For simple things I use Apples suite. For complex things I use solutions like laTeX and custom scripts. I try to avoid MS products because the UX makes my head hurt. Unfortunately there are things that I have to do in MS Office for work, luckily the web version is functional, so I don’t have to install that mess in my computer.
What is your favorite office suite?
- Thread starter JayAgostino
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I use both. The biggest advantage of Google products is they’re free and everyone has access. I recently taught two friends about Google Voice and they’re in love. (They’ve used Gmail for years, and were clueless about all the other products.)
I’ve found that if you have to use Word for something, it’s easy to create/edit in Google and then just download into Word. I’ve never had much luck with the Apple suite or converting between it and anything else.
I also HATE 365. If I want to use a web interface I’ll use Google. The thing I always liked about MS was having the app right on my computer. I can save anything to anyone’s cloud, but don’t make me use a web-based client.
I’ve found that if you have to use Word for something, it’s easy to create/edit in Google and then just download into Word. I’ve never had much luck with the Apple suite or converting between it and anything else.
I also HATE 365. If I want to use a web interface I’ll use Google. The thing I always liked about MS was having the app right on my computer. I can save anything to anyone’s cloud, but don’t make me use a web-based client.
casperes1996
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Exactly the same here. Although the only MS products I use at work are Teams and OneNote - though both of those can irritate me to no end as well at times.
rdrr
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I don't think it's the consumer who decided to subscribe to Office Software, I think it's the Software companies themselves who saw this as a potential better revenue stream, just like the cloud.
MEJHarrison
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Sure. And when those things pop up, I find other tools. Maybe I'm just fortunate, but to date, there's not been anything that I must have to the point that I'll pay monthly.
Herdfan
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Blame Netflix.
I think everyone was doing just fine going to Blockbuster or a local video store to rent movies. Then Netflix came along and got people comfortable with paying a monthly fee for a service and here we are.
rdrr
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I know what you are trying to say with the whole subscription model coming from streaming services, but it is a bad comparison. The streaming service was all about convenience... Getting in my car, renting a movie, watching it, and hoping to return it in time (and in some cases rewinding it beforehand) vs just streaming the movie. Also remember scoping out the return pile looking for the latest release, so you could snag it before it got on the shelf?Blame Netflix.
I think everyone was doing just fine going to Blockbuster or a local video store to rent movies. Then Netflix came along and got people comfortable with paying a monthly fee for a service and here we are.
The software pay as you go model absolutely is the bane of the modern society, along with the click through agreement and giving away your privacy to use the software.
Herdfan
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It just was the first step in getting us conditioned to paying small monthly fees for things.
Yoused
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Decades ago, I found myself using Excel for part of my job, which is when I started yelling at the paperclip, "Stop helping me!" With some effort, I made a decent spreadsheet that we could use to build practical production run maps that could be put into the machine console (the boss was adamant that the console not be hooked up to the network, because if it was, suits in their office would be entering stuff into the machine with no clue as to the physical dynamics of operation, so we printed the run sheet and entered it at the console).
More than once, I wished I had my Mac, because at the time there was a nifty little program that I could have used to make the run sheet process easier and faster, but businesses like ours were not Mac-friendly. My problem with Excel is that spreadsheets tend to be somewhat fragile, too easy for ordinary people to oops-up. My design was good, but other people were kind of clumsy with it – we were mostly people of a hands-on mechanical inclination, less computer literate. I had one cow-orker who did understand how to use the weekly production report sheet I designed, though.
Excel is like iTunes, an embedded standard that gets used for all kinds of stuff, including stuff it is not really designed for, but there is no real competition. I want an office suite-app that does things more like that other old app I alluded to.
We do not really compose documents the same way we read them. My vision for an office app is something into which one would aggregate the various elements that go into the result, work on those elements individually, and direct the app to generate the document, which could then be adjusted to a finished product. Looking at the whole finished product while you work on a small part of it is simply nonsensical and unproductive.
