Most office workers aren't actually using Microsoft Office

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  • Reply 61 of 132
    bobschlobbobschlob Posts: 1,074member
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Sporlo View Post



    That chart: Adobe Reader needs to die. It's the slowest and most unstable piece of software I've ever been forced to use. The fact that some PDFs require Adobe Reader to be opened properly is so sad.

    Could someone elaborate on this a bit? I have heard (from others) of PDFs that won't open without Adobe Reader, but I have never seen this for myself.

  • Reply 62 of 132
    snovasnova Posts: 1,281member
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by BobSchlob View Post

     
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Sporlo View Post



    That chart: Adobe Reader needs to die. It's the slowest and most unstable piece of software I've ever been forced to use. The fact that some PDFs require Adobe Reader to be opened properly is so sad.

    Could someone elaborate on this a bit? I have heard (from others) of PDFs that won't open without Adobe Reader, but I have never seen this for myself.


    Bob,

    I just learned about this myself today thanks to  mstone. so I think I can help.   I just did a "print to PDF" from 10.9 and looked at the document header. It gave me PDF version 1.3 output.  Review this link below to see what features came after version 1.3.   This is assuming OS X "Preview" application does not attempt to support all of Adobe's additions after 1.3. 

     

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format

  • Reply 63 of 132
    bobschlobbobschlob Posts: 1,074member
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by mstone View Post

     
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by snova View Post

     
    sorry.  are you trying to debate with me that the document that iWorks produces are supposed to be an portable format and are not?  no contest. Where did you ever get that idea?


    iWork is truly not portable at all. It is not even compatible with the recently past version of iWork or even the recently past OS X. Adobe fully supports Acrobat Reader on every platform even legacy. Why not upgrade your Reader to the latest version? To not do so is illogical.  It is free and has all the latest compatibility and security updates.


    Wow. snova's point shot right over your head by about 15 miles. You totally didn't get what he was saying.

  • Reply 64 of 132
    ggfggf Posts: 42member
    timgriff84 wrote: »
    3. Like most people I know Office. If i spent 2 hours learning something new. The cost of non production work for that time would be greater than the license cost for the year for Office. That basically makes Office the cheapest option.

    The problem is Microsoft keeps mucking around with office and changing the interface in ways that make it less useable.
    Every time they bring out a new version you have to relearn how to do things because they have moved things or added a forth or fifth way of doing something which is incomparable with the first three ways. They are doing this to try and drive the upgrade cycle but it is a major reason why people are not upgrading and are staying with old versions. The subscription model is just another way of trying to keep the cash flow up. When you don't sell the hardware you get pushed into this sort of thing
  • Reply 65 of 132
    themacmanthemacman Posts: 151member
    mstone wrote: »
    It is not a matter of sending a document that they can't read, it is more about manipulating the document before you send it. Also validating it. making editable forms, chapters and table of contents, properly preparing high resolution for printing, making them compatible with automated work flows, making dynamic documents with scripting, password protecting documents, making them non-prinatable or unable to copy text, extract, or modify, assign security certificates, adding multimedia or accessibility options on, and on, and on. Like I said it is professional software for professionals. If you don't need those sorts of tools then it is not for you.

    As far as it being a Portable Document Format, in Acrobat you can choose which version of compatibility you want to save it as but not all features are compatible with third party applications. They are however all supposed to be compatible with the latest version of Reader which is always free, so yes it is portable but not necessarily completely with Preview or Chrome.

    You can also combine PDF's into one PDF. I feature that I haven't found on the Mac without Acrobat Pro. Maybe I am wrong but that has been my experience.
  • Reply 66 of 132
    runbuhrunbuh Posts: 315member
    "The majority (68 percent) of the total minutes that employees spent interacting with Office on a daily basis was consumed by Outlook email, which accounted for about a half hour of the average employee's day."

    Thirty minutes doing email a day? That's it? That's bullsh*t.
  • Reply 67 of 132
    ericthehalfbeeericthehalfbee Posts: 4,485member
    Pointless study trying to take numbers and twist them to their advantage.

    Who I work for has 2,000 employees across Canada. We use Office exclusively. The majority of people accessing documents are doing exactly what this study says - viewing or light editing. So our work numbers would match this study closely. So we should ditch Office, right?

    Not so fast. In reality we could never replace Office with an inferior solution like Google Docs. While many documents are only accessed/viewed by people, they were created utilizing many advanced features (for example, Excel scripts). While the people who create and manage these documents are a small number of the total, their work is viewed/used by everyone. They can't give employees some half-baked office suite as they'd risk losing compatibility.

