Is MS Office worth it?

[mmmbop]

Re: Re: Re: No extra work required

Originally posted by MrMacman
I still don't think its worth $150.

For someone like me who wants to swap Office files from their work PC to their home Mac seamlessly, Office v.X is a real boon. While the other productivity apps (as mentioned above) have great feature sets and near 100% comptibility with Office files, with Office v.X on your Mac you know where you are and that your docs will work/look just as you intended.

It's amazing how many of my work colleagues and mates think Office isn't available on the Mac.

But I want to know what they mean by updated versions for release this month. Are they more bug fixing/performance stuff (like all Office apps taking nearly a minute to quit completely on my machine or screen redraw speeds when you delete a large chunk of text in Word - my two biggest gripes.) Or are we going to see major new features? Isn't Office 2003 on the PC due for release later this year?

MARK

 

[QCassidy352]

Originally posted by LethalWolfe
Just because there are parts you don't use/understand doesn't mean they are "unnecessary features." I'm sure there are plenty of people who use Office 9-5, M-F that find those features very useful.

That's kinda like a user saying FCP has a bunch of unecessary features because the user gets by just fine on iMovie.


Lethal

Wow, this is really interesting. It seems that no one can answer the question.

Let me ask it one more time -
*What exactly are the features that you find so great and necessary??*

Forget that it's the industry standard, forget that it costs $500, forget that many "other people" consider it the best.

Stop just accepting that Word is the best and tell me what you do with Word that you couldn't do with open office or appleworks (besides be compatible with other users).

I really don't see the need. Maybe someone can explain it, but so far, apparently not.

 

[Powerbook G5]

Well one of the things I like about Word is the floating toolbar menu to the right that has a load of useful editing and formatting tools right at your disposal. Another is the visual spell/grammar check that works on the fly as you are working on your paper so you can see right away if something is marked for questioning. Those are just two simple things that pop out at me right away when it comes to features that I like about Word that I couldn't find or just aren't implemented well in Appleworks. Plus, Appleworks files don't seem to be very compatible. I deleted AW6 and afterwards couldn't for the life of me open two documents I made with it and had to reinstall it *just* to open them so I could copy and paste into Word so I could send them to my teacher.

 

[LethalWolfe]

Originally posted by QCassidy352
Wow, this is really interesting. It seems that no one can answer the question.

Let me ask it one more time -
*What exactly are the features that you find so great and necessary??*

Forget that it's the industry standard, forget that it costs $500, forget that many "other people" consider it the best.

Stop just accepting that Word is the best and tell me what you do with Word that you couldn't do with open office or appleworks (besides be compatible with other users).

I really don't see the need. Maybe someone can explain it, but so far, apparently not.

I'm not a power user of Office so I can't answer your question. I took a class in college and part of that class was learning the Office suite and I just remember being very surprised at the integration the apps in the suite had and some of the things you could do w/Word (all of which I've never needed in my day to day life and readily forgot). Since the "tell me what features are great" approach hasn't been too successful, lets switch directions. Why don't you tell us what features in Word (and/or Office) you find completely useless and extraneous?


Lethal

 

[Powerbook G5]

Yeah, I had to take a required course in Office XP and learned an insane amount of stuff that Office offers. It may not be useful to everyone, but the features are there for those who do need it. Since asking the question, I have come more and more to the conclusion that Office v.X may very well be worth it, especially since it's going to be $150 for the student version. As much as I'd love to buy an Apple labeled Office suite instead of Microsoft, I've used Appleworks and it's just not all that great.

 

[zio1]

open office does all that

Something I think is missing here..... I am what you might call a 'power user.' I format a *lot* of documents regularly. I prefer LaTeX tools and Framemaker, myself, but MS Word on the Mac really is very useful. I have been impressed -- especially the Mac style toolbar, which is better than anything they have in even the Windows version, imho. And yet..... everything I have wanted to do on Mircosoft's Office, I have been able to do in open office at least as easily, sometimes moreso. I prefer the MS Office on the Mac way of doing 'ruby' (furigana) for Asian character sets...... but that is pretty obscure. Open office has a stylist that I think is integrated into the application even better than MS Office's stylist. I think open office does outlining better. It embeds excel and open office spreadsheets -- it is just a clone of MS Office, and so all the MS Office features are there.

The big points, for me are, this..... It is *free*! It does not lock your data into a proprietary .doc format, if you don't want it to. It is extremely interoperable with MS Office file formats -- my experience has been seamless (but I know it is not perfect.... that has just been my experience). Really...... you ought to just try it because it is *free*. And if you don't like it, then fine, go ahead and spend your $150 for essentially the same feature set.

Just my opinion, but I thought those major points needed noting.

 

[macktheknife]

If you work with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on a regular basis on a PC and need almost seemless compatibility on your Mac, you are better off getting Office X. OpenOffice, AppleWorks, ThinkFree, etc. are great alternatives if you need to open an Office document infrequently.

I do think there is nothing intriniscally great about Office; you are mostly paying for the compatibility with the rest of the PC world. Nonetheless, as a financial analyst, Excel is one of the best software I've had the pleasure of using. It is probably the only Microsoft product I sing praises for.

 

[Powerbook G5]

The points raised about Openoffice are quite helpful, thanks. A lot have missed the initial question of what programs out there are on par with the features of Office and I think you guys hit the nail on its head on that. I'll give both Openoffice a try and check out the trial version of Office and see how they stack up. Either way, I am sure it will just add that much more to the usefulness of my system.

 

[QCassidy352]

Originally posted by LethalWolfe
I'm not a power user of Office so I can't answer your question. I took a class in college and part of that class was learning the Office suite and I just remember being very surprised at the integration the apps in the suite had and some of the things you could do w/Word (all of which I've never needed in my day to day life and readily forgot). Since the "tell me what features are great" approach hasn't been too successful, lets switch directions. Why don't you tell us what features in Word (and/or Office) you find completely useless and extraneous?


Lethal

Well, I can name a few features (auto correct and auto format mess me up as often as they help, in my experience), but I can't really answer your question because I don't use many features. I guess what I am saying is that I don't see why *any* word processing program needs a lot of features. Therefore why use the $500 one instead of the free one?

As I said, I type, revise, spellcheck, and print. So clearly, I am not a "power user." My question was really whether there are any power users who can explain Word's advantages. I'm not being antagonistic; I really just don't know why Word is considered so great compared to openoffice and appleworks, and I wonder if anyone has an answer, or if Word is just accepted as great without a real reason. Zio, a poweruser, seems to feel that openoffice is just as good. If others disagree, I'd love to hear what Word offers.

and I agree with macktheknife (great name, btw): people pay for Word for the compatibility, not necessarily the features.

 

[actionslacks]

As much as I hate to say it... Buy Office. It is a simple decision.

1. It is compatible with the rest of the world. You won't find yourself wasting time trying to figure out workarounds with Open Office (although it is also really nice for the price).

2. It is worth the $ - especially because there are a lot of deals right now.

3. It runs better in OSX than it does on a windows box.

 

[DakotaGuy]

I agree buy MSOffice. I did and was so happy. It is a great suite of programs and if you are like me and work at a place with all PC's and have a Mac at home taking files back and forth is seamless. There are some alternatives for Word and Powerpoint, but I have not found a spreadsheet as good as Excel. MS Word is an excellent word processor. Appleworks word processor works as good, but when you start to move files back and forth, one wrong setting can change your file into a file the PC can't read. I like it simple. It's like the rest of the Mac, it just works and works right everytime without any messing with it.