I could care less about Office to tell you the truth but, but, I actually use Word to write scripts(screen plays).
Besides, the average person doesn't even know how to use the Office suite to the fullest of its power.
Apple,IMHO, has held back making Pages look and feel dynamic just to stay nice with MS. But if the gloves are coming off I would expect Apple to bring the pain and do up Pages like a beast!
On my Mac, iPhone and iPad Numbers is awesome but on the iPad it is crazy sick and so damn easy to bust open a spread sheet, put down your data and go baby! It is freaking heaven on earth.
I understand that iWork probably can't break into the enterprise market. However, since Apple is making a product, why don't they make it suitable for business. It just seems odd to me that Apple would purposely keep selling an inferior product. It isn't that iWork is a bad product...it is an incomplete product. Why won't Apple finish it off? Give us features like reviewing and compare documents and better paragraph numbering...etc.
They've got 100 billion dollars, why not spend 10 million on office software?
iWorks has several kinks including the interface, which isn't consistent with the OS. For instance, in Pages the full screen icon is towards the left hand side of the application Window instead of the right where it is for the rest of the OS Windows. The icon is also in reverse. Moreover, the OS isn't consistent within iWorks apps. For example, Keynote doesn't have a full screen icon at all. There is other examples I can't remember right off the top of my head.
Microsoft should just drop the product for the Mac. How many copies do they sell anyway to such a small PC market? Microsoft is trying to do too much. Dropping some software would allow them to focus their efforts.
That is crazy talk. Do an internet search. Microsoft makes hundreds of million of dollars a year selling Office for the Mac. It is highly profitable. More profitable then some of its other endeavors like Bing and the sale of its phone OS. Microsoft's real mistake is not unifying the code base and simultaneously releasing both a Mac and Windows version with the same features.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ash471
I understand that iWork probably can't break into the enterprise market. However, since Apple is making a product, why don't they make it suitable for business. It just seems odd to me that Apple would purposely keep selling an inferior product. It isn't that iWork is a bad product...it is an incomplete product. Why won't Apple finish it off? Give us features like reviewing and compare documents and better paragraph numbering...etc.
They've got 100 billion dollars, why not spend 10 million on office software?
iWorks has several kinks including the interface, which isn't consistent with the OS. For instance, in Pages the full screen icon is towards the left hand side of the application Window instead of the right where it is for the rest of the OS Windows. The icon is also in reverse. Moreover, the OS isn't consistent within iWorks apps. For example, Keynote doesn't have a full screen icon at all. There is other examples I can't remember right off the top of my head.
Microsoft should just drop the product for the Mac. How many copies do they sell anyway to such a small PC market?
Back in 2008 the Mac Business Unit took in $350 million dollars. I recall that it's closer to half a billion now, but can't find the source. Microsoft continues to be the largest developer of OSX software outside of Apple itself.
I understand that iWork probably can't break into the enterprise market. However, since Apple is making a product, why don't they make it suitable for business. It just seems odd to me that Apple would purposely keep selling an inferior product. It isn't that iWork is a bad product...it is an incomplete product. Why won't Apple finish it off? Give us features like reviewing and compare documents and better paragraph numbering...etc.
They've got 100 billion dollars, why not spend 10 million on office software?
I agree, Apple needs to step up their word processing and spreadsheet software. However, Apple also needs to have the iPad and Mac versions unified too. I suspect this also means Apple's products may never reach the level of "bells and whistles" of Word and Excel. How, necessary is that? I'm not sure. In some ways Word and Excel seem to be overly complicated while still not reaching the capability of a desktop publishing program. There must be some level of capability of the two programs where is satisfies all but a few needs. This is likely necessary to keep the program size down to where it fits on mobile devices such as tablets.
The alternate may be for a highly complete word processing and spreadsheet software exists with the major features live on the iDevice and the rest of the "bells and whistles" live in a cloud. However, Apple needs to offer full feature software in some manner or other because enterprise users want Apple products and iWorks, right now, is too anemic for the long haul.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mstone
As long as Pages can open Word docs I'm good. I don't ever need the formatting, just the text. Numbers, on the other hand, sometimes cannot faithfully reproduce Excel files if they contain unsupported functions. That has already become a problem for us. We have a file that needs to be edited 4 times a year which breaks if you export it with Numbers so we have to do it on Windows. I hope Microsoft doesn't try to intentionally break stuff for iWork by leveraging their Office monopoly to support their Windows and tablet sales.