    This study is trying to imply you can replace Office simply because not everyone uses all the features. In many cases they are, but likely aren't even aware of it.


    On a side not, my daughter started grade 5 thus year. She's been using Word and PowerPoint since a Grade 3. Her school sets students up with Google Docs for sharing and collaborating on work. The first time she used it she was mad at features missing. She asked her teacher if she can use Office. Imagine a 10 year old picking up how inferior Google Docs is after a few hours of use.
  • Reply 68 of 132
    dewmedewme Posts: 5,334member

    Check out PDF Toolkit+ for combining multiple PFDs into a single PDF document.

     

    I have mixed feelings about MS Office. I love Excel, but in reality I'm really just a big fan of the spreadsheet genre starting at Lotus 123. Spreadsheets are pure genius. I don't actually use Excel for anything that Lotus 123 or Quattro Pro could not handle just as well.

     

    I love Visio, but it's an app that Microsoft bought and has fortunately done a pretty good job of not screwing up - so far. Not having Visio on the Mac is one of the tragedies of the computing universe. I use Visio almost every day.

     

    PowerPoint is okay, but KeyNote is better. As a genre, PowerPoint and its peers provide a fast track to the institutionalized incineration of human intellect, capital, and productivity. But who doesn't like a good PPT deck? 

     

    Word, now this is where the blood starts to boil. Basically, Word has not improved at all since version 2.0. Sure they've added tons of useless crap to it over the past 20 years but it has not gotten any better as a vehicle to capture human intent. It still does weirdo dorko kinds things with fonts and formatting that will absolutely test the limits your sanity at times. Performance - start at big bloated sluggish piece of crap and ratchet down your expectations from there an order of magnitude. It doesn't really matter how many CPU cores or how many gigabytes of RAM you feed Word, it's never enough. Once it starts auto paginating, auto spell checking, and automatically making incremental backups you'd may as well take your hands off the keyboard because it quits registering key clicks and periodically goes into states of suspended animation. What the heck is it doing during these frequent visits to Mars? Who knows. I won't even get into the perils of Word's font handling and formatting woes, but suffice it to say that you never really know what editing operation is going to turn your entire document into 36 point Cosmic Sans Helvetica just because ... well because Word decided that it wanted to do this. What YOU want to do is of no consequence. When you use Word - it is calling the shots and you are a slave to its will. If you don't do what Word demands of you - prepare to be punished. Word tries way too hard to do things that you don't give a rip about and fails miserably to do anything useful. Using Microsoft Word is all about testing your boundaries and limits of self restraint over the desire to bludgeon the whole Word team into Human Hamburger Helper. 

     

    Why do companies keep buying this crap? Because they are scared. Microsoft has convinced them that everyone else is using MS Office and if they want their documents to be intelligible forever they must use the applications that defined the formats. Plus there is an incredible amount of inertia and unwillingness to change, even when it is for the better. Microsoft feeds that fear and has convinced them that the ONLY safe choice is to buy Office suites for ever one of their employees, whether their employees actually use the Office applications or not. Nobody gets fired for choosing MS Office.

  • Reply 69 of 132
    sporlosporlo Posts: 143member
    mstone wrote: »
    To be fair, if you are comparing reading a pdf file in Safari while downloading it from the web, to reading the same pdf file in Preview when it is already on your hard drive, there are going to be differences. To take the Internet out of the equation, try reading a pdf file that is on your computer by draging it into your Safari window. I think you will notice quite a difference in how smoothly it scrolls.
    Nope. If I have the Reader plugin installed and open a web PDF, interacting with it is a pain. If I remove the plugin, just like magic the built in Safari PDF reader (likely related/similar to Preview) makes viewing any Internet PDF silky smooth. It's not the internet, it's Reader (Mac version at least).
  • Reply 70 of 132
    snovasnova Posts: 1,281member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by EricTheHalfBee View Post



    On a side not, my daughter started grade 5 thus year. She's been using Word and PowerPoint since a Grade 3. Her school sets students up with Google Docs for sharing and collaborating on work. The first time she used it she was mad at features missing. She asked her teacher if she can use Office. Imagine a 10 year old picking up how inferior Google Docs is after a few hours of use.

