The article incorrectly infers Outlook for Mac only works with IMAP accounts, which isn't true since it works with Exchange/365 accounts.
No, you just read it wrong. "includes support for Outlook.com accounts, Gmail, iCloud, Yahoo, and other email providers that support IMAP" — that's a list of different things.
Oh, like macOS? Remember back in good ol' days when macOS was lean and stable, but at the same time, feature-poor and not supporting the newest hardware compared to Windows? Then, Apple starts adding features and brining macOS into the current century and it's bloated and buggy. Each new version is worse than the last.
Rose-tinted glasses. There have always been myriad bugs in all versions of Mac OS/OS X/macOS. I don't have any major issues right now outside of a few built-in apps.
And as to the crazy notion that the entire office suite should be "FREE"... Oh yeah... LOL. As if we need Ads to mar the UI! Not on your life, buddy!.
Have you used Pages/Numbers? No ads there How about OpenOffice/LibreOffice? No ads there. Not sure where you got the idea that a free office suite must have ads.
I won’t hold my breath for a free MS Office suite. It’s too much of a cash cow for MS. This is especially true since they went to Office365 and make everyone pay every month. But your image of free office suites is way off the mark.
Actually, compared to Apple, MS Office suite IS free. You see, for you home/personal users, you can get 6 licenses of full MS Office for $100. EACH one includes 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage. That comes out to roughly $17 per YEAR, per person, for 1TB of cloud storage (and FREE Office Software). Apple charges $120 per year for ONE USER iCloud (and free Pages/Numbers that practically no one uses).
So, $17 for 1 YEAR of M365+1TB cloud from MS or $120 for 1 YEAR of iCloud plus basic office apps from Apple.
Suddenly Apple looks like a rotten apple and I'll take MS, thank you.
Yeah, I've heard that, use a bloated, difficult to use word processor, but you get free cloud space. Pass.
And as to the crazy notion that the entire office suite should be "FREE"... Oh yeah... LOL. As if we need Ads to mar the UI! Not on your life, buddy!.
Have you used Pages/Numbers? No ads there How about OpenOffice/LibreOffice? No ads there. Not sure where you got the idea that a free office suite must have ads.
I won’t hold my breath for a free MS Office suite. It’s too much of a cash cow for MS. This is especially true since they went to Office365 and make everyone pay every month. But your image of free office suites is way off the mark.
Actually, compared to Apple, MS Office suite IS free. You see, for you home/personal users, you can get 6 licenses of full MS Office for $100. EACH one includes 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage. That comes out to roughly $17 per YEAR, per person, for 1TB of cloud storage (and FREE Office Software). Apple charges $120 per year for ONE USER iCloud (and free Pages/Numbers that practically no one uses).
So, $17 for 1 YEAR of M365+1TB cloud from MS or $120 for 1 YEAR of iCloud plus basic office apps from Apple.
Suddenly Apple looks like a rotten apple and I'll take MS, thank you.
Yeah, I've heard that, use a bloated, difficult to use word processor, but you get free cloud space. Pass.
Funny that after 23 years of supporting thousands of users WHO ALL USE WORD, I've never heard anyone describe Word as "difficult". No one's ever said "Is there an easier word processor? Word is so hard". Never.
The article incorrectly infers Outlook for Mac only works with IMAP accounts, which isn't true since it works with Exchange/365 accounts.
No, you just read it wrong. "includes support for Outlook.com accounts, Gmail, iCloud, Yahoo, and other email providers that support IMAP" — that's a list of different things.
Oh, like macOS? Remember back in good ol' days when macOS was lean and stable, but at the same time, feature-poor and not supporting the newest hardware compared to Windows? Then, Apple starts adding features and brining macOS into the current century and it's bloated and buggy. Each new version is worse than the last.
Rose-tinted glasses. There have always been myriad bugs in all versions of Mac OS/OS X/macOS. I don't have any major issues right now outside of a few built-in apps.
