Mac Users: Pick Your Poison

October 14, 2014 | This Just in

[This Just In]

Good evening,

I recently bought a Mac. I need to do some office work, but I don't care for any of the applications. I've read that the Apache OpenOffice, LibreOffice, KOffice, and NeoOffice are popular. From what I've been discovering, the NeoOffice seems ideal given that it's designed for OS X.

Is anyone currently using any of these office suites? If so, what do you like/dislike about it? Would you have any recommendations?

TJI

[Yosemitest]

Here's an Amazon Link.

Parallels Desktop 10 for Mac, by Parallels Software
Price: $69.95 & FREE Shipping.

[FLCowboy,]

I use Libre Office spreadsheet, and interface with MS Office with no problem, on a Windows platform.

[norwaypinesavage]

If you need to use a spreadsheet, stay away from Open Office and its clones. They simply can’t do any thing more sophisticated than adding two cells, and I wouldn’t even trust that. Our business uses both Open Office and MS Office, and I have personally spent more time correcting incompatibility errors thanit would have cost to buy everyone MS Office.

[ImJustAnotherOkie]

Office 2011 is the best but it sucks. You bought a mac for the wrong job.

You can VM Windows if you have enough memory and run office also. It’s not too feasible with less than 16gb.

[Not gonna take it anymore]

I have Office for Mac so have never needed to run Windows in a VM on my Mac. Nor would I every install Windows. Hate that thing even though I have to use it everyday at the store.

Office for Mac is completely compatible with PC versions of Office and I have never had any issues.

[yldstrk]

Word for Mac

You just gotta have Word.

Macs are great for everything else.

[kevkrom]

I’ve historically used OpenOffice, as in the past, I’ve needed to work on different computers at different times, and via Dropbox syncing I could switch between Mac/Windows/Linux and resume where I left off. So for me, cross-platform was a big issue.

These days, with my MacBook Pro, I don’t have to worry about that because I’m always using the same computer. Still trying to get the hang of Pages/Numbers/Keynote, and I keep OO around mostly to manage older documents since the Apple suite doesn’t recognize open document formats (ODF, ODT, etc.).

[kevkrom]

Apple may make it free. I don't know. Have you bought any new iPhone or iPad lately? Pages and Numbers are free when you do. . . and then I think you can get it on your Mac too.

No, they treat the iOS and OS X versions as separate "purchases". They've indicated no plans to make the applications free to people with older devices. With their new cloud-centric focus, they may yet do so to entice storage subscriptions, I suppose.

That said, isn't the iCloud version (web access) free?

[kevkrom]

Compatibility with MS Office is unreliable. One of our employees decided to save money on MS Office one day and downloaded LibreOffice. The software then happily proceeded to corrupt the MS Office document that we were collaborating on. I guess you could use it as long as (a) you are a geek, and (b) you don't need 100% compatibility with MS Office. By 100% compatibility I mean small, not very significant bugs, like shifted tables or corrupted page watermarks. The text itself will be OK, probably. As I said, in most businesses a single problem that costs a worker 10 minutes is unacceptable.

I would certainly recommend against using MS Office and Open/Libre Office in a "mixed" environment. Pick one and stick with it. If layout is important to you, don't "export as .DOC and send" but export to PDF instead to preserve your layout.

[same old song]

I had Office for Mac 2010(?) from Microsoft and it was great. Funnily enough it was easier to use than Office for Windows...

[Borderline]

I am mostly a hardware guy, but have been using the Apple Pages, Numbers, Keynote apps since it came out. They have gotten pretty good at compatibility with Windows users. I trade spreadsheets and docs with corporations using the Windows Office Suites on a regular basis without many issues cropping up. Well worth the few dollars compared to the cost of Office!

Rick

[martin_fierro]

They’re all pretty good with varying degrees of compatibility with MS Office files.

Personally I avoid those free office suites that require installation of JAVA (opens up all sorts of security issues).

[longtermmemmory]

“mostly compatible” or “with few glitches” does not cut it in the real world.

Whether people like it or not, serious business means Office software.

[itsahoot]

If you have an old version of iWork, load them into your applications restart and run software update, worked for me.

[ReignOfError]

“mostly compatible” or “with few glitches” does not cut it in the real world.

Whether people like it or not, serious business means Office software.

I'm not sure if that's a paid Microsoft ad or it fell through a wormhole from 2003. "Serious business" comes in a lot of shapes and sizes, and that's no more true than "serious business means Adobe Photoshop" or "serious business means AutoCAD" or "serious business means FORTRAN".

[CurlyDave]

Whether people like it or not, serious business means Office software.

Absolutely right.

If I never had to send an electronic file to someone else, I could do very well with Pages, Numbers and Keynote. The problem is that if you ever have to send a file to an outsider, it has to be in MS Office format. That is the de facto standard, and if you do not live with it, you will look very non-professional.

After 7 years of retirement, I got a consulting job for a little while. I had to use MS Office.

Every year I can send accounting data to my tax preparer in Excel, and he can actually read it. Still have to be careful about the 1900 date standard (Windows) and the 1904 date standard (Mac), but that is the only major built-in incompatibility I know of.