    You might laugh at this.   For the past few years most students in my district were required to carry USB thumb drives to save their work at school and allow to take home for subsequent editiing . The school district has historically used MS Office on PCs.  This year however, I saw something quite different. Students were given the option to use Google Docs instead of Office and bypass the need for USB thumb drive. Unfortunately, this required that students create a Google account and all privacy concerns that go along with it.  Given the option of #1. MS Office or #2 Google Docs, I sent a letter to school to ask if Apple iWork for iCloud may be used in place of Google Docs. I was pleasantly rewarded with a "yes".  Thus, I am happy to report my youngest has been using iWork for iCloud via PC while at school and natively iWork for Mac/iWork for iOS at home for both papers and presentations.  Its been very good experience for us. Not sure what the experience has been like for other students using Google Docs, but I'm happy to see the school district is exploring other options for students and allows us to get off the Microsoft treadmill.   Is this a possible inflection point for the next generation of office workers? I'm not sure, I don't see why it couldn't be. 

  • Reply 71 of 132
    snovasnova Posts: 1,281member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by DewMe View Post

     

    I love Visio, but it's an app that Microsoft bought and has fortunately done a pretty good job of not screwing up - so far. Not having Visio on the Mac is one of the tragedies of the computing universe. I use Visio almost every day.


    DewMe,

    When I can get away with it I use OmniGraffle from Omni Group instead of Visio. OmniGraffle's roots are from NeXTSTEP, where it was a clone of the app called "Diagram" from Lighthouse Design, where it was a "magical" experience for me, like so many other NeXTSTEP OS apps when I used my NeXT Workstation.  Ironically, Visio is also a clone of "Diagram" from NeXTSTEP but written for Windows.

     

    Here is some history that might interest you about the relationship of Visio to OmniGraffle and both back to NeXTSTEP OS (which is now better known as OS X).

    http://worldcadaccess.typepad.com/blog/2007/11/visio-lighthous.html

     

    Anyhow, you might want to give OmniGraffle a try if you are so inclined. There is a free trial period. If you do, let me know if you also thinks its leaves the you with a magical experience. ;-)  cheers.

     

    p.s. as I understand it there is now an iPad version as well. Although I have never tried it. 

  • Reply 72 of 132
    dreyfus2dreyfus2 Posts: 1,072member
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by snova View Post

     

    Most IT departments have a standard install set (or images) on all machines.  Regardless if and how often the tools will get used by each specific employee.  This allows various departments to compose documents in a format that they know everyone can read.  How often someone is required to compose depends on their role.  Which is a "don't care" form an IT point of view.  For most IT departments, I think it would create too much headache to try to determine who actually needs Office composition tools vs Read-Only tools to save some dollars here to justify custom installs.


     

    It is a) not that simple (e.g. there are common use terminals, or terminals used by multiple shifts during the day in many industries) and b) not really a problem everywhere (e.g. all our Office sessions are virtualized and we pay for concurrent users, so adjusting the license count to the actual demand is not that big a deal).

     

    For a lot of smaller and mid sized companies having standard images is a huge cost saver, as calling a contractor in to e.g. just swap a Word Reader to a full version when needed would cost more than an Office license (considering volume licensing is really cheap) and could take hours, if not days. And then there is the really flexible solution to only license a minimum amount of sets and add monthly Office 365 subscriptions to cover higher demand – this can be administered remotely and saves time and cost. There are really quite a few solutions to handle these things. If any company is really paying tons of unused licenses over many years, somebody is simply not doing the right job there.

     

    ===

     

    Regarding the Acrobat / PDF discussion: Unless somebody really works in the pre-press or architectural areas, or has demand for high volume server-side PDF generation, there is one other alternative for editing PDFs on a Mac beyond what Preview is capable of: PDFPen (and the Pro version of it) cost a fraction of Acrobat Pro and do almost everything it does, the Pro version even supports fillable form generation. For reducing the size of PDF files (something neither Preview nor PDFPen are really good for) there is a cheap little tool called "PDF Squeezer" in the OS X App Store, which gives you great control over the shrinking process (something the Quartz filter under OS X unfortunately does not, it shrinks bitmaps in PDFs to the point of being unreadable). [I am not affiliated with either, but even getting PDFPen Pro and Squeezer would save you a couple of hundred bucks over Acrobat Pro.]

  • Reply 73 of 132
    ayebang1ayebang1 Posts: 4member

    This article posts not so true story.

    MS Office is a must for office guys as they need to do work for their boss. The 100% compatibility is a must. This is why they all need Office application.

  • Reply 74 of 132
    crysisftwcrysisftw Posts: 128member
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by sflocal View Post



    ...Don't ask... just wanted to get it. It's work related... image However, may very well be my last Windows Office pack I'll buy.



    I refuse to subscribe to Office365. I shouldn't have to pay for the "privilege" to continuously use it.

