Workspace yet! 
Professionally, I use Office. When I’m doing things for friends/clubs I go Google. Honestly, I prefer Google Forms to the Office equivalent.
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I'm also a huge Keynote fan, and like it so much more over PowerPoint.
JayAgostino
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Yeah, it really stands out with all of its unique features.
What do you personally like about it?
Apple fanboy
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I spend more time in excel than I do with Mrs AFB.
Herdfan
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Which is why I got her to learn it. In a class with 5-6 groups presenting and all but one looked the same, her group stood out. Sort of liked they put in more effort, when in reality they didn't.
JayAgostino
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Nycturne
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Yeah, it's clear that Keynote benefits from the things Apple learns from how they give presentations. The designers for PowerPoint need more professional presenters, in my opinion.
I had a science teacher in high school that had what he called the weekly thought problem. You'd get rotated around through different groups each week with a more difficult chemistry/physics/etc problem to tackle. You'd attempt to solve the problem and present the solution. His comments would be on how you presented, reminders on presentation etiquette, and the content of the problem and the quality of the solution. He wouldn't mark anyone down if it was the first time a particular mistake was made, and briefly explain why it was a mistake for the whole class. The goal was: Try things, make mistakes, and learn from them, but you do need to learn from them or your grade will suffer. As someone who can get anxious in front of an audience, I think the thing that stood out is how it didn't feel embarrassing to have made those mistakes and learn from the experience.
I learned more about how to give a good presentation and avoid the traps of PowerPoint from him than anyone else.
This same teacher also had a policy of: I drink tea during class to help my throat, there are more mugs, tea bags and the like available. So long as you act like an adult, clean up after yourself and don't disrupt the lecture periods, help yourself. So yeah, we helped ourselves and it worked surprisingly well. A lot of respect for that guy.
Herdfan
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I know this is an older thread, but has anyone recently switched from Office to Google?
Just spent 15 minutes trying to get logged back in to Excel. Word was logged in just fine. Do not like this subscription model BS. Let me just buy a hard copy and own it.
My daughter has never really used Office and has been on Google since middle school and she keeps telling me to switch. So this last thing has almost pushed me to do so.
Has anyone switched that ended up going back?
I don't do super technical stuff. I have some large spreadsheets, but not super complicated.
Otherwise just some letters on Word.
Just spent 15 minutes trying to get logged back in to Excel. Word was logged in just fine. Do not like this subscription model BS. Let me just buy a hard copy and own it.
My daughter has never really used Office and has been on Google since middle school and she keeps telling me to switch. So this last thing has almost pushed me to do so.
Has anyone switched that ended up going back?
I don't do super technical stuff. I have some large spreadsheets, but not super complicated.
Otherwise just some letters on Word.
rdrr
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So I am in both worlds. We have teams that prefer the MS Suite, but we are a GSuite shop since around 2012. I prefer the Google suite to MS mostly because its seems cleaner to me. Also I haven't found something that I couldn't do in Google Sheets that can be done in Excel, but to be fair I don't use a lot of advanced Excel functions like pivot tables or overly complicated formulas.
I recently presented a pecha kucha at work, and we had to use Powerpoint over Google slides. Something to do with the automatic timer.
MEJHarrison
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Agreed 100%. What the hell happened to people? One day they woke up and said "why buy that software once when I can buy it every month instead?" I'm blaming the Tide Pod generation.
I prefer the Microsoft tools because that's what I've always used at work. Also, I've been using Numbers on my Mac since I already own it. I have to say, I'm not a fan. I just have an easier time getting Excel to do what I want than Numbers. It's been a few years now so I feel like I've given Numbers a fair chance. I just don't care for it. It gets the job done I guess. If I wasn't a light user, I'd find another option.
Besides a spreadsheet, the rest of my needs are meet with some note application. At work I use Notepad all the time because it's just there and I rarely need something fancy. At home on the Mac, it's Notes. I can't remember the last time I needed Word or whatever it would be on the Mac. I've never used the presentation stuff. My skills are talking to computers, not people. So I don't need it to look nice or slide in from the side. My office suite is Visual Studio, Notepad and Excel.