I didn't read it wrong. The article states nowhere that Exchange support is included in the free version. It does list what it does support, and Exchange is not in the list.
You can assume it's included, but again, the article infers it's not.
I do not miss the days of helping clients get their Outlook working. So many wasted hours, meanwhile my Apple Mail has worked flawlessly for 20 years. Amazing the pain people will put themselves through.
And as to the crazy notion that the entire office suite should be "FREE"... Oh yeah... LOL. As if we need Ads to mar the UI! Not on your life, buddy!.
Have you used Pages/Numbers? No ads there How about OpenOffice/LibreOffice? No ads there. Not sure where you got the idea that a free office suite must have ads.
I won’t hold my breath for a free MS Office suite. It’s too much of a cash cow for MS. This is especially true since they went to Office365 and make everyone pay every month. But your image of free office suites is way off the mark.
Actually, compared to Apple, MS Office suite IS free. You see, for you home/personal users, you can get 6 licenses of full MS Office for $100. EACH one includes 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage. That comes out to roughly $17 per YEAR, per person, for 1TB of cloud storage (and FREE Office Software). Apple charges $120 per year for ONE USER iCloud (and free Pages/Numbers that practically no one uses).
So, $17 for 1 YEAR of M365+1TB cloud from MS or $120 for 1 YEAR of iCloud plus basic office apps from Apple.
Suddenly Apple looks like a rotten apple and I'll take MS, thank you.
Says "IT Guy".... typical IT Guy response. Blinded by Microsoft's "Certifications".
My theory is that Microsoft still exists thanks only to Excel. The company rests upon that single foundation stone. Businesses around the world must have Excel because of the formulas and macros or whatever, that run their company spreadsheets. Over the last two or three decades, they have accumulated and rely on hundreds of old spreadsheets, refining and improving them. And because of compatibility issues, they cannot afford to change to something else. They must be able to open a spreadsheet from 20 years ago and it must work perfectly. No time to change formulas or debug etc. So for essential business spreadsheets, it has to be Excel. But Word, PowerPoint? Outlook?? Who cares? These are software appliances — like refrigerators, TVs etc, — a highly competitive market with low margins. For office, there’s Google for those who don’t mind being spied upon. Apple has free alternatives, there is open source, and a myriad of free and paid alternatives.
Because a business must use Excel, they therefore buy the entire Office package, as Microsoft offers bulk-purchase discounts. Thus an entire organisation resorts to using the bloody programs as they have already paid for them. If someone wants to use an alternative, the IT guy will say: “Heck no, we’ve already got you a word processor (or whatever).” The same goes for cloud storage, and even the operating system — Windows is the only thing that will run all of Excel perfectly. So it has to be a Windows PC. Microsoft’s entire business rests upon that single foundation stone, once that foundation stone is undermined, good luck…
Any idea whether Outlook reads MacOS/iCloud contacts now? The last time I tried Outlook couldn’t. That was maybe 3-4 years back. Colleagues had advised me of a workaround by shifting my iCloud contacts to an Exchange account. But native Contacts access is an essential feature for any proper email app and thus I’ve stayed away from Outlook.
And as to the crazy notion that the entire office suite should be "FREE"... Oh yeah... LOL. As if we need Ads to mar the UI! Not on your life, buddy!.
Have you used Pages/Numbers? No ads there How about OpenOffice/LibreOffice? No ads there. Not sure where you got the idea that a free office suite must have ads.
I won’t hold my breath for a free MS Office suite. It’s too much of a cash cow for MS. This is especially true since they went to Office365 and make everyone pay every month. But your image of free office suites is way off the mark.
Actually, compared to Apple, MS Office suite IS free. You see, for you home/personal users, you can get 6 licenses of full MS Office for $100. EACH one includes 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage. That comes out to roughly $17 per YEAR, per person, for 1TB of cloud storage (and FREE Office Software). Apple charges $120 per year for ONE USER iCloud (and free Pages/Numbers that practically no one uses).
