Posted on 11/10/2013 7:00:21 AM PST by SeekAndFind
You keep saying that - but time will prove you wrong. We put Linux on everything! The correct response is “Not Yet!” The Surface merely ANOTHER Arm based platform after all. Just like my Nexus-7 or my BeagleBoard or ...
Oooo, the Surface has a “with the dual kickstand and keyboard cover”. Wow, I’m sold... NOT.
Roflol.
A kickstand?
Seems like finance, proj mgmt, performance modeling, capacity, etc do a lot of work in Excel.
Could be users are extracting data from large bus apps and manipulating the data in Excel.
Of course, I don't have evidence to support this, just an observation.
If you want Office, PowerPoint, excel then the choice is obvious
I have used it for a few years.
I’d really be interested to see how it stacks up against the latest version of Microsoft Office.
For anything you might want to do in a small business, household use, or even pretty sophisticated financial stuff it is at least the equal of Microsoft Office. For simple things like letters, even with embedded tables and pictures, it is very good. Better than Word for my purposes.
I management my investments myself, and I can export stock tables and screens from both Investor's Business Daily and Value Line, compare them against each other, merge them and pick out duplicates with Numbers or Excel with equal ease.
The big issue is that anything I generate in iWork is not going to translate perfectly into Microsoft Office. Fonts, tables, spacing, tabs, etc. may be off somewhat and might look different than it does on your computer.
If I am only going to use things myself, or share between Mac users, or send out stuff in printed form, or convert files to .pdf before I send them out, this is fine. OTOH if I ever want to send an electronic file to someone who uses Windows, and allow them to further manipulate the file, I have to at least see how it looks in Office before I send it.
The practical implication is that I have to have both iWork and Office, unless I am willing to adhere to the limitations above, I need to check what anything I send out on Office. Since I need to have them both, I use Office to generate almost everything. Not because I want to, but because I don't want to spend the time to check what everything I do in iWork looks like in Office and fix it.
So you will be getting a laptop if you want ‘all of the functionality’
My laptop was gathering dust. Got it loaned out to a friend whos computer died.
Tablets, by there nature, you are going to have to ‘give up some functionality’... Question is, what do you get in return?
I no longer lug a laptop. I take my iPad everywhere.
1) small and verylight.
2) NO startup issues. My laptop was taking five plus minutes to boot.
3) very long battery life, versus 1.5 hours on the old laptop.
4) quick internet access. Safari, etc.
5) quick email access. With ability to read most attachments
6) movies on demand via Netflix
7). Vitrtual keyboard is ‘good enough’. Would prefer a real keyboard but not enough to lug it around.
8) Video conferencing capability. Much easier to use as a video phone than a lap or desktop because of the ease of moving the camera
9) Movie editing capability.
In the real world people use Windows for business. They use Office for work.
iPads are toys, and Open Office is great if you aren’t running a large operation.
But if you listen to people on the net, you would think Open Office or Libre Office was the most used software on Earth and that businesses ran off of iPads.
A few examples:
1. A national distributor of medical devices had uses the #1 DME spftware for their Billing. Unfortunately, they could not set up their sales network on the product, and spent two weeks a month trying to figure out how to pay sales commissions. We built a tool that turned this into a 30 minute clerical exercise, managing all the sales exceptions and organizational issues. It also allows sales reports to go out daily, if desired.
2. A medical products distributor had 9 different business lines, and had SAP and several other software packages. They could not get a clear view of their business. We built a sales dashboard that integrated all of the product lines, calculated commissions, and sent sales reports out daily
3.An oil company had a complicated Salary and Bonus process. Numerous exceptions as to who get what individual for performance management and rewards calculations. They are also an SAP shop and cannot manage the process without spreadsheets. We automate the process - importing SAP data, storing data for international folks not on their SAP system, managing different currencies, different rating systems and policies in different busines units.
4. We built a tool to help a gas company account for reserves - doing the work of 2 full time analysts.
That kind of koolaide.
Not very well. It’s all right for doing homework, but not real business applications.
Does Office for Mac work well with the iPad?
I’ve tried several apps like QuickOffice, Docs Unlimited, etc. but they just don’t do what they say they’ll do. I find it very hard or difficult to edit Excel or Word with any of those apps.
Does the Office for Mac work better than those?
Personally, I switched to Apple three years ago, and until something really changes I'm not going back. I still have to run a Windows partition for some work stuff, but it runs way faster on my MacBook than it ever did on my last windows based laptop.
We have an iPad and don’t view it as a replacement for a MacBook or iMac. For the full package get a MacBook Air like I did. Best computer I’ve owned - incredibly compact yet functional. iPad is still a toy, IMHO.
I switched about 3 years ago to - on a personal basis. The company is still stuck on the treadmill.
Have spent way to much time trying to get Microsoft junk to play nicely with each other. Spent ten plus hours trying to get my dads printer working for the older machines after he upgraded to Windows 7.
You like their latest sales point... ‘Well, everybody uses windows/office, so you should too’
At the law library, most of the machines in evidence were Apple. On the plus side of 90%
I have not used it much, but have you tried parallels instead of a partition?
I will have to check it out.
I like the IPad for business travel. It does 95% of what I need to do away from the office. It’s that 5% (usually Microsoft Office) I need to do while traveling that hurts me.
Thanks for the feedback.
“Apple thinks the enterprise should adapt the them, not the other way around.”
I believe that this is a Jobs leftover; when he had NeXT, which made a FANTASTIC machine and OS in it’s time (IMO, Apple’s OS is really a newer version of the NeXT operating system), it was VERY expensive. He actually thought that it was so good that businesses would throw out everything that they had and buy them. It wasn’t quite THAT good, and they didn’t.
[Update: This story was originally published before the iPad Air and Surface Pro 2 were released. It has been updated to reflect actual product details.]
Not just for Windows but for anything with a browser. It's called iWork for iCloud. Still in beta, but Apple actually demoed this running on a Windows PC at their announcement event last month.
Other than what you mentioned — the big thing for me is full MS Office capability, (mostly Word, full Outlook, Excel, Powerpoint.)
I was talking about BOTH ARM and Intel Surfaces. Problem is MS has them rigged so nothing else can run on them. Not to mention good luck with drivers. Who’s going to waste their time on drivers for something that’s going to be dead in a year or two anyway, esp. the ARM Surfaces, since RT is almost dead right now.
I haven’t tried parallels, but that was on my brother’s recommendation. He though parallels was more resource intensive and the kind of work I am doing doesn’t involve bringing anything off my work computer. All my work data stays on the work computer with the system I am using to link up.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.