I've experienced the same thing you have. Your fear of Microsoft intentionally breaking stuff to increase the FUD in enterprise customer's minds is well founded in Microsoft's past history.
The ultimate solution may be for Apple to improve Numbers while customers begin to set limitations on what feature sets their company will limit Word and Excel users to, so the company can operate in a mixed iPad, iPhone, and Mac/PC environment without problems.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jaker's Ugly Brother
So, back to running Office via Parallels again.
Maybe.
Perhaps I'm just a curmudgeonly dinosaur, but I seriously hate the ribbon-based UI. Worse, it's been quite a few years since MS added anything new to any part of Office that I considered to be a positive feature. For me, Windows XP and Office 2003 running in Parallels gets the job done. I might just decide to revert back rather than go with MS's latest "upgrade".
I don't think you're a urmudgeonly dinosaur for hating the ribbon-based UI. It is just terrible in too many ways to say. I/m personally happy to stay with Office 2008 if it were more stable. I'd even upgrade to a newer version for more stability. I don't want any more "bells and whistles" I want stability from Office that I don't now have.
Quote:
Originally Posted by macxpress
I'd rather they worked on an iOS version right now anyways. Office 2011 for Mac is fine.
I totally agree. It's for Microsoft's own good to be on Apple's iPads. The "Surface" is a dead whale and has no future in enterprise who will stick with Windows 7 for the next few years. I'm not convinced Windows 8 will find a home in the general market.
Back in 2008 the Mac Business Unit took in $350 million dollars. I recall that it's closer to half a billion now, but can't find the source. Microsoft continues to be the largest developer of OSX software outside of Apple itself.
Just as Apple's iTunes has been the most often installed non-Microsoft software on PCs.
Microsoft might get into FTC hot water if they tried to hurt Apple by not continuing to develop Office for Macs... or even not make an Office version for the iPad once they do so for the touch-based Windows devices. Europe, especially, is watching Microsoft like a hawk.
I'm pretty sure Microsoft scrambled to re-write Office for Windows 8 which is a completely new version of Windows. I think they will slightly update Office for Mac one more time and call it quits. If Apple doesn't re-write a version of iTunes for Windows 8 they will lose out on all the Windows customers than own an iPad or iPhone. It's all a game.
I've used Windows 8. It sucks. I think we are back in the Windows 3.1-Windows 95 era, except Apple now has the best operating system. Windows 8 still has a desktop hidden away, but you can't use Mail, Messenger and other Windows 8 apps on the desktop. Multitasking is critical in a business environment.
I liked AppleInsider's confusing and contradictory version better. Google News regularly features these AI articles on their main Technology page, guaranteeing oodles of page views, so who needs to proofread anything?
So, microsoft is up to old tricks. It has been said here that we knew that office 14 was the next version planned for release, I cannot comment on that but perhaps ms is a little worried about market share slipping.
Quote:
Originally Posted by GadgetCanada
Apple, all you need now is to build a true Excel spreadsheet competitor for OSX. Include similar power that macros and VBA provides in Excel. Numbers right now is nice but nowhere near as powerful as Excel. Pages is great but you really need a heavy hitting spreadsheet app.
I use Excel over Numbers for one purpose, parsing data - Excel does this really well, Numbers really badly. Numbers could be a really useful application with some work. Graphing data too is better in Excel and mysterious at times in Numbers. If you need Excel's features however, you're stuck - I use Mathematica though.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ash471
Great, because I have no plans to buy Office 2013.
I use Pages with EndNote and a LaTeX for scientific documents quite happily (well - mostly). Keynote only for presentations.
we use it in our office everyday (Windows and Macs), and for 99% of the cases it's absolutely enough. For home use I would guess libreoffice is suitable for 99.9% of the users.
Don't say I tried OpenOffice two or more years ago... - they really improved.
For about 20 people we have one MS Office running on a windows machine - just in case if a macro isn't running or so.
I don't get it why people care so much for MS Office (if not for Outlook which we do not use in the Office, we have Lotus :-( )
I think iWork is much more productive to use than Office. If Apple made it more precise when importing office documents this "Office update outage" could be an opportunity.
Apple is probably working with marrying the iOS and Desktop version via iCloud, (using the same file format perhaps?).
