I always publish my documents as PDFs (which is internally supported on macOS).... though when I send them I don't expect them to be modified. The professor should accept PDFs IMHO -- since it is the most widely supported standard for publishing documents - and he should not need to edit them.
As a college professor, it's my job to edit student writing. When I have to grade 500 pages of student papers in less than a week at the end of a semester, inserting comments in PDFs is abjectly inefficient. MS Word and insert comments using TextExpander and voice dictation is the most effective way for me to be productive.
I didn't realize a college professor edits student writings, you should only be making comments. It's the student's writing not yours.
You think you might be a trifling arrogant telling a college professor how to teach?
The college professor is right, at least in my limited experience, on the difficulty of editing PDFs. iOS 11 should help. I'm looking forward to the time when an iPad can be used as an input device to a Mac.
Sure. I ended up teaching one of my college courses because the professor knew less than I did (and I didn't get paid for it). I think it's more arrogant to accept college professors as being smarter than many of their students. College professors are there to guide students, not teach them. That's the job of K-12 teachers who really are teachers when they're not acting as parents disciplining the kids.
As for annotating or editing a pdf, I agree it's difficult but the idea of a pdf is you're not supposed to edit it, just add annotations. A pdf is supposed to be a static document that was produced at a specific time so various people could read it while knowing nobody has changed it from the original. PDF forms allow data entry but the form doesn't change.
As for teachers, I have three brothers, a wife, and three sister-in-laws who have been teachers. They all have retired (except my wife still subs). Any one of them could have taught at the college level but felt teaching kids was a better use of their time and skills.
Increasingly hard to find people who still use Office.
Seriously? I would say exactly the opposite. My daughter took a computer science class and the professor expected the kids to turn their programs in as Word documents. I suggested that she should probably just turn in text files (to avoid the possibility of autocorrect or other nonsense) and she said he specifically said he wanted them as Word. Now that's an extreme example, but, in my experience, from K-12 through to business, the expected document formats are Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Maybe there is some niche that can get by on Google docs or some such alternative, but that's a niche.
The reason this is happening is because the school's administrators are (forced to) use Microsoft products because all the infrastructure systems require it. Administrators could care less about the students as long as they get paid. Word is absolutely a stupid way to submit any kind of program submission. Unformatted text (using something like BBEdit) has always been the best way to submit coding since it isn't screwed up my formatting used in any kind of page layout system. I can't see anyone using Pages to submit programs to a professor. Microsoft products are never the best products in any of the areas they sell in but that never matters because corporations and our silly government has too much invested in Microsoft to change for anything better.
As for Microsoft having issues with they crappy software running under any Apple OS, it's always been this way and will never improve. People forced to use Microsoft Office products will just have to wait until Microsoft figures things out and delivers another half-a** product. Things never change with Microsoft no matter who's in charge.
disclaimer: I've had to fight Microsoft since the early 90's and the current issue is typical.
Have you even used Office365 on MacOS? Microsoft of today is NOT what it was under Bill Gates and MonkeyBoy Ballmer so let go of the 90's hate.
I've been using it since it came out years ago. Office365 of MacOS is finally on the same level as its Windows counterpart. It's stable, it runs great and thankfully, they keep it updated continuously. It's not the "crappy software" running on MacOS. I'll say that Office 2011 was a steaming pile of horse manure which is was one of the reasons I continued to use Office for Windows. Now, that's all history. When I receive documents created in other suites, I cringe at it. They just don't polish their apps as nicely as Office.
No I haven't and I don't plan to. I am not going to pay Microsoft every month for something I hardly ever use. When Office 2011 doesn't work, I'll just use Pages and deal with conversion issues.
I'd say the latest version of LibreOffice is an overall better solution than the antique MS Office 2011 for the Mac. I cannot see how anyone in the educational sector can live with themselves if they require cash strapped students to purchase the Microsoft Office products over a free functional equivalent like LibreOffice, which reads and writes the same Office file formats as MS Office, unless of course the class is vocational and specifically about mastering the specific Microsoft product in question. A word processor is just a tool for creating evidence used to evaluate the student's understanding of an educational topic. The tool itself is totally peripheral to the primary purpose of education. Do art teachers grade student's artistic compositions based on the brand of paints and brushes they use? Unlikely.
Teachers need to be more flexible and reward the value represented by the content and backing thought process rather than the presentation. Yeah, it may take more time and effort on the teacher's behalf to deal with a few different file formats. But that's just a tiny investment compared to the overall value that teachers can make to their student's futures and lives in general. If efficiency of administration and processing throughput of grading student papers is more important than advancing the educational process there are plenty of production supervisor positions in manufacturing out there that may be a better calling than education for some individuals currently in the education sector.
