Office 365 – Is anyone using?

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mikehalloran
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Office 365 – Is anyone using?

Post by mikehalloran »

Having bought Office in the past, I am bombarded by ads to purchase Office 365. I'm sure that I'm not alone here, of course. However, between this description

http://www.macworld.com/article/2026649 ... users.html

and this review

http://www.infoworld.com/article/260769 ... d-mac.html

So far, I can't think of a single compelling reason to update. It's clear that there is no upgrade here... or has there been since these were published?

My work uses GoogleDocs and GMail. I use Pages/Numbers on my iPad. Both have ways to import and export to Word and Excel.

One of the things I did during my recent clean install on my iMac was to revert back to Office 2008. In Mountain Lion, it got much faster for some reason and there was no longer a speed advantage to using Office 2011 which I never cared for. 2008 was really slow under older OS.

So, is anyone using Office 365 on either platform? Do you find any advantage to doing so?
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Shooshie
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Re: Office 365 – Is anyone using?

Post by Shooshie »

I use OfficeMac 2011. Having "bought" Word, Excel, and Office more times than I can remember, my policy these days is to avoid giving Microsoft any more money than is absolutely necessary when Office finally won't work anymore. I first bought Word and Excel in about 1984 or 85, right when Bill finished with them. Since then I've bought it many times, for many prices. For audacity Microsoft is exceeded only by Adobe, since Photoshop and Illustrator truly are Ransomware for which I've paid thousands and thousands. I've always believed in first-rate tools, but computers created the tools for which you can never stop paying.

Imagine my delight and surprise when Microsoft introduced the $100/year subscription. Let's compare the value of that deal:
  • • In the late 1990s, I bought a new full version of Office for PowerMac, because they would not upgrade my old 68040 copy again. I think I paid around $250.
    • I used Classic Office until forced to buy the OS X version around 2004, and I bought it at Micro Center, as an upgrade, for $35.
    • In 2012 I bought Office 2011, paying about $95.89.
So, such a subscription arrangement would have cost me around $1800 (and counting), compared to my actual cost: about $380 for the same period, continuing into the near future, at least.

I don't plan to upgrade it until it phones home and they issue the secret command: "Self Destruct, little apps!" then I'll buy the cheapest update available. Not suggesting that you or anyone else do likewise; I'm just talking, which I probably shouldn't do when it's about a company I dislike as much as the Redmond Godzilla.

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Re: Office 365 – Is anyone using?

Post by BKK-OZ »

I only use Word because my customers do. I hate hate hate it, so I essentially use it fo ensure doc compatability. I have used 365, meh, bleh.

p.s. I have to have After Effects for my video work (nothing else comes close), but I agree with Adobe being greedy, so I use Gimp instead of PS, it does enough of what I need to get by.
Cheers,
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…string theory says that all subatomic particles of the universe are nothing but musical notes. A, B-flat, C-sharp, correspond to electrons, neutrinos, quarks, and what have you. Therefore, physics is nothing but the laws of harmony of these strings. Chemistry is nothing but the melodies we can play on these strings. The universe is a symphony of strings and the mind of God… it is cosmic music resonating through 11 dimensional hyperspace.
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billf
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Re: Office 365 – Is anyone using?

Post by billf »

I refuse to give Microsoft or Adobe another dime for their apps. I've been transitioning away from Office and going with LibreOffice, which is so far working out nicely.

As for Adobe, I have the full CS6 and will keep using it until viable replacements are needed. For Photoshop, I am replacing it with PhotoLine, which is more robust than GIMP (which is quite robust and I also use), yet substantially less costly than paying the CC ransom.

As for After Effects, BlackMagic just released a full version of Fusion for free and announced that an OSX version is in the works, so things are starting to get interesting in that space.
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Re: Office 365 – Is anyone using?

Post by mikehalloran »

OK, I am not a power user when it comes to anything related to pictures or graphics. Photoshop Elements 6 has the functionality I require and still works in Yosemite.

One may have noticed certain Apple announcements after the Yosemite release to the effect that they didn't care where you got iPhoto or Aperture, the App Store was going to authorize it and let you run updates. ?!?!?!?

Here's the reason. Will Photos give photographers decent tools or be yet another dumbed down product for "the rest of us"?
http://9to5mac.com/2014/06/27/apple-to- ... next-year/
I only use Word because my customers do. I hate hate hate it, so I essentially use it fo ensure doc compatability.
OK... I'm not in love with it although I liked Word 5.1 (renamed Classic after the disaster that was 6). Word 2004 was pretty good but stopped running in Lion or ML – damn. I'm ok with 2008 but wish that I could set it up like 2004. Word 2011 did nothing for me except run a lot faster until ML when 2008 caught up – you have to look too hard through too many menus to find the basics: bleah! I am glad that Microsoft made 2008 compatible with any functionality I need. I got over the fact that 2011 installed more fonts – big whoop on that.

