Not sure that I can be “nice” about software I do not use. There are two reasons for non-use. Firstly, the obvious one, I have no need for it in my workflows.
Second, and here I cannot be nice, I absolutely hate Microsoft and refuse to have any of their products on my Macs, iPhone, or iPad. Much of their stuff has “code bloat” and if one finds a bug they expect the user to pay for the next release that might include a fix. I refuse to give up disk real estate to anything coming out of Redmond. (I’m also and advocate of open source so commerical products have to have some real benefit for me to install them.) Although I have to confess I do currently have Teams on my Mac but only because a group I work with insist on using it because they were beguiled into taking out a corporate Office 365 subscription. Also have the web version of Outlook because the universoty college running my Korean language course have also subscribed to Office 365. However, I do not use either of these products for any other purpose. For office tasks Pages, Numbers, Keynote, and Apple Mail are adequate for my needs.
MariaDB, which I will be downloading and using from Dec 2nd (or soon after when my RaspberryPi 5 arrives). A fork from MySQL after Ellison tried to change the licence which incensed the MySQL developers who split to create MariaDB but they have tried to keep it MySQL compatible. Admire both the product and the programmers.
The results of See Also & Classify depend on how you databases are constructed. If you have more topical databases (which we encourage) versus a large catch-all database, the AI can make suggestions and connections in the current database.
While I’m no fan of Microsoft I have to say, Excel is best-of-breed. Numbers is a pale, pale imitation. Perhaps that’s my nice thing to say about an app I rarely get to use
Excel is amazing, but I am in accounting, so I might be biased. I use it at work all day and have a dozen or so personal spreadsheets I use. I am sure Numbers is fine for most people, but every time I try to use it drives me slightly insane.
Personally I find the MS complaining you often see in the Apple community a bit tiresome (in many cases it’s because they haven’t used it enough to really understand it, much as you see Windows people complaining about Apple). Windows a 11 is a great OS and macOS has just as many bugs that have been around for years as their competitor. I prefer macOS, but I am perfectly happy to use my Windows machines, and they are just plain better at some things (like file management).
On the other hand, MS really does want to be advertising company too, and that shows more every year. Apple is getting worse on this front as well, but they are not to MS/Google levels at least.
If I ever need a spreadsheet program that excels over Numbers it will be LibreOffice’s Calc. However at this moment ni time Numbers is sufficient for my needs.
@geoffaire I disagree. I have a Numbers file in which the graphs are not on the same sheet as the data.
Sigh. You will pry Excel out of my cold, dead hands but Lordy I wish Microsoft would bring the Mac version up to par with the Windows version. MS alleges that they’re doing so, but the implementation of tools like Power Query on the Mac suggest their heart just isn’t in it.
Long time since I used that particular spreadsheet but from memory all I did was to select the graph, delete it, and immediately paste it onto the other sheet. (Will try to locate it on backups from an old old machine.) But then again it I really wanted that functionality I would do it in LibreOffice, which is where the sheet originated. The one thing I missed from Numbers graphs was radar charts, which I think have finally been added to program however my need for some pictures is long gone.
In another post on these forums, I mentioned that I use Bitwarden. But there’s obviously more than one good password manager out there. I really like Dashlane a great deal, it works fantastically and does everything you’d expect. The only reason I don’t use it is I don’t really need the VPN they bundle with it, and you can’t unbundle it. But if that’s something you want, it’s a great value for the cost with that included.
Another candidate came to mind as I was working on something else. I’ll also mention Ulysses, which is an excellent writing app that I tried for a little while. It did almost everything I wanted, and helped me in innumerable ways as a result. I stopped using it because I have a strong case of subscription fatigue, and I ended up getting Scrivener which is one time purchase. I’d much prefer buying the software once than doing it again and again. All said though, I’d still recommend Ulysses to virtually anyone.
On further reflection there is another open-source package I admire but not using yet namely Apache’s Lucene text retrieval system. I worked in that arena for most of my professional life and hated giving up access to such tools on a fundamental career change. Turns out I did not, at that time, have a requirement for such a tool but increasingly of the opinion that I do now. So once that RaspberryPi 5 for MariaDB is in use the next one will be an RPi5 for Lucene (and Solr). My thought is to create a DevonThink like app solely using open source products.
Is there an open source project you admire but haven’t used yet?