Booooo! Although MS Office isn't as dominant as it once was, it's still a de facto industry standard. I still have a copy of Office 2011 that I use maybe once a week. I try to avoid it, since I've found each version of Office to be progressively more and more bloated and difficult to use. It's really hard for me to swallow paying $100 a year, or probably $2 per use for basic word processing.
Edit - pages, open office, Google docs and most other apps have the ability to export as a word file, so if that's all you need you should be fine. Importing can get a bit dicey, especially for complicated documents
I wonder how much of this because there are just plenty of bugs that need to be worked out of High Sierra versus it being a major change that will require developers to update their apps. I hope it's the former. I have plenty of old apps that still work fine on Sierra that I have no particular interest in upgrading.
Here we go again. Apple is not allowed to update or upgrade its operating system unless it remains compatible with third party software? That’s not how it works.
Don't put words in my mouth. Should Apple obsess about ensuring every bit of legacy software works on every future version of Mac OS? Of course not. On the other hand, it is a bummer as a consumer when legacy software stops working. If it's just my old copy of Office 2008 that stops working in High Sierra, I can live with that. If half the programs I try to run give me errors after I upgrade to HS, that won't give me a very positive experience. I think Apple does an excellent job on backwards compatibility myself, and I hope that history continues this time around.
If half of your programs have errors after updating to HS then you have other problems on that computer.
Increasingly hard to find people who still use Office.
Seriously? I would say exactly the opposite. My daughter took a computer science class and the professor expected the kids to turn their programs in as Word documents. I suggested that she should probably just turn in text files (to avoid the possibility of autocorrect or other nonsense) and she said he specifically said he wanted them as Word. Now that's an extreme example, but, in my experience, from K-12 through to business, the expected document formats are Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Maybe there is some niche that can get by on Google docs or some such alternative, but that's a niche.
The reason this is happening is because the school's administrators are (forced to) use Microsoft products because all the infrastructure systems require it. Administrators could care less about the students as long as they get paid. Word is absolutely a stupid way to submit any kind of program submission. Unformatted text (using something like BBEdit) has always been the best way to submit coding since it isn't screwed up my formatting used in any kind of page layout system. I can't see anyone using Pages to submit programs to a professor. Microsoft products are never the best products in any of the areas they sell in but that never matters because corporations and our silly government has too much invested in Microsoft to change for anything better.
As for Microsoft having issues with they crappy software running under any Apple OS, it's always been this way and will never improve. People forced to use Microsoft Office products will just have to wait until Microsoft figures things out and delivers another half-a** product. Things never change with Microsoft no matter who's in charge.
disclaimer: I've had to fight Microsoft since the early 90's and the current issue is typical.
Have you even used Office365 on MacOS? Microsoft of today is NOT what it was under Bill Gates and MonkeyBoy Ballmer so let go of the 90's hate.
I've been using it since it came out years ago. Office365 of MacOS is finally on the same level as its Windows counterpart. It's stable, it runs great and thankfully, they keep it updated continuously. It's not the "crappy software" running on MacOS. I'll say that Office 2011 was a steaming pile of horse manure which is was one of the reasons I continued to use Office for Windows. Now, that's all history. When I receive documents created in other suites, I cringe at it. They just don't polish their apps as nicely as Office.
No I haven't and I don't plan to. I am not going to pay Microsoft every month for something I hardly ever use. When Office 2011 doesn't work, I'll just use Pages and deal with conversion issues.
Dewme: I agree with your argument completely... In a perfect world where logic drives decisions. We live in a world driven by dollar$ And Microsoft is willing to go as low as necessary to win a world driven by bean counters and disprove our ivory tower views.
Dewme: I agree with your argument completely... In a perfect world where logic drives decisions. We live in a world driven by dollar$ And Microsoft is willing to go as low as necessary to win a world driven by bean counters and disprove our ivory tower views.
Honestly, good. Office 2011 for Mac is absolute and utter trash.
We are talking here about upgrading, but you don't use an upgraded version of Office. In the Netherlands Office is the business standard. I find 100 euro per year not particular expensive for the current offering of Office 365. It's constantly updated, runs on all Apple machines and never crashes. Every student here runs 365 for a student price and nobody is complaining.
Increasingly hard to find people who still use Office.
Seriously? I would say exactly the opposite. My daughter took a computer science class and the professor expected the kids to turn their programs in as Word documents. I suggested that she should probably just turn in text files (to avoid the possibility of autocorrect or other nonsense) and she said he specifically said he wanted them as Word. Now that's an extreme example, but, in my experience, from K-12 through to business, the expected document formats are Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Maybe there is some niche that can get by on Google docs or some such alternative, but that's a niche.