So, $17 for 1 YEAR of M365+1TB cloud from MS or $120 for 1 YEAR of iCloud plus basic office apps from Apple.
Suddenly Apple looks like a rotten apple and I'll take MS, thank you.
Yeah, I've heard that, use a bloated, difficult to use word processor, but you get free cloud space. Pass.
Funny that after 23 years of supporting thousands of users WHO ALL USE WORD, I've never heard anyone describe Word as "difficult". No one's ever said "Is there an easier word processor? Word is so hard". Never.
Oh that is FUNNY! For the decade and a half I was doing Desktop Support, I’d get the same call at least two to three times a week; “How the **** can I get Word to do xxxx?” Following that I spent a decade in robotics, and I’d hear it from other people, just not directed at me, “Why the **** is Word doing that?” Yes, I regularly recommended easier word processors to people that didn’t need The Hindenburg to write a letter. Word is fine if you need all of those functions. But almost no one outside of an office does. Frankly, the majority of people who work INSIDE an office don’t either. It’s big, bloated, the ribbon is a nightmare to navigate. Honestly I’ve speculated that Microsoft worked with their customers to nail down the best interface, and the features that were needed the most and should be up top out of the box. THEN THEY DID THE EXACT OPPOSITE.
EDIT; Let me add one other thing. The whole office suite has incrementally gotten worse. 98 was actually pretty good. 2000 not quite so. Over time they added this and that, and other things, each time making it more complicated, obtuse, and unintuitive. Word today is just the culmination of over twenty years of feature creep and decay.
My theory is that Microsoft still exists thanks only to Excel. The company rests upon that single foundation stone. Businesses around the world must have Excel because of the formulas and macros or whatever, that run their company spreadsheets. Over the last two or three decades, they have accumulated and rely on hundreds of old spreadsheets, refining and improving them. And because of compatibility issues, they cannot afford to change to something else. They must be able to open a spreadsheet from 20 years ago and it must work perfectly. No time to change formulas or debug etc. So for essential business spreadsheets, it has to be Excel. But Word, PowerPoint? Outlook?? Who cares? These are software appliances — like refrigerators, TVs etc, — a highly competitive market with low margins. For office, there’s Google for those who don’t mind being spied upon. Apple has free alternatives, there is open source, and a myriad of free and paid alternatives.
Because a business must use Excel, they therefore buy the entire Office package, as Microsoft offers bulk-purchase discounts. Thus an entire organisation resorts to using the bloody programs as they have already paid for them. If someone wants to use an alternative, the IT guy will say: “Heck no, we’ve already got you a word processor (or whatever).” The same goes for cloud storage, and even the operating system — Windows is the only thing that will run all of Excel perfectly. So it has to be a Windows PC. Microsoft’s entire business rests upon that single foundation stone, once that foundation stone is undermined, good luck…
I agree that Excel is the key application in Ms-Office and most probably the big chunk of the sales of Ms-Office depend on it. A little bit like the success of the iPhone drives other service sales like Apple Music.
But Microsoft is more than Ms-Office/Excel: X-Box, Azure, Ms-Windows are all very important business lines for Microsoft.
I like Excel a lot, but mostly because I love the whole spreadsheet paradigm. But there is a limit with spreadsheets. That limit is where a real programming language would be so much easier than managing huge formulas and nested logic. But I'd rather swim in a shark tank while wearing a meat suit than to use VBA or anything resembling it. I've also used Pages enough to recognize that it is nearly as powerful as Excel, but I have to constantly avoid falling into the pitfalls created by my muscle memory, which are deeply ingrained all the way back to Lotus 123.