You can't really be "representing the normal user" if you're assuming people understand what SQLite and Python are. Heck, my Mom can't even understand that her Apple Mail software (hooked up to GMail servers) and Safari with gmail.com open, are actually pointing to the same email account... things like RS232 or Ethernet are power-user linguo to her.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
A scripting language based on Python or at least Python like. Whatever is offered up it should have solid support for communicating with the rest of the world. That is it should not be difficult to communicate with instrumentation over RS232, Ethernet or whatever Mac supported protocol you might want to use. About the only thing I don't like about Python is the lack of braces or other block indemnification characters.
iWork has improved a lot over the years to the point where it is sufficient for most.
You know what would be an interesting idea? Apple making a Windows compatible version of iWork and promoting it as an easy to use creative office suite for all. Fight MS on their own turf and see what happens especially if they price it the same as the Mac version (ie far cheaper than MS Office).
Yes, not only that buy also make it cheap so those non power users will forego MS office and then see the revenue of MS drops to a point where it makes no sense to buy MS shares.
MS is shooting themselves in the foot/feet on every front.
They are mainly a software company making most of their money selling software to third parties and when they stop selling it their revenue suffers.
Can they afford to give away their updates free for smartphone and tablets?
I don't think so and one more thing their partners which buy the software from them need to sell hardwares so they wouldn't be upgrading the software otherwise no one will buy the new hardware which they will be producing.
With their business plan I can see the revenue of the mac division of Apple beats the revenue of the whole of MS.
One more thing the Surface is an open question which may just break MS who knows.
Because Mac releases of Office have never had the same year as the Windows release. Now if you had asked them when Office for Mac 2014 is coming out, PR might have given a slightly different answer.
This. Really, whoever wrote this article didn't know that? Or just writing a lazy article they know will get lots of people to write "Microsoft Sucks" and "I stopped using Office 400 years ago" comments in?
Comments
Just another sign of MSFT becoming complacent and passing up opportunities to improve their revenue.
THANK-YA JUH-EEEEEEZ-US! Office 2011 for Mac already has enough useless, fat. We don't need further bloat.
MS can bite me!
I could care less about Office to tell you the truth but, but, I actually use Word to write scripts(screen plays).
Besides, the average person doesn't even know how to use the Office suite to the fullest of its power.
Apple,IMHO, has held back making Pages look and feel dynamic just to stay nice with MS. But if the gloves are coming off I would expect Apple to bring the pain and do up Pages like a beast!
On my Mac, iPhone and iPad Numbers is awesome but on the iPad it is crazy sick and so damn easy to bust open a spread sheet, put down your data and go baby! It is freaking heaven on earth.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ash471
I understand that iWork probably can't break into the enterprise market. However, since Apple is making a product, why don't they make it suitable for business. It just seems odd to me that Apple would purposely keep selling an inferior product. It isn't that iWork is a bad product...it is an incomplete product. Why won't Apple finish it off? Give us features like reviewing and compare documents and better paragraph numbering...etc.
They've got 100 billion dollars, why not spend 10 million on office software?
iWorks has several kinks including the interface, which isn't consistent with the OS. For instance, in Pages the full screen icon is towards the left hand side of the application Window instead of the right where it is for the rest of the OS Windows. The icon is also in reverse. Moreover, the OS isn't consistent within iWorks apps. For example, Keynote doesn't have a full screen icon at all. There is other examples I can't remember right off the top of my head.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BanExtremists
Microsoft should just drop the product for the Mac. How many copies do they sell anyway to such a small PC market? Microsoft is trying to do too much. Dropping some software would allow them to focus their efforts.
That is crazy talk. Do an internet search. Microsoft makes hundreds of million of dollars a year selling Office for the Mac. It is highly profitable. More profitable then some of its other endeavors like Bing and the sale of its phone OS. Microsoft's real mistake is not unifying the code base and simultaneously releasing both a Mac and Windows version with the same features.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ash471
I understand that iWork probably can't break into the enterprise market. However, since Apple is making a product, why don't they make it suitable for business. It just seems odd to me that Apple would purposely keep selling an inferior product. It isn't that iWork is a bad product...it is an incomplete product. Why won't Apple finish it off? Give us features like reviewing and compare documents and better paragraph numbering...etc.
They've got 100 billion dollars, why not spend 10 million on office software?
iWorks has several kinks including the interface, which isn't consistent with the OS. For instance, in Pages the full screen icon is towards the left hand side of the application Window instead of the right where it is for the rest of the OS Windows. The icon is also in reverse. Moreover, the OS isn't consistent within iWorks apps. For example, Keynote doesn't have a full screen icon at all. There is other examples I can't remember right off the top of my head.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BanExtremists
Microsoft should just drop the product for the Mac. How many copies do they sell anyway to such a small PC market?