The reason this is happening is because the school's administrators are (forced to) use Microsoft products because all the infrastructure systems require it. Administrators could care less about the students as long as they get paid. Word is absolutely a stupid way to submit any kind of program submission. Unformatted text (using something like BBEdit) has always been the best way to submit coding since it isn't screwed up my formatting used in any kind of page layout system. I can't see anyone using Pages to submit programs to a professor. Microsoft products are never the best products in any of the areas they sell in but that never matters because corporations and our silly government has too much invested in Microsoft to change for anything better.
As for Microsoft having issues with they crappy software running under any Apple OS, it's always been this way and will never improve. People forced to use Microsoft Office products will just have to wait until Microsoft figures things out and delivers another half-a** product. Things never change with Microsoft no matter who's in charge.
disclaimer: I've had to fight Microsoft since the early 90's and the current issue is typical.
Have you even used Office365 on MacOS? Microsoft of today is NOT what it was under Bill Gates and MonkeyBoy Ballmer so let go of the 90's hate.
I've been using it since it came out years ago. Office365 of MacOS is finally on the same level as its Windows counterpart. It's stable, it runs great and thankfully, they keep it updated continuously. It's not the "crappy software" running on MacOS. I'll say that Office 2011 was a steaming pile of horse manure which is was one of the reasons I continued to use Office for Windows. Now, that's all history. When I receive documents created in other suites, I cringe at it. They just don't polish their apps as nicely as Office.
No I haven't and I don't plan to. I am not going to pay Microsoft every month for something I hardly ever use. When Office 2011 doesn't work, I'll just use Pages and deal with conversion issues.
Sop you can't call Office "crap" since you're using a version that is six years old and from a Microsoft that had Apple-haters as CEO. Office 365 is in entirely different league compared to what you're using.
I get that people aren't fans of the subscription model. That's just where things are heading for serious software used by the masses. I do that with Office365 as well as Adobe Creative Suite.
I was buying Office every few years, and the subscription model is actually cheaper for me compared to retail boxed versions. Adobe Photoshop used to be about $1,500 per license, now it's just $10/month and everything is always updated and current. I hated the subscription model at first, now.. it makes sense. I always remain current with all my software at a reasonable price relative to buying a newer version at retail price every few years, so the math works for me now. That's the same for most folks too. You can't just imply there is some sort of conspiracy going on "forcing" Office365 on people just because you hate it. It's not true. It's popular because it works, and it's still the standard for corporations, schools, and even small businesses. The alternatives do work, but they are buggy compared to Office365, especially when the file formats are not 100% compatible. It's why I abandoned Pages and Numbers. It didn't fully support Word & Excel files and I gave up.
I'm not surprised by this. Office 2011 was released in late 2010. It will be 7 years old when macOS Sierra ships. One of my customers recently found that a font that they need to use was not compatible with Office 2011, so we had to upgrade them to 2016. Although there were issues with El Capitan, and Sierra, Office 2016 is better since it's 64bit. Of course, I would just prefer not to use Office at all. The only reason why I have it installed on my Macs is so that I can stay familiar with the software. Otherwise, I use Pages, Numbers, and Keynote.
I wonder how much of this because there are just plenty of bugs that need to be worked out of High Sierra versus it being a major change that will require developers to update their apps. I hope it's the former. I have plenty of old apps that still work fine on Sierra that I have no particular interest in upgrading.
It's probably a combination of bugs in the dev build of High Sierra, and Office. I recently found out that there are fonts that won't work with Office 2011, so the end is near for those apps. Office 2011 was released in late 2010. I think 7 years is long enough for something to work. People who rely on Microsoft Office should stay up to date.
Increasingly hard to find people who still use Office.
Microsoft made huge strides in Office365 on the Mac. It's on par with the Windows version finally.
Office 2011 was horrible in every way. I purchased it back in the day to get away from Windows, but couldn't wean off of it because of Office. Now, with Office365 on the Mac and stable, I rarely have to ever get into Windows. Microsoft is finally opening its eyes on non-windows systems like MacOS and iOS.
I have been using Office 2011 for years and have absolutely no problems with it. Finally opening its eyes on non-windows systems? Office 98, 2001, 2004, 2008, and 2011 have been great products on the Mac. I used all of them without any problems. Word 6 was the overall turd of the bunch.
The whole article is a piece of junk written to be negative about Microsoft for the sake of being negative.
First of all, High Sierra doesn't have any end users. It is for developers and developers only. If you read the article you would think it is a mainstream release or at least public beta.