Pages was starting to get really good until the version released with Mavericks. My wife uses the editing features of the older version and converts to the current or Word if she has to. Why Apple couldn't keep the advanced features and pop open a dialog box saying, "this doc has functions not supported in iOS, shall I save anyway?" with the option to click Hell Yes! I will never know.
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Re: Office 365 – Is anyone using?

Post by bayswater »

Yes, I've noticed Apple doesn't seem to distinguish the source of your apps any more.

I deal with all sorts of people who are in closed Microsoft shops. I've managed to get along with Pages, Numbers, etc and LibreOffice and no Microsoft apps at all. I was even able to get by with the open substitute for MS Project. I haven't needed an Access clone, and I managed to get by with the reader for Visio. I don't think MS does anything for Mac for either of those anyway. I've been concerned about layouts and formatting being messed up, for for 4-5 years now, no one has complained.
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Re: Office 365 – Is anyone using?

Post by buzzsmith »

Jumping in with (hopefully) a related topic.

I pretty much have everything now compatible with ML (10.8.5) and my SSD Drive except for FileMaker which I use only for invoicing.

The cheapest that I've seen for an ML compatible version is about $300.00.

(I currently have FileMaker Pro 7.0v1.)

Alternatives?

Thanks!

Buzzy



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David Polich
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Re: Office 365 – Is anyone using?

Post by David Polich »

I am still using Office 2010. It works fine on my system. I even have a copy of Office 2011 which I never installed. No point.
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Re: Office 365 – Is anyone using?

Post by Shooshie »

Ever since the invention of photography, people have had portraits made and protected those pictures all their lives, passing them down to future generations, many of whom still have the pictures of their ancestors from the 1800s. Our pictures are personal, and highly important family heirlooms to be treasured for a century or two, at least. So, when a company comes along and makes promises about helping you keep your pictures safe and available forever, it's important that they follow through with such promises. This is no trivial matter.

I think Apple may be guilty of a cavalier attitude toward those who use such services. We've already watched as time and again they've pulled the plug and jerked the rug out from under those who were using their services like dot-mac or iTools to manage some of their photographic possessions. Now, the very tool they promised would keep treasured family heirlooms is going away, to be replaced by something we haven't even seen yet.

If they screw this up; if people lose their pictures because the migration from iPhoto to "Photos," or if the permanence of our photo storage is in any way upended, I think it will be time for a class action suit, in which every Apple user is compensated for any loss of their photos. I just know how much work it's been for me to keep my photographic collections safe and complete through generation after generation of software. If someone decided to end the JPEG format, we'd be in serious doo-doo. And don't think it's not possible. We've seen attacks on GIF and TIFF formats, and there are a few formats I can barely recall that have gone under the wheels of the bus.

But I'm pretty tech savvy. I know my way around a computer, and I know formats, and all about how images work in a rasterized or vectorized world. I can retrieve files from a dead hard drive at least some if not most of the time, plus, I've got so many redundant copies that I really don't need to.

But what about those poor grannies who entrusted their memories to this new age? That's all I'm going to say.

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Re: Office 365 – Is anyone using?

Post by bayswater »

Aperture stores the originally imported picture along with the previews, metadata and adjustment information. It has a simple facility for backup. I don't remember what iPhoto stores but real picture files are the library, so it's not that much of a risk. You can bet there will be a load of cheap App Store offerings to convert iPhoto and Aperture libraries to other library formats.

That said, I'm not looking forward to the disappearance of Aperture. It's far from perfect, but I expect Apple's new application will be pretty dumbed down, like Pages, etc.
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Re: Office 365 – Is anyone using?

Post by Shooshie »

bayswater wrote:Aperture stores the originally imported picture along with the previews, metadata and adjustment information. It has a simple facility for backup. I don't remember what iPhoto stores but real picture files are the library, so it's not that much of a risk. You can bet there will be a load of cheap App Store offerings to convert iPhoto and Aperture libraries to other library formats.

That said, I'm not looking forward to the disappearance of Aperture. It's far from perfect, but I expect Apple's new application will be pretty dumbed down, like Pages, etc.
Have you ever looked at the iPhoto library? it used to consist of thousands of folders, with thumbnails in some and images in others. They were all connected together by iPhoto, which acted as the digital switching station that kept track of all that. It still is, but I'd say it's beyond the average person's reach without some instruction. As long as there are ways for the average user to migrate their entire collections, without error, then everything's probably fine. But I've been through some nasty situations even in the past 10 years, where it took me a while to secure all my old photos and music files.

