I think I’m done with any subscription services from Microsoft. I have had nothing but issues when I’ve tried to close/cancel various products. This last straw was that they kept charging me for a 365 subsciption even though my account was marked for closure. I had to reopen it, cancel the subscription, and reclose it. I’ll only be buying Office 365 outright from now on if I need it.
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I’m ok with that. I rarely use Office I usually don’t need anything more that viewing the document, since no one at work understands how to Print- PDF.
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I just checked my old hotmail / outlook.com account and it has had a “total makeover”.
If that is all you need you could sign up for a free account that includes online versions of Excel, Word, etc.
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A few years ago, I was a staunch defender of the superiority of Excel. I’ve evolved over time to the point that I’ve changed the “Open With” app for anything xls or xlsx from Excel to Numbers.
However, my octegenarian parents use MS Office and getting them to change over to Numbers (and related issues) would be much more difficult than paying the annual fee for MS365, so I continue to subscribe. ¯_( ツ)_/¯
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At my last company only a small percentage of our users needed MS Excel, but all of them needed a program that used the Excel format natively. So I gave most people OpenOffice/LibreOffice and they had no problem exchange files or linking to each other.
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We are making a concerted effort in our house to use the Apple apps, names Pages and Numbers instead of Word and Excel. Seeing if we can get by with those and thereby saving us the cost of a Microsoft subscription. If we really need those apps, we can always send the document to our work computers.
But since I’m already paying for iCloud, might as well try to save a subscription, especially with how much compatibility has improved.
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So look at Libre Office. I’ve never had ANY problems with LO reading MO files. A few issues with MO reading the LO versions of MS Office files but that’s on them not me.
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So switch them to Libre Office which is far more like MO than Numbers (which is a PITA to deal with IMO)
No need to do anything special, the MO files open up with a double click easily.
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I believe that Excel is definitely more powerful than Numbers. But for how I use a spreadsheet, Numbers has everything I need.
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I didn’t have much difficulty switching to Pages a Keynote but moving from Excel to Numbers was much harder. Too many years of ingrained Excel thinking. Luckily my spreadsheet needs are significantly less these days (retirement).
I hear ya. I used to work for Asian companies, and Excel became the de facto common language between American and overseas offices, and I was a fluent speaker. That was over 10 years ago, and to put it in perspective, I just changed the associated app for XLS files to Numbers a couple weeks ago.
Old habits die hard.
I still have Excel but only to open XLS files that Numbers borks, and that hasn’t happened yet. I’d hazard a guess that there are a lot more people (needlessly) proclaiming how much more capable Excel is (it is), than those who actually need that extra capability. I was one of em.
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Perhaps but most folks don’t need or use the few extras that Excel has. One huge advantage over Numbers is that nearly all the command hotkeys are the same between Excel and LibreOffice and that helps a lot in the transition. Especially for those of us who were quite fluent and used a lot of Excel hotkeys and formulas.
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The last time I checked, which was admittedly a while ago, you can’t record a macro in Numbers the way you can in Excel. You can write macros in Numbers using AppleScript, much as you can write them using VBA in Excel, but you can’t record them keystroke by keystroke. Macros can take a lot of the tedium out of working with spreadsheets.
An aside: I learned the rudiments of VBA by trying to refashion a departed colleague’s library of macros for use on another project.
Excel definitely has more than a few extras, but you’re right that the majority of people don’t need them.