Back in 2008 the Mac Business Unit took in $350 million dollars. I recall that it's closer to half a billion now, but can't find the source. Microsoft continues to be the largest developer of OSX software outside of Apple itself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Business_Unit ;
Quote:
Originally Posted by ash471
I understand that iWork probably can't break into the enterprise market. However, since Apple is making a product, why don't they make it suitable for business. It just seems odd to me that Apple would purposely keep selling an inferior product. It isn't that iWork is a bad product...it is an incomplete product. Why won't Apple finish it off? Give us features like reviewing and compare documents and better paragraph numbering...etc.
They've got 100 billion dollars, why not spend 10 million on office software?
I agree, Apple needs to step up their word processing and spreadsheet software. However, Apple also needs to have the iPad and Mac versions unified too. I suspect this also means Apple's products may never reach the level of "bells and whistles" of Word and Excel. How, necessary is that? I'm not sure. In some ways Word and Excel seem to be overly complicated while still not reaching the capability of a desktop publishing program. There must be some level of capability of the two programs where is satisfies all but a few needs. This is likely necessary to keep the program size down to where it fits on mobile devices such as tablets.
The alternate may be for a highly complete word processing and spreadsheet software exists with the major features live on the iDevice and the rest of the "bells and whistles" live in a cloud. However, Apple needs to offer full feature software in some manner or other because enterprise users want Apple products and iWorks, right now, is too anemic for the long haul.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mstone
As long as Pages can open Word docs I'm good. I don't ever need the formatting, just the text. Numbers, on the other hand, sometimes cannot faithfully reproduce Excel files if they contain unsupported functions. That has already become a problem for us. We have a file that needs to be edited 4 times a year which breaks if you export it with Numbers so we have to do it on Windows. I hope Microsoft doesn't try to intentionally break stuff for iWork by leveraging their Office monopoly to support their Windows and tablet sales.
I've experienced the same thing you have. Your fear of Microsoft intentionally breaking stuff to increase the FUD in enterprise customer's minds is well founded in Microsoft's past history.
The ultimate solution may be for Apple to improve Numbers while customers begin to set limitations on what feature sets their company will limit Word and Excel users to, so the company can operate in a mixed iPad, iPhone, and Mac/PC environment without problems.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jaker's Ugly Brother
So, back to running Office via Parallels again.
Maybe.
Perhaps I'm just a curmudgeonly dinosaur, but I seriously hate the ribbon-based UI. Worse, it's been quite a few years since MS added anything new to any part of Office that I considered to be a positive feature. For me, Windows XP and Office 2003 running in Parallels gets the job done. I might just decide to revert back rather than go with MS's latest "upgrade".
I don't think you're a urmudgeonly dinosaur for hating the ribbon-based UI. It is just terrible in too many ways to say. I/m personally happy to stay with Office 2008 if it were more stable. I'd even upgrade to a newer version for more stability. I don't want any more "bells and whistles" I want stability from Office that I don't now have.
Quote:
Originally Posted by macxpress
I'd rather they worked on an iOS version right now anyways. Office 2011 for Mac is fine.
I totally agree. It's for Microsoft's own good to be on Apple's iPads. The "Surface" is a dead whale and has no future in enterprise who will stick with Windows 7 for the next few years. I'm not convinced Windows 8 will find a home in the general market.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dlux
Back in 2008 the Mac Business Unit took in $350 million dollars. I recall that it's closer to half a billion now, but can't find the source. Microsoft continues to be the largest developer of OSX software outside of Apple itself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Business_Unit ;
Just as Apple's iTunes has been the most often installed non-Microsoft software on PCs.
Microsoft might get into FTC hot water if they tried to hurt Apple by not continuing to develop Office for Macs... or even not make an Office version for the iPad once they do so for the touch-based Windows devices. Europe, especially, is watching Microsoft like a hawk.
I'm pretty sure Microsoft scrambled to re-write Office for Windows 8 which is a completely new version of Windows. I think they will slightly update Office for Mac one more time and call it quits. If Apple doesn't re-write a version of iTunes for Windows 8 they will lose out on all the Windows customers than own an iPad or iPhone. It's all a game.
