Thinking about dumping Office

Have you considered Drafts?

I do use Drafts and love everything about it. However I wish someone could tell me how well Drafts holds up to large amount of notes, i.e. 10,000+

As a bit of unimportant trivia, I actually beta tested Microsoft Excel 1.0 at the request of the MicroCenter in Columbus, OH. MicroCenter knew I was a heavy user of Microsoft MultiPlan and Chart on the Mac, and Microsoft had asked them to give feedback on the Excel beta. As no one at MicroCenter was actively using spreadsheets on the Mac, they asked.me if I’d be interested and I agreed. My first experience of beta testing, and I received a complementary copy of the release version, which the official release was September 30, 1985.

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Did you notice any bugs that you discovered in your beta testing of v1 that they have yet to fix?

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Copy and paste was slow :rofl:

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I use Pages and Numbers of personal stuff; MS Office for work-related stuff.

Easy to dump Office after I retired (5 years ago). I’ve actually used the iWork programs since they first came out, only using Word or Excel when I had to because of work sharing needs. That said, I’ve got LibreOffice around for any cases I still need Office compatibility (it has never happened) however I use Writer to open and modify some very old WordPerfect documents that I still need to do several times a year.

I use Nisus Writer Pro for writing tasks that Pages is not up to doing.

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I am in a similar situation, retired 8 years now and almost everything I do is personal. I tried OpenOffice/LibreOffice some years ago and didn’t really like but that was under Windows.

So far Pages seems to have all the features I need for my documents. Numbers has all the functions I commonly use. Rarely give presentations and definitely not recently.

Never expected to open such a can of worms with my initial post. Different people have vastly different needs and some really need Office while others are fine with other suites. I would be considered a past power Excel user to the point of writing VBA code to automate sheets for others. No longer need to do that.

I use Office for work. I have Office 365 on my computer. Sharepoint is pretty slick for some of the stuff I use. I use the iWorks as much as possible for personal stuff and for the community organizations I am part of.

I use Office 2018, works fine in Catalina.

Just used Pages recently for a doc and worked fine, turned out pretty decent.

but, tried Numbers, can’t get used to it, muscle memory I guess…

and as some have mentioned, compatibility.

if your needs are light, there’s also Alphabet’s Google GSuite’s Spreadsheets, pretty decent for some light/shared work.

I swapped from Office to OpenOffice in the late 90s and then from OpenOffice to iWork around 2005.

Personally I vastly prefer Pages and Numbers to anything else. I don’t have any complaints about Pages but Numbers does fall down for more complex charting/graphing and the lack of pivot tables is frustrating (but categories can do some of the work).

Occasionally I get sent a document which Pages/Numbers mangles (normally crazy things from corporate sales people) but Google Docs is normally good enough.

I tried pages etc all but they are very limited. I use Libre Office

You could move to LibreOffice, it’s got all the same features and much of the same hot keys as the MS programs.

I have used all the options. My company uses Microsoft 365 and allows us to install it on up to five devices, so I use it for work and for working with others since the Microsoft formats are the de facto standards. If I don’t need to play nice with others, I really like Keynote for its Magic Move animation. Numbers is fine for my personal spreadsheets and actually has some real advantages over Excel. The ability to put multiple tables with their own row heights and column widths is great.

LibreOffice’s word processor has page styles in addition to paragraph and character styles. I wish Microsoft would copy this feature for Word.

I used LibreOffice for many years, as before using Mac I used Linux. I even wrote my PhD thesis using Writer. It’s excellent, but I use office on iOS a lot, especially when travelling as I only take an iPad. If I didn’t have a free subscription to Office through work, I’d definitely be using it. When I retire, this will be my solution.

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I’ll second your point about Sharepoint. I use the iWorks suite for most of my personal stuff as most of my stuff is just me working independently.

But when I’m working with others, especially now in the era of remote work with a team, Microsoft 365 is indispensable.

Maybe that’s the way to think about this. If what you’re doing is mostly independent work, and you like the lighter weight of the Apple apps, great. But if what you’re doing is collaborative work, or even remote work, then you’ll probably find it’s easier to use on online suite of tools like MS365 or Google Apps.

I really wish someone would port Libre Office to iOS.