Is it even neccessary to buy Microsoft Office anymore?

[Petary791]

My girlfriend left me with her MacBook Pro and I've been using Apple Pages for some stuff, but I want to transfer it to my PC (blech) so I just went on Gmail and saved it as a document. I see I can export it as a Word file (in addition to PDF and HTML and all sorts of other goodies.) So when I get my Mac this summer, why would I even buy Apple Microsoft stuff?

-Money-saver Pete

[crispygoat]

if not, you can always use OpenOffice.

[fenderhutz]

Now that Open Office works well. Not really, UNLESS it is a requirement for business purposes (Outlook Calendar etc.)

[FL Knifemaker]

I like Outlook for Email. That's the only reason I bought it. After I DUMPED Vista, I had no choice.

[Pilgrim]

It depends on how often you have to exchange files with folks who use MS Office, which is the dominant program in the market. If you do so, then you MUST have the ability to send files they can open and work with, and you MUST be able to accept Office files and work with them.

I believe that OpenOffice can do that, so it may be a good solution. I personally find Office a good suite to work with, so I use it.

[coreyfyfe]

i bought office when i bought my mac pretty much because i could get the student discount on it. i have to use excel, power point, and word constantly for projects/presentations/labs at school and for the most part everything has to be usable on my own computer and ones owned by the school/lab im working in so it was just convenient.

kind of sucks, but it is the dominant program on the market and it really comes down to a convenience issue.

[Sir Edward V]

i bought office for my mac because with the discount at my school it cost $6, XP Pro costs $6 too, Vista is $12. Leopard cost me $70 though...

P.S. I tried to open Pages, but they want me to pay for it or use a trial period. Looks like its not free with my Mac...

[Bob Clayton]

i've been a mac user for 2 years now, and i don't use any of MS Office

[iamlowsound]

Originally Posted by coreyfyfe

i bought office when i bought my mac pretty much because i could get the student discount on it. i have to use excel, power point, and word constantly for projects/presentations/labs at school and for the most part everything has to be usable on my own computer and ones owned by the school/lab im working in so it was just convenient.

kind of sucks, but it is the dominant program on the market and it really comes down to a convenience issue.

Same here. I needed to be able to use excel and word. Since I already knew how to use them and I knew that there wasn't going to be any compatibility glitches I chose to buy them and put them on my mac. I also think they run a heck of a lot better on my mac than they ever did on my old PC.

lowsound

[DigMe]

I could easily see Word becoming obsolete in a few years if it didn't come packaged with Office. For the time being though I think PowerPoint and Excel will keep Office pretty successful.

bc

[burk48237]

I have to run office for work, because it's what my company uses for all the files I use in the field. It still a MS program unfortunately and runs like one. I am tired of the endless "are you sure you want to open the program you just asked me to open? Are you really sure? Do you realize if you open the program it will be open? And that when you close the program it will not be open again? I know you double clicked on the program, but are you really sure you want to open it? This program was never intended to be open. Do you wan to to save the changes you just spent three hours making to the document? Are you sure even though you said so? That file name is invalid, it contains a letters and numbers. Are you sure you want to name that file you just saved?.........................................:hm m:

[lord toranaga]

I use pages exclusively for my word processing needs, or text edit for simple stuff.

[CrazyArcher]

I heavily use Office2007, mostly Word and Excel, and I love it. I tried to use OpenExcel (or however it's called) at my friend's comp, and lack of those tiny helping features drove me nuts.
The thing with MSOffice is that it's business-oriented, and home users consider it feature-bloated - and from their perspective they are probably right. However when one exists in business environment, Office2007 is the best suite out IMO. Oh if only other Windoze and other MS products were as good as Office...

[*smb]

I uninstalled Office from my laptop - just didn't use it. I'm happy with OpenOffice and Google Docs.

[Toasted]

Originally Posted by CrazyArcher

I heavily use Office2007, mostly Word and Excel, and I love it. I tried to use OpenExcel (or however it's called) at my friend's comp, and lack of tiny helping features drove me nuts.

I need Clippy, dammit.

[CrazyArcher]

There's no more clippy anyway!

No, I was talking about stuff like fixating the table cell in a formula with F4 (or any other shortcut), and redrawing a graph automatically on table's update. It just doesn't exist in OpenCalc...

[Toasted]

I'm bringin' him back!

[CrazyArcher]

Eh, I liked the kitty more, anyway. :P

One other example of corporate-oriented nature of Office2007 is native support multithreaded calculations by Excel. Show me a home user who could need to grind enough data to make his CPU busy so much, that multi-threaded calculation would be feasible

[Bob Clayton]

at school, the new version of office is on all the computers...

it's confusing as all hell.

microsoft took a product that (kinda) worked, and totally changed the UI.
no one i know likes it.

[Toasted]

Just to be the exception, I really like it. There's some great features, especially in the new Outlook. Moving to docx / xlsx / pptx etc. is a really REALLY good move.