Word is a bloated mess and loves to mangle my fonts and styles, seemingly at random, but there is a lot of power under the dung layer. Some of the features that make it earn its keep only become apparent when you're collaborating on large documents with a team of writers contributing content, dealing with comments, managing tables and figures, table of contents, indices, references, footnotes, etc. It's a big hammer for the 20% of its users who need a big hammer and are willing to work around it peculiarities and bugs. For more pedestrian and personal use I prefer Pages. In fact, if I'm starting to put together any document beyond a one or two pager, I start with a text editor and then move the text into a word processor. I don't need the many distractions of any word processor when the primary goal is to capture my/team's thoughts on "paper." Plowing it into a word processor later on is fine, but only if absolutely necessary to publish the document to a larger audience. Microsoft Word had and maybe still has an outline format feature, as does OneNote, but it was absolutely hideous.
Outlook is better than Lotus Notes. That's not a high bar to jump over, but it is a bar. Personally, I hate having three essential productivity functions (email, calendar, and contacts) bundled in a single app and prefer that they be kept separate. This is more apparent when you work across multiple platforms, especially ones that use open standards rather than proprietary ones like Exchange. I've never had an issue with Apple's mail, calendar, or contacts apps - except when you add Outlook to the mix and it stomps on something like your contacts.
I also like choosing my own applications for my home and personal use. I think a lot of people use or aspire to use the same apps at home that they use at work. Heck, Microsoft even encourages this by making some Microsoft apps like Office available for dirt-cheap prices for employees of companies that have big dollar Microsoft contracts. But you don't have a help desk and IT support department at home. The nostalgia of bringing your work tools home with you also contributes to the predominance of Windows over Mac. It's either a powerful endorsement or a powerful revulsion - depending on what side of the love-hate relationship you have with Microsoft's tools at work.
Microsoft's success in the business world is largely driven by their ability to lock-in customers with enterprise level tools and support. On the Office front there has always been a deeply rooted fear about file incompatibility issues with non-Microsoft tools despite the fact that Microsoft's newer file formats are very well documented and based on what are now "open" standards. I've used the open equivalents of some of the file formats that Microsoft supports in my own apps. They are very flexible. The file format fear (FFF) should no longer be a concern that pushes organizations to stick with Microsoft, but it still is because there's no stopping the FFF inertia at least with boomers, especially those in the E-suite.
We should be paid to use Outlook. All of MS products are bloated to the point 90% of the features are worthless to most users.
That’s a major reason I don’t use Office Apps. sure I could use Word to do Legal Footnotes. I don’t ever need to do those. Sure I could use Excel to do Statistical functions. I don’t need to do that. The functions I need are buried under those that I don’t. Add to that the Ribbon, the single worst user interface ever created by man, that Microsoft took and set up in the absolutely worst way possible, and you see why I hate Office Apps.
Touché ribbons, absolutely sucks…….. the best thing about early retirement I never never have to use that abomination again.
And as to the crazy notion that the entire office suite should be "FREE"... Oh yeah... LOL. As if we need Ads to mar the UI! Not on your life, buddy!.
Have you used Pages/Numbers? No ads there How about OpenOffice/LibreOffice? No ads there. Not sure where you got the idea that a free office suite must have ads.
I won’t hold my breath for a free MS Office suite. It’s too much of a cash cow for MS. This is especially true since they went to Office365 and make everyone pay every month. But your image of free office suites is way off the mark.
Actually, compared to Apple, MS Office suite IS free. You see, for you home/personal users, you can get 6 licenses of full MS Office for $100. EACH one includes 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage. That comes out to roughly $17 per YEAR, per person, for 1TB of cloud storage (and FREE Office Software). Apple charges $120 per year for ONE USER iCloud (and free Pages/Numbers that practically no one uses).
So, $17 for 1 YEAR of M365+1TB cloud from MS or $120 for 1 YEAR of iCloud plus basic office apps from Apple.
Suddenly Apple looks like a rotten apple and I'll take MS, thank you.
Yeah, I've heard that, use a bloated, difficult to use word processor, but you get free cloud space. Pass.