     

    You can also try LibreOffice for Mac. It has good cross-compatibility and is completely free of cost. Apache OpenOffice is a similar alternative, also completely free.

     

    And yes, Office365 does have its uses for some users, but a majority of them are generally against the 'pay-to-use' model for a productivity suite. Why would you want to pay for productivity some times and not the other times!

  • Reply 75 of 132
    oa30oa30 Posts: 1member
    Let's just be clear...this study means nothing to Microsoft or Google. Any company that is in the business of making a PROFIT is required to PAY for Google Apps. Period. Just like Office. In-fact, the price for Office 365 for Business compared to the Google equivalent is the same. However, they give you more options if needed. But at a minimum, Microsoft has "Office Online" which is the free online version. You read that right...FREE! It's been out longer than Google Docs, but of course everyone glosses over that. But to finalize the point...if you make money, you have to pay for a business license no matter who it is. If you are doing this for personal, there are FREE equivalents from Microsoft. If you are a student there are FREE equivalents (or heavily discounted) versions as well.
  • Reply 76 of 132
    rogifanrogifan Posts: 10,669member
    AT my office we have Excel docs with lots of macros (VBA) and heavy integration with Oracle Hyperion tools. What's the alternative for that?
  • Reply 77 of 132
    jameskatt2jameskatt2 Posts: 720member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Gatorguy View Post





    Network World won't be a Google shill. . .

    http://www.networkworld.com/news/2014/031914-google-apps-279871.html

    Microsoft is paying attention.

     

    And Network World is still wrong.  It probably gets a lot of ad revenue from Google.

     

    It doesn't even mention that LibreOffice and OpenOffice are both completely viable but FREE competitors to MicrosoftOffice.  Google Docs costs money.  LibreOffice is FREE.

  • Reply 78 of 132
    blah64blah64 Posts: 993member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by EricTheHalfBee View Post


    On a side note, my daughter started grade 5 thus year. She's been using Word and PowerPoint since a Grade 3. Her school sets students up with Google Docs for sharing and collaborating on work. The first time she used it she was mad at features missing. She asked her teacher if she can use Office. Imagine a 10 year old picking up how inferior Google Docs is after a few hours of use.


    Are the laws completely different in Canada than in the U.S. regarding kids' use of online services?

    As far as I know, Google doesn't allow kids under 13 to use services like gmail and google docs due to federal COPPA laws. Because there is no option to use gmail, google docs, etc. without allowing them to create their world-famous, amazingly detailed psychological profiles of you as a user (product), they don't allow kids to use said services without parental sign off. Last time I checked that required more than checking a box on a web page, it was stuff like a photocopy of your passport or driver's license or sending them your credit card data.

    Even Google Apps for Education scans kids' emails, and they've been under fire for this:
    http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/03/13/26google.h33.html

    Edit/update: I see they are at least acknowledging that people are really pissed about this:
    http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/04/30/3432582/google-scans-students-gmail/
    But while the headline insinuates that Google will stop reading kids' emails, what they actually say below in the article just says they will stop delivering ads. Who cares about the damn ads?! It's the data collection itself that is the problem. I digress, back to the question:

    How on Earth can a school be allowed to opt kids en masse into a spyware, marketing profile program? I expect better than that from Canadian laws (unlike here in the U.S.)
  • Reply 79 of 132
    glubengluben Posts: 21member
    I work in a local council in the UK and Office is installed right across the board for about 1,000 employees.

    There is no way that we would move to another program like Google Docs or OpenOffice. Our IT department would allow it, probably for security reasons, but also because the majority of staff aren't computer savvy enough to know their way around other programs. We only just finished moving to Windows 7 and Office 2010 and that was challenging enough for them!
  • Reply 80 of 132
    hydrhydr Posts: 146member
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Euphonious View Post

     

     

    No. They're not.

     

    Windows has about 91% desktop market share (source). That's about the same as two years ago. Is that what you call 'dying'? Windows 8 may not have taken off as MS would have expected, but Windows still has an absolute stranglehold in the desktop market.

     

    Likewise, Office still has a stranglehold in the corporate environment. Web-based alternatives like Google Apps or competing products like iWork  may be gaining in popularity among consumers, but it is the corporate space where the money is made.


     

    If you look per year on the source page you provided, you see that MacOS is increasing each year, while Windows is declining each year. It takes a long time before that growth starts to really accelerate. My guess it will take maybe 2-3 years before Mac is over 10%, and another 5-6 years before Mac is over 40%. 

     

    Microsoft is losing on marketshare on Desktop. It´s an declining business for them.

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