Secondly, that Office 2016 may not partially work with High Sierra at the moment is because Apple changed things in the OS and the vendors have to adapt. Not Microsoft's wrong doing.
Thirdly, there is nothing to be suspicious about why Microsoft says backup your data before upgrading, which is a typical language used, also by Apple, for any installation .
Last but not least, Microsoft has been open about Office 2011 support cycle. It has nothing to do with High Sierra. Support for Offioce 2011, first released in October 2010, will end in October 2017 on any platform. It is not even certain High Sierra will be generally available by then, and even if it was it would make little sense to make it MacOS 10.13 compatible.
From the title it is clear, the writer either doesn't know the stuff he is writing about and that Office 2011 support ends in a few months for everyone, or he thinks it is was always a possibility Microsoft to release a patch for Office 2011 to make it MacOS 10.13 so that Apple Insider readers can use an unsupported application on High Sierra moving forward.
There are so many things to criticize Microsoft for but not the things this article lists. This article assumes the readers are idiots.
The whole article is a piece of junk written to be negative about Microsoft for the sake of being negative.
First of all, High Sierra doesn't have any end users. It is for developers and developers only. If you read the article you would think it is a mainstream release or at least public beta.
Secondly, that Office 2016 may not partially work with High Sierra at the moment is because Apple changed things in the OS and the vendors have to adapt. Not Microsoft's wrong doing.
Thirdly, there is nothing to be suspicious about why Microsoft says backup your data before upgrading, which is a typical language used, also by Apple, for any installation .
Last but not least, Microsoft has been open about Office 2011 support cycle. It has nothing to do with High Sierra. Support for Offioce 2011, first released in October 2010, will end in October 2017 on any platform. It is not even certain High Sierra will be generally available by then, and even if it was it would make little sense to make it MacOS 10.13 compatible.
From the title it is clear, the writer either doesn't know the stuff he is writing about and that Office 2011 support ends in a few months for everyone, or he thinks it is was always a possibility Microsoft to release a patch for Office 2011 to make it MacOS 10.13 so that Apple Insider readers can use an unsupported application on High Sierra moving forward.
There are so many things to criticize Microsoft for but not the things this article lists. This article assumes the readers are idiots.
You are making a great deal of assumptions, and inferring a lot of things you have no basis to presume.
At no point did I say that there was any wrong-doing on MS's part. Office 2011 got a patch in April, so it's still supported today. I was also clear about the impending end-of-life status of the product, and made no editorial comment about it.
If you think that developers are the only people running this software, you're very, very mistaken. I'm not saying I approve, in fact, AI has published an editorial about why you shouldn't. However, people do need to know that if they involve themselves in this beta, and the public beta which is relatively soon, that Office 2011 and 2016 aren't going to work right.
When I think somebody's done something wrong, I'm very clear about it.
Take for example this forum post, directed at you. The two things you got right is "it is for developers and developers only" and the sentence fragment about "backup your date before upgrading."
You've come into this post with an agenda -- and mistakenly assumed that I had one as well.
The problem lies with Microsoft and their Xamarin junk that is used as middleware layer. Propper written native apps wont have any issues.
Any evidence that those were written in Xamarin? I think they predate Xamarin embracement by Microsoft. Check the facts before posting "junk opinions". As much as I am not big fan of Microsoft (bear in mind I was developer in times their tools were outsanding in '90 and Apple was not even near) I cannot accept some foolish populistic comments like this. Balance it please with some maturity.
Increasingly hard to find people who still use Office.
Seriously? I would say exactly the opposite. My daughter took a computer science class and the professor expected the kids to turn their programs in as Word documents. I suggested that she should probably just turn in text files (to avoid the possibility of autocorrect or other nonsense) and she said he specifically said he wanted them as Word. Now that's an extreme example, but, in my experience, from K-12 through to business, the expected document formats are Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Maybe there is some niche that can get by on Google docs or some such alternative, but that's a niche.
The reason this is happening is because the school's administrators are (forced to) use Microsoft products because all the infrastructure systems require it. Administrators could care less about the students as long as they get paid. Word is absolutely a stupid way to submit any kind of program submission. Unformatted text (using something like BBEdit) has always been the best way to submit coding since it isn't screwed up my formatting used in any kind of page layout system. I can't see anyone using Pages to submit programs to a professor. Microsoft products are never the best products in any of the areas they sell in but that never matters because corporations and our silly government has too much invested in Microsoft to change for anything better.
