Word - the worst program that ever was and ever shall be.
Wee I sure know one thats worst - Pages
I agree. I use Office365 for the Mac and to be honest, it's the best suite for the Mac (and iOS) that I've ever used. I paid for iWork back in the day and I wanted to like it, I really wanted to. However, the reality is that in the business world, Microsoft Office is still king of the land and iWork's dismal compatibility with Office (Especially with Excel) made the product useless for anything but personal use where documents are never seen by anyone else.
Office sucked badly for ages but finally, thanks to the post-Ballmer era, Microsoft got smart and made Office for the Mac on par with its Windows counterpart. It's a pleasure to use now.
I suspect people are just in the habit of criticizing Office365 without ever having used it. If anything, it shows how badly Apple is at doing software. iWork is cute, but nowhere near what Office is. I think Apple will marginalize it even more down the road.
If only Apple was serious with their own iWork suite like Microsoft than Office wouldn't be required at first place.
Why aren't they serious? What is it that iWork lacks that most people need? I don't get it. The suite runs ONLY on Apple devices, so no matter how good they make it will never reach anywhere near Office for adoption. Office on Mac is often required for 100% compatibility with other office files received and sent. Thats it. If it wasn't for that, 99% of people could get by with iWork.
Facing pages.
The Apple software doesn’t support facing pages so you can’t use it to write a novel or a brochure for example.
Word - the worst program that ever was and ever shall be.
It's way overboard for simple word processing, but it's amazing if you ever have to write a Ph.D. thesis or any other long complicated document.
or if you are working with multiple co-authors, and go through rounds of track changes, editing & commenting.
Word and Excel are a necessity at work, and we are all Apple & attempt to use Pages/Numbers (Keynote has long overtaken Powerpoint) but they do not have nearly the functionality that we need, so we fall back to Office.
The subscription fee for Office365 is horrible, especially considering the collaboration does not work well (huge lag in updating cells when multiple people are working on an Excel workbook). We were fine with Office '11 until the ended support, and now we will be stuck paying yearly for software we used to pay for every 5-7 years.
My main issue is Outlook. There is no Free/Busy concept in Outlook 2016 for the Mac when viewing calendars. This is one of the very features in Outlook for Windows. I still have no idea why this is not in Outlook for Mac except thinking that Outlook for Mac has always seemed to not be a high priority (no Archive folders until Office 2016). Even Webmail can show Free/Busy, and Outlook for the Mac seems more based off of that. Oh well, maybe Office 2020 it will be added....
Microsoft is bringing its Mac iteration in line with Widows with updated Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), though not all object models are supported at this time.
Aww, a lot of husbands died I see.
[yet another] AI typo aside, Office won't be "in line with Windows" until Microsoft bring Access to the Mac.
This missing component is the only reason I haven't gotten a close friend off of the Windows PC voodoo platform. On a regular basis, she loses her wifi on her 1.5 year-old Toshiba laptop under Windows 8.1. This only started after Toshiba replaced its noisy fan. No loose connections, she checked. It's also seemingly a consistent annoyance for Windows users in general, according to web searches, and was a consistent annoyance for me on two different Windows machines of my own in the past. Plus, the trackpad sucks on every pc laptop I've ever operated...
if Microsoft wasn't protecting their crappy platform's dominant install base in businesses, Access would be on the mac and more people could jump ship.
Anyone know the build number or can verify they have received the update. I am a "Fast Update" guy and all my stuff still looks and feels the same. I am currently checking a few of the features mentioned above, but still not convinced I have it.
If only Apple was serious with their own iWork suite like Microsoft than Office wouldn't be required at first place.
Why aren't they serious? What is it that iWork lacks that most people need? I don't get it. The suite runs ONLY on Apple devices, so no matter how good they make it will never reach anywhere near Office for adoption. Office on Mac is often required for 100% compatibility with other office files received and sent. Thats it. If it wasn't for that, 99% of people could get by with iWork.
Facing pages.
The Apple software doesn’t support facing pages so you can’t use it to write a novel or a brochure for example.
My main issue with Numbers is lack of macro support, which is why I use Excel 2011 (and not Excel 2016). Apple has the resources and incentive to add a decent macro language, but hasn't.
The Office 365 cloud and collaboration features aren't just important to businesses - hundreds of thousands of students and faculty are Office 365 users thanks to the steep discounting they offer schools for the entire suite, including e-mail hosting and 1 TB of cloud storage, which all ends up being free for the students and faculty.
Office 2016 was a serious improvement of the previous versions of Office that have been released for OS X/macOS. The one lagging tool is Outlook 2016, which still continues to really lag far behind the Windows version, and is rather slow. The fact that after almost 20 years, you still can't create a contact list/group on an Exchange server is ridiculous, and is one of the most annoying left out features. We encourage our users on Macs to just use the Outlook Web Client which has more features available than Outlook 2016.
I'm on the fast build channel, and I would stay away from these first builds of 16.x (the new version is 16, where as "Outlook 2016" was version 15.x). They are very slow on a quad core i7 iMac with 64GB of RAM and an SSD installed.