The biggest thing I found lacking in Office was a decent way to manage a database. That would be a major underpinning of the app I envision. It would have the modularity to handle a variety of work, a good scripting tool to customize the function and final presentation of individual elements and the capabilty to composite a complex document from diverse source material or just quickly output individual elements, as needed.
But, people need jobs, so it is best to keep work difficult.
More than once, I wished I had my Mac, because at the time there was a nifty little program that I could have used to make the run sheet process easier and faster, but businesses like ours were not Mac-friendly. My problem with Excel is that spreadsheets tend to be somewhat fragile, too easy for ordinary people to oops-up. My design was good, but other people were kind of clumsy with it – we were mostly people of a hands-on mechanical inclination, less computer literate. I had one cow-orker who did understand how to use the weekly production report sheet I designed, though.
Excel is like iTunes, an embedded standard that gets used for all kinds of stuff, including stuff it is not really designed for, but there is no real competition. I want an office suite-app that does things more like that other old app I alluded to.
We do not really compose documents the same way we read them. My vision for an office app is something into which one would aggregate the various elements that go into the result, work on those elements individually, and direct the app to generate the document, which could then be adjusted to a finished product. Looking at the whole finished product while you work on a small part of it is simply nonsensical and unproductive.
The biggest thing I found lacking in Office was a decent way to manage a database. That would be a major underpinning of the app I envision. It would have the modularity to handle a variety of work, a good scripting tool to customize the function and final presentation of individual elements and the capabilty to composite a complex document from diverse source material or just quickly output individual elements, as needed.
But, people need jobs, so it is best to keep work difficult.
KingOfPain
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Same here. At home I do simple documents in Pages, and I sometimes use Numbers, but I don‘t often have use for a spreadsheet here.
For more complex documents I use LaTeX. What I really missed in Pages once, was the possibility to mix portrait and landscape orientation in the same document. Pages can do both, but not mixed in one document (at least I hadn‘t found a way to do it).
Used to hate Excel, but I had to use it for work a lot in the last eight years. I‘m still not an Excel lover, but having to handle thousands of data points for different communication protocols, I am glad that I can use formulas to automate a lot of work that would otherwise be very tedious or error prone.
The interesting thing is that my boss tried to add decoding of the OpenOffice table format to our products first, but it was too resource consuming for our embedded products, therefore he opted for Excel instead.
But I still hate Word with a passion, because it often does things that make no sense: I think you wanted to do this… No I didn‘t! I would have told you to that explicitly, if I wanted to do that.
The worst case happened probably over 20 years ago:
I had the audacity to set a single word in a table bold, because I wanted to emphasize it.
The process in Word must have been like this: That text style is the same that I use for captions, therefore this must be a cation as well, and I put captions in the table of contents… done!
Anyway, that single word that was part of a table ended up in the table of contents and I found no way to tell Word not to do that. The only possible solution was to undo and use a different way to emphasize that word.
Also, there is this old joke, that Microsoft wanted to name the product Text, but then noticed that it is not suitable for longer documents, which is why they renamed it to Word.
I‘m pretty sure they named it Word, because of the competitor Word Perfect, but there is some truth to it that it isn‘t very capable with more complex documents.
When my main computer was still an Acorn RiscPC with RISC OS, I had a product called TexWriter, because it was a WYSIWYG program that could also output TeX code. But it was also capable of reading and saving the Word document format at that time. Some people were known to repair Word documents with it that Word itself screwed up so much that it couldn‘t open them anymore.
KingOfPain
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Also, there is this whole OOXML standard fiasco. For those who missed it or purged it from their brain, just a few points:
* ISO clearly states that there should only be one similar standard. Since the OpenOffice format already was a standard, OOXML should never have become an ISO standard.
* Microsofts description of the standard was over 6000 pages and was still lacking information. This means that no one (including Microsoft) could correctly implement the format using this description.
* Some national committees ratified the standard with comments, i.e., some parts would have to be adjusted, but I‘m pretty sure they weren‘t.