I've used Windows 8. It sucks. I think we are back in the Windows 3.1-Windows 95 era, except Apple now has the best operating system. Windows 8 still has a desktop hidden away, but you can't use Mail, Messenger and other Windows 8 apps on the desktop. Multitasking is critical in a business environment.
Quote:
Originally Posted by canucklehead
There, I corrected it.
I liked AppleInsider's confusing and contradictory version better. Google News regularly features these AI articles on their main Technology page, guaranteeing oodles of page views, so who needs to proofread anything?
Quote:
Originally Posted by TalkingHeadGuy
THANK-YA JUH-EEEEEEZ-US! Office 2011 for Mac already has enough useless, fat. We don't need further bloat.
AGREED. Mac users dodged a bullet.
So, microsoft is up to old tricks. It has been said here that we knew that office 14 was the next version planned for release, I cannot comment on that but perhaps ms is a little worried about market share slipping.
Quote:
Originally Posted by GadgetCanada
Apple, all you need now is to build a true Excel spreadsheet competitor for OSX. Include similar power that macros and VBA provides in Excel. Numbers right now is nice but nowhere near as powerful as Excel. Pages is great but you really need a heavy hitting spreadsheet app.
I use Excel over Numbers for one purpose, parsing data - Excel does this really well, Numbers really badly. Numbers could be a really useful application with some work. Graphing data too is better in Excel and mysterious at times in Numbers. If you need Excel's features however, you're stuck - I use Mathematica though.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ash471
Great, because I have no plans to buy Office 2013.
I use Pages with EndNote and a LaTeX for scientific documents quite happily (well - mostly). Keynote only for presentations.
give libreoffice a try!
we use it in our office everyday (Windows and Macs), and for 99% of the cases it's absolutely enough. For home use I would guess libreoffice is suitable for 99.9% of the users.
Don't say I tried OpenOffice two or more years ago... - they really improved.
For about 20 people we have one MS Office running on a windows machine - just in case if a macro isn't running or so.
I don't get it why people care so much for MS Office (if not for Outlook which we do not use in the Office, we have Lotus :-( )
What is needed is Office for iOS (at least PowerPoint for iOS) and Office 2014 for Mac.
I think iWork is much more productive to use than Office. If Apple made it more precise when importing office documents this "Office update outage" could be an opportunity.
Apple is probably working with marrying the iOS and Desktop version via iCloud, (using the same file format perhaps?).
You can't really be "representing the normal user" if you're assuming people understand what SQLite and Python are. Heck, my Mom can't even understand that her Apple Mail software (hooked up to GMail servers) and Safari with gmail.com open, are actually pointing to the same email account... things like RS232 or Ethernet are power-user linguo to her.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
A scripting language based on Python or at least Python like. Whatever is offered up it should have solid support for communicating with the rest of the world. That is it should not be difficult to communicate with instrumentation over RS232, Ethernet or whatever Mac supported protocol you might want to use. About the only thing I don't like about Python is the lack of braces or other block indemnification characters.
Integration with _database_
Quote:
Originally Posted by blackbook
iWork has improved a lot over the years to the point where it is sufficient for most.
You know what would be an interesting idea? Apple making a Windows compatible version of iWork and promoting it as an easy to use creative office suite for all. Fight MS on their own turf and see what happens especially if they price it the same as the Mac version (ie far cheaper than MS Office).
Yes, not only that buy also make it cheap so those non power users will forego MS office and then see the revenue of MS drops to a point where it makes no sense to buy MS shares.
MS is shooting themselves in the foot/feet on every front.
They are mainly a software company making most of their money selling software to third parties and when they stop selling it their revenue suffers.
Can they afford to give away their updates free for smartphone and tablets?
I don't think so and one more thing their partners which buy the software from them need to sell hardwares so they wouldn't be upgrading the software otherwise no one will buy the new hardware which they will be producing.
With their business plan I can see the revenue of the mac division of Apple beats the revenue of the whole of MS.
One more thing the Surface is an open question which may just break MS who knows.
Quote:
Originally Posted by dagamer34
Because Mac releases of Office have never had the same year as the Windows release. Now if you had asked them when Office for Mac 2014 is coming out, PR might have given a slightly different answer.
This. Really, whoever wrote this article didn't know that? Or just writing a lazy article they know will get lots of people to write "Microsoft Sucks" and "I stopped using Office 400 years ago" comments in?
Damn. This could be enough for me to switch back to Windows full time.
A more urgent problem is getting them to fix Mac Office 2011 so that it doesn't look crappy on retina displays.