Anyone know the build number or can verify they have received the update. I am a "Fast Update" guy and all my stuff still looks and feels the same. I am currently checking a few of the features mentioned above, but still not convinced I have it.
Microsoft on Monday issued a number of so-called "Insider Fast" builds of Office 2016 for Mac to Office Insider beta testers, teasing a slate of upcoming features that should roll out to consumers in the coming weeks.
Detailed in a combined release notes webpage for current Office for Mac apps, the latest Insider Fast builds are considered previews of the "next major version" of Microsoft's app suite.
The latest releases incorporate a number of highly requested features, new additions and bug fixes for Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint. As expected, most upgrades impact users with Office 365 subscriptions, Microsoft's cloud-based productivity solution.
Starting with Word, Office 365 subscribers will benefit from a new AutoSave feature when working with OneDrive and SharePoint files, which automatically saves documents as users work. The function is similar to other auto-save products like Google Docs, and can be deactivated in program settings.
Also new for Word is real-time collaboration and sharing. Office 365 subscribers can co-author OneDrive and SharePoint files with other users, while new options streamline the process of sharing OneDrive for Business and SharePoint files with colleagues.
Finally, Microsoft is adding a series of new chart types for embedding in Word documents, including Waterfall, Histogram, Pareto, Box & Whisker, Treemap and Sunburst. The company touts the charts as designed to enable quick visualization of common financial, statistical and hierarchical data.
Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet tool benefits from collaborative features similar to those built into Word, meaning users can simultaneously edit workbooks stored in OneDrive and SharePoint. The app also gets access to the same new chart types mentioned above.
Specific to Excel are new IFS and SWITCH functions, which simplify and shorten spreadsheet formulas. The Insider Fast build includes better support for charts with PivotTable data sources, as well as Table Slicers for quick filtering.
Microsoft is bringing its Mac iteration in line with Widows with updated Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), though not all object models are supported at this time.
PowerPoint comes with a raft of upgrades, including real-time collaboration, document change and revision tracking, auto-save and more.
QuickStarter, which leverages the Bing Knowledge graph to build a presentation outline on specified subject mater, is now available for Mac, as is Trim Media, which allows users to cut unwanted content from the beginning and end of inserted audio and video clips. PowerPoint Designer on Mac adds additional triggers and layouts to match the full functionality of its Windows counterpart.
Moving on to Outlook, the email management tool receives a modest update with emoji support when composing messages.
Microsoft's OneNote, did not receive a new Insider Fast build on Monday, suggesting only minor changes are in store for the digital note taking tool.
When Microsoft plans to roll out the major Office 2016 for Mac update is unclear, though a rapid Insider Fast build release schedule suggests public availability is imminent.
I went for the BOLD features, things I've needed and consulted on with workarounds
Comments
I suspect people are just in the habit of criticizing Office365 without ever having used it. If anything, it shows how badly Apple is at doing software. iWork is cute, but nowhere near what Office is. I think Apple will marginalize it even more down the road.
The Apple software doesn’t support facing pages so you can’t use it to write a novel or a brochure for example.
or if you are working with multiple co-authors, and go through rounds of track changes, editing & commenting.
Word and Excel are a necessity at work, and we are all Apple & attempt to use Pages/Numbers (Keynote has long overtaken Powerpoint) but they do not have nearly the functionality that we need, so we fall back to Office.
The subscription fee for Office365 is horrible, especially considering the collaboration does not work well (huge lag in updating cells when multiple people are working on an Excel workbook). We were fine with Office '11 until the ended support, and now we will be stuck paying yearly for software we used to pay for every 5-7 years.
This missing component is the only reason I haven't gotten a close friend off of the Windows PC voodoo platform. On a regular basis, she loses her wifi on her 1.5 year-old Toshiba laptop under Windows 8.1. This only started after Toshiba replaced its noisy fan. No loose connections, she checked. It's also seemingly a consistent annoyance for Windows users in general, according to web searches, and was a consistent annoyance for me on two different Windows machines of my own in the past. Plus, the trackpad sucks on every pc laptop I've ever operated...
if Microsoft wasn't protecting their crappy platform's dominant install base in businesses, Access would be on the mac and more people could jump ship.
I'm on the fast build channel, and I would stay away from these first builds of 16.x (the new version is 16, where as "Outlook 2016" was version 15.x). They are very slow on a quad core i7 iMac with 64GB of RAM and an SSD installed.
And Ended up with an updater UI Bug on 3.13
Caveat Emptor take care when rushing ahead
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_officeinsider-mso_mac-msoinsider_act/office-for-mac-updater-bug/c968b40f-7516-42fd-8b23-813e237c17f8
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_officeinsider-mso_mac-msoinsider_act/office-autoupdate-for-mac/0db61462-38c4-4483-b60f-a8f6bf844570
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_officeinsider-mso_mac-msoinsider_act/latest-version-of-autoupdate-313-fast-ring-has/41937c42-fee5-4bca-8204-e25875dcbf70