For example, I spent years tweaking some webpages in dotMac, thinking that if Apple took it away, they'd offer some kind of migration path. They did not. That's fine; most of those pages were of limited shelf-life, anyway. But the fact remains, there is no archive of all that I put into them. No bringing that back. I like Dropbox, now, but I'm not getting married to it. It's just a passing tool, as are all the other things in my Mac. But my work... it has to survive all those changes, and that's something I do feel concern about.

I have been a writer all my life, and I wrote countless essays, stories, and even correspondence in MS Word from the 1980s through the 1990s. At some point, all those files quit working. I was able to get most of that content out with a utility called Juice, but it's not a perfect way to do it. Formatting and random gibberish end up in there, and you have to go through it with a fine-toothed comb to remove it. I still have hundreds, if not thousands, of such files that never have been extracted. Probably never will. That's lost work. I've learned to keep things simple. Keep text files. Keep jpegs. Keep MIDI files. Audio files. At least things can be reconstructed if need be.

Another app I worry about is Sibelius. Avid could abandon it today. If so, people would have to deal with their work, trying to migrate it to another engraver, and possibly just giving it up. It could happen to any app. There aren't any guarantees out there. At least the old print world left behind paper. Fires consumed that paper, but if you could keep it safe from fire, you had a good chance of keeping your work for future generations to see.

Sorry... I seem to be on a rant these days. The same theme keeps popping up in many of my posts.

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Re: Office 365 – Is anyone using?

Post by mikehalloran »

David Polich wrote:I am still using Office 2010. It works fine on my system. I even have a copy of Office 2011 which I never installed. No point.
Office 2010 is for Windows; Office 2011 is for the Mac.

There was an Office 2013 for Windows but 2011 was the last standalone version for the Macintosh.
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Re: Office 365 – Is anyone using?

Post by bayswater »

Shooshie wrote:Have you ever looked at the iPhoto library? it used to consist of thousands of folders, with thumbnails in some and images in others. They were all connected together by iPhoto, which acted as the digital switching station that kept track of all that.
I have looked, mainly for the reasons that concerned you. What is this thing doing with my pictures? My point was that it does nothing to your pictures. They're all there just as they came off the camera organized in folders, though hidden in the package format. So they're safe as any other file you might save. Apple hasn't changed the pictures in a way that makes them irretrievable without their software. Aperture makes this a little more transparent, and also makes it easy to render the pictures with all the processing and adjustments by exporting the "versions".
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Re: Office 365 – Is anyone using?

Post by BKK-OZ »

Shooshie wrote:...Fires consumed that paper, but if you could keep it safe from fire, you had a good chance of keeping your work for future generations to see...

Shooshie
I wonder too about the possibilities of a massive EMP, either from the Sun or elsewhere.

Our history/understanding of magnetic/electro-magnetic media for information storage is, what, maybe 100 years old? We couldn't even measure this sort of stuff in any way at all until the last 150 years or so. We know that the magnetic poles swap from time to time, what else could happen along those lines, that might just wipe out all our electronics, ala the big power-grid meltdowns caused by magnetic fluxes from the Sun that have happened a couple of times now?

...and meanwhile, one of the drives in my RAID died... hmmmm

Sorry for going so far OT.
Cheers,
BK

…string theory says that all subatomic particles of the universe are nothing but musical notes. A, B-flat, C-sharp, correspond to electrons, neutrinos, quarks, and what have you. Therefore, physics is nothing but the laws of harmony of these strings. Chemistry is nothing but the melodies we can play on these strings. The universe is a symphony of strings and the mind of God… it is cosmic music resonating through 11 dimensional hyperspace.
- M Kaku
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mikehalloran
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Re: Office 365 – Is anyone using?

Post by mikehalloran »

buzzsmith wrote:Jumping in with (hopefully) a related topic.

I pretty much have everything now compatible with ML (10.8.5) and my SSD Drive except for FileMaker which I use only for invoicing.

The cheapest that I've seen for an ML compatible version is about $300.00.

(I currently have FileMaker Pro 7.0v1.)

Alternatives?

Thanks!

Buzzy



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FileMaker Pro 11 works great in Yosemite even though not supported--I've had no issues whatsoever. Perhaps some reseller has unsold copies of that or FMP 12 at a good price.

I don't believe there are any real alternatives to FileMaker Pro. I'm still using templates that I developed in 1986. There is a "lite" version called Bento but I've never investigated it. I probably won't upgrade again till around September when the next version arrives.

FM.7 file format is still used in FMP 11. To use them in FMP 12 or later, they will be converted to fm.12 format, a one-step process. Interestingly, You can still open and convert older FM files by following instructions here (not an issue if everything is fm.7)

http://help.filemaker.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/10571
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