As for Microsoft having issues with they crappy software running under any Apple OS, it's always been this way and will never improve. People forced to use Microsoft Office products will just have to wait until Microsoft figures things out and delivers another half-a** product. Things never change with Microsoft no matter who's in charge.
disclaimer: I've had to fight Microsoft since the early 90's and the current issue is typical.
That is actually very true. It is saving investement and sort of atavism as well. I have been corporate application developer and manager for last 25 years and I have seen this in action. I am trying get educated CTOs and CIOs that it is not neccessarily the best way to go. I have big portfolio of evidence where it fails and why it may be costly. However few changes in Microsoft caused that they have few really leading products with excellent change of philosophy (SQL Server newest approach is example of that, but probably not only that).
Comments
As for annotating or editing a pdf, I agree it's difficult but the idea of a pdf is you're not supposed to edit it, just add annotations. A pdf is supposed to be a static document that was produced at a specific time so various people could read it while knowing nobody has changed it from the original. PDF forms allow data entry but the form doesn't change.
As for teachers, I have three brothers, a wife, and three sister-in-laws who have been teachers. They all have retired (except my wife still subs). Any one of them could have taught at the college level but felt teaching kids was a better use of their time and skills.
No I haven't and I don't plan to. I am not going to pay Microsoft every month for something I hardly ever use. When Office 2011 doesn't work, I'll just use Pages and deal with conversion issues.
Teachers need to be more flexible and reward the value represented by the content and backing thought process rather than the presentation. Yeah, it may take more time and effort on the teacher's behalf to deal with a few different file formats. But that's just a tiny investment compared to the overall value that teachers can make to their student's futures and lives in general. If efficiency of administration and processing throughput of grading student papers is more important than advancing the educational process there are plenty of production supervisor positions in manufacturing out there that may be a better calling than education for some individuals currently in the education sector.
Although MS Office isn't as dominant as it once was, it's still a de facto industry standard. I still have a copy of Office 2011 that I use maybe once a week. I try to avoid it, since I've found each version of Office to be progressively more and more bloated and difficult to use. It's really hard for me to swallow paying $100 a year, or probably $2 per use for basic word processing.
Edit - pages, open office, Google docs and most other apps have the ability to export as a word file, so if that's all you need you should be fine. Importing can get a bit dicey, especially for complicated documents
I was buying Office every few years, and the subscription model is actually cheaper for me compared to retail boxed versions. Adobe Photoshop used to be about $1,500 per license, now it's just $10/month and everything is always updated and current. I hated the subscription model at first, now.. it makes sense. I always remain current with all my software at a reasonable price relative to buying a newer version at retail price every few years, so the math works for me now. That's the same for most folks too. You can't just imply there is some sort of conspiracy going on "forcing" Office365 on people just because you hate it. It's not true. It's popular because it works, and it's still the standard for corporations, schools, and even small businesses. The alternatives do work, but they are buggy compared to Office365, especially when the file formats are not 100% compatible. It's why I abandoned Pages and Numbers. It didn't fully support Word & Excel files and I gave up.
I have been using Office 2011 for years and have absolutely no problems with it. Finally opening its eyes on non-windows systems? Office 98, 2001, 2004, 2008, and 2011 have been great products on the Mac. I used all of them without any problems. Word 6 was the overall turd of the bunch.
First of all, High Sierra doesn't have any end users. It is for developers and developers only. If you read the article you would think it is a mainstream release or at least public beta.
Secondly, that Office 2016 may not partially work with High Sierra at the moment is because Apple changed things in the OS and the vendors have to adapt. Not Microsoft's wrong doing.
Thirdly, there is nothing to be suspicious about why Microsoft says backup your data before upgrading, which is a typical language used, also by Apple, for any installation .
Last but not least, Microsoft has been open about Office 2011 support cycle. It has nothing to do with High Sierra. Support for Offioce 2011, first released in October 2010, will end in October 2017 on any platform. It is not even certain High Sierra will be generally available by then, and even if it was it would make little sense to make it MacOS 10.13 compatible.
From the title it is clear, the writer either doesn't know the stuff he is writing about and that Office 2011 support ends in a few months for everyone, or he thinks it is was always a possibility Microsoft to release a patch for Office 2011 to make it MacOS 10.13 so that Apple Insider readers can use an unsupported application on High Sierra moving forward.
There are so many things to criticize Microsoft for but not the things this article lists. This article assumes the readers are idiots.
If you think that developers are the only people running this software, you're very, very mistaken. I'm not saying I approve, in fact, AI has published an editorial about why you shouldn't. However, people do need to know that if they involve themselves in this beta, and the public beta which is relatively soon, that Office 2011 and 2016 aren't going to work right.
You've come into this post with an agenda -- and mistakenly assumed that I had one as well.