Funny that after 23 years of supporting thousands of users WHO ALL USE WORD, I've never heard anyone describe Word as "difficult". No one's ever said "Is there an easier word processor? Word is so hard". Never.
Word has always been the lowest common denominator, and has always been crap, but most of the world uses it or a facsimile of it, I learned a long time ago when I was in school, that if you use InDesign or Quark using the text editor, combined with the desktop publishing part of the program, you could always make a better looking document in half the time, when asked by other people, how? I said that I used something other than Microsoft Word the lights went off, they were hoping that I would tell them how to use Microsoft word in a better way than what they were used to, but I said sorry if you want a better looking document that is more readable with images you need to use another program. Oh well.
Comments
Rose-tinted glasses. There have always been myriad bugs in all versions of Mac OS/OS X/macOS. I don't have any major issues right now outside of a few built-in apps.
You can assume it's included, but again, the article infers it's not.
Says "IT Guy".... typical IT Guy response. Blinded by Microsoft's "Certifications".
Because a business must use Excel, they therefore buy the entire Office package, as Microsoft offers bulk-purchase discounts. Thus an entire organisation resorts to using the bloody programs as they have already paid for them. If someone wants to use an alternative, the IT guy will say: “Heck no, we’ve already got you a word processor (or whatever).” The same goes for cloud storage, and even the operating system — Windows is the only thing that will run all of Excel perfectly. So it has to be a Windows PC. Microsoft’s entire business rests upon that single foundation stone, once that foundation stone is undermined, good luck…
...is 'embrace, extend, extinguish' still valid...?
Word is a bloated mess and loves to mangle my fonts and styles, seemingly at random, but there is a lot of power under the dung layer. Some of the features that make it earn its keep only become apparent when you're collaborating on large documents with a team of writers contributing content, dealing with comments, managing tables and figures, table of contents, indices, references, footnotes, etc. It's a big hammer for the 20% of its users who need a big hammer and are willing to work around it peculiarities and bugs. For more pedestrian and personal use I prefer Pages. In fact, if I'm starting to put together any document beyond a one or two pager, I start with a text editor and then move the text into a word processor. I don't need the many distractions of any word processor when the primary goal is to capture my/team's thoughts on "paper." Plowing it into a word processor later on is fine, but only if absolutely necessary to publish the document to a larger audience. Microsoft Word had and maybe still has an outline format feature, as does OneNote, but it was absolutely hideous.
Outlook is better than Lotus Notes. That's not a high bar to jump over, but it is a bar. Personally, I hate having three essential productivity functions (email, calendar, and contacts) bundled in a single app and prefer that they be kept separate. This is more apparent when you work across multiple platforms, especially ones that use open standards rather than proprietary ones like Exchange. I've never had an issue with Apple's mail, calendar, or contacts apps - except when you add Outlook to the mix and it stomps on something like your contacts.
I also like choosing my own applications for my home and personal use. I think a lot of people use or aspire to use the same apps at home that they use at work. Heck, Microsoft even encourages this by making some Microsoft apps like Office available for dirt-cheap prices for employees of companies that have big dollar Microsoft contracts. But you don't have a help desk and IT support department at home. The nostalgia of bringing your work tools home with you also contributes to the predominance of Windows over Mac. It's either a powerful endorsement or a powerful revulsion - depending on what side of the love-hate relationship you have with Microsoft's tools at work.
Microsoft's success in the business world is largely driven by their ability to lock-in customers with enterprise level tools and support. On the Office front there has always been a deeply rooted fear about file incompatibility issues with non-Microsoft tools despite the fact that Microsoft's newer file formats are very well documented and based on what are now "open" standards. I've used the open equivalents of some of the file formats that Microsoft supports in my own apps. They are very flexible. The file format fear (FFF) should no longer be a concern that pushes organizations to stick with Microsoft, but it still is because there's no stopping the FFF inertia at least with boomers, especially those in the E-suite.