* Microsoft sent people into committees in Africa, just to push the standard through, then these people never showed up again. As a consequence these committees were no longer able to ratify other standards, because they didn‘t have enough people to do so.
Those are a few things that I can remember. I‘m sure this page has a lot more:
noooxml.wikidot.com
* ISO clearly states that there should only be one similar standard. Since the OpenOffice format already was a standard, OOXML should never have become an ISO standard.
* Microsofts description of the standard was over 6000 pages and was still lacking information. This means that no one (including Microsoft) could correctly implement the format using this description.
* Some national committees ratified the standard with comments, i.e., some parts would have to be adjusted, but I‘m pretty sure they weren‘t.
* Microsoft sent people into committees in Africa, just to push the standard through, then these people never showed up again. As a consequence these committees were no longer able to ratify other standards, because they didn‘t have enough people to do so.
Those are a few things that I can remember. I‘m sure this page has a lot more:
20 good reasons to disapprove OOXML - NoOOXML
noooxml.wikidot.com
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Yoused
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I know MS Word is complicated, but I couldn’t have done my dissertation any other way. The APA template meant all I had to do was choose the headings, and when I was done writing, my table of contents, table of tables, and everything was all done automagically.
I view MS Office the way Churchill viewed democracy: It's "...the worst form of government, except for all the others."
MS Office is flawed. And it's particularly flawed on Macs, where it doesn't run as well as on Windows. But it's superior, in some cases far so, to the alternatives I've tried from Apple, Google, and Apache (OpenOffice).
Notes:
1) This only applies to the desktop version of MS Office. I really dislike the online version of Outlook, and I've not bothered trying the online versions of other Office programs.
2) I've not tried alternatives to PowerPoint, so I can't speak to those. But I have tried alternatives to Excel, Word, and Outlook.
3) The only document program that I've found superior to Word for my workflow is LaTeX, but only for equation-heavy documents.
MS Office is flawed. And it's particularly flawed on Macs, where it doesn't run as well as on Windows. But it's superior, in some cases far so, to the alternatives I've tried from Apple, Google, and Apache (OpenOffice).
Notes:
1) This only applies to the desktop version of MS Office. I really dislike the online version of Outlook, and I've not bothered trying the online versions of other Office programs.
2) I've not tried alternatives to PowerPoint, so I can't speak to those. But I have tried alternatives to Excel, Word, and Outlook.
3) The only document program that I've found superior to Word for my workflow is LaTeX, but only for equation-heavy documents.
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casperes1996
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IMO, Keynote is king. Best presentation program out there
Man, WP was SO much better...
Herdfan
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I never used WP. I started out on Multimate and then moved to Word from there.
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I don't have a favorite but am generally forced to use Microsoft Office at my jobs.
Every major Office upgrade can be summarized by "You know those common functions you’re used to quick access to in the top bar? Well, we completely buried all of them now and good luck finding them.”
Every major Office upgrade can be summarized by "You know those common functions you’re used to quick access to in the top bar? Well, we completely buried all of them now and good luck finding them.”
I use MS Word for most documents that don't contain embedded images. There's a lot I don't like about Word, which I've used since its first Mac release in 1985, but it's easier to collaborate with others that way. I turn to Pages when I create documents with images.
The same is true for presentations. I use PowerPoint if I have to share with Windows users, but always use Keynote if not. Occasionally, I create a presentation in Keynote and export to PowerPoint, since I work faster that way. Still, it's disappointing Apple hasn't done more to enhance Keynote's feature set, especially for animations.
Spreadsheets are an exception: I use Excel almost all the time.
The same is true for presentations. I use PowerPoint if I have to share with Windows users, but always use Keynote if not. Occasionally, I create a presentation in Keynote and export to PowerPoint, since I work faster that way. Still, it's disappointing Apple hasn't done more to enhance Keynote's feature set, especially for animations.
Spreadsheets are an exception: I use Excel almost all the time.
