Source
r/apple•
Danabl

Give it to me straight...just how bad is Office for OSX?

OSX

Quick background...I'm a former Mac user. Two years ago I sold my 2009 MBP for a cheaper HP laptop for one huge reason: I need to be able to use Microsoft Office. While Pages is OK I'm a teacher in a school that is totally Windows based and I need seamless compatibility when editing Word documents. While I generally favor OSX over Windows in all other areas, I'm most comfortable and productive using Office on a Windows machine. I've never used Office on a Mac. I've done lots of searching, and reviews are really mixed.

My HP laptop needs to be replaced. I've logged hours of searching for a new laptop and have found a few that I like. Our Best Buy has a Dell model that feels very premium and a lot like a MBP. I love it, but when I read reviews online I'm horrified by tales of Dell customer service. The same can be said of pretty much every PC company I read about.

I really really want Apple level customer service, but Office compatibility is really hanging me up. If a great Office experience is my number one priority for a new computer, should I give up on Apple?

Also...I'm going to be visiting the Apple store tomorrow...any chance they'll have a display running Office?

Thanks!

edit: Wow..that was fast! Thanks for the quick response. Definitely leaning towards Mac again.

Edit number 2...thanks for all of the insight. I was able to use Word on an MBA at the Apple store today, and it seemed to work just fine.

Posted Jul 24, 2014, 9:58 PM UTC · edited

1683
thekingswitness•

I downloaded Office my freshmen year of college and haven't had any problems whatsoever using it.

50
racas•

This, I believe, is the best answer. Office for Mac is good, stable, and useable for what it is. If you compare it to iWork, you'll say it's bloated but somewhat more powerful. If you compare it to Office for Windows, you'll say it's clunky. But if you take it on its own, you'll realize it is good software.

12
TheColorsDo•

I really feel like Word 2010 is the best version of Word I've used, and I've only recently switched to Mac (about a year ago).

3
slenderwin•

I'm a Junior in college and have been using it since the get-go. However, my experience has not been so great.

  • Word-wise, it works fine.
  • Excel-wise, I can't say as I haven't gotten into excel yet, that'll come this coming semester.
  • Powerpoint-wise is where it fails. I had to put together a large, smart-art heavy powerpoint and it crashed a dozen times in the course of a couple of hours. The first crash causing me to lose hours of work. Powerpoint is unstable.

So, as you can see, Office for OS X? It's acceptable.

But let me talk about my parallel experience using Parallels to run Windows 8 and Office 2013 on Windows.

  • It was faster and more fluid.
  • It was more feature rich, including back-ups, and additional editing features in both Word and Powerpoint.
  • It didn't crash, not even once.

The bottom line? Office for Mac 2014 (or 2015) should be coming soon. So long as you buy an Office 365 Subscription (as a student) you'll get 2011 and get an upgrade to 2014/2015 when it's released, all for $79.99(?) This also includes downloading it on a couple more devices such as your iPad or another computer (or virtual machine, like I did.)

Is Office 2014/2015 for Mac going to fix all these differences? If OneNote is any indication, yes. The new apps will be native, beautiful, and feature-rich. They can't come soon enough.

3
badfoodman•

Excel crashes hard on large datasets, much more than on my friend's much weaker Windows machine. Otherwise it's basically the same piece of junk (honestly, Excel is just a piece of software I can't stand using regardless of OS), and on small datasets it works just fine.

1
octopusslover•

I am using office on iMac and am pretty happy with it. Don't feel any big difference between OS X's and Windows's versions. Would recommend mac.

14
dislocatex•

Is there any difference? I'm helping my mother to get a Macbook Air because she gets extremely stressed using her crappy windows laptop. But she needs office for work thus this post made me a little nervous.

2
andrez123100•

I think it is just the UI. I've been able to do pretty much anything else with most of the office apps. Although I'm not sure if the macro functionality is the same in excel as it is with windows.

3
dislocatex•

Why would the UI be different? What purpose does that achieve? How is it different?

0
GreenPresident•

It is completely different. As in, you would not think it's the same program.

http://images.pcworld.com/images/article/2012/07/word20reply20comment-11385262.png

http://www.maclife.com/files/u220903/microsoft_word_2011_for_mac_screen_620px.jpg

The UI is different because Windows and OSX have different philosophies when it comes to handling and managing windows. It's also different because Word 2013 is made for Windows 8.

Office has come a long way. The Mac version is so cluttered. The Mac version looks like someone installed too many toolbars by accident. Word a joy to use under Windows. I find the Windows version of Office so much better that I use Pages where I can and boot Windows to do stuff like editing documents side by side, etc.

2
jlian•

It feels clunky and bloated (compared to iWork) but it's usable. It makes for a terrible experience a lot of the time but you probably will be able to do what you need to do. One thing I noticed is that the hotkeys are not very optimized for mac, so expect your workflow to slow down coming from Windows.

However it's always possible to run Windows version of Office on VM via Parallels/VMFusion. I'm not familiar with the experience but I've read a lot of praise. They are mature products made for people with your exact needs. You should look into it.

Almost no chance that Apple store will have Office running on their store macs. Maybe look it up on YouTube.

EDIT: Apple store apparently always has Office.

13
sfacets•

iWork feels featureless when compared to Word... it's very pretty, but to be a productivity tool rivalling Word, it has a way to go.

13
ZedEffective•

IWork is fantastic when you stay within the guidelines of the premise documents. You can make some beautiful stuff, but from a chemists point of view don't use numbers in place of excel. If it's an essay or a simple graphs iWork is far quicker and prettier.

2
ThirdWorldScientist•

Ah, fellow scientist! I agree. I love my macbook, but iwork just doesn't cut it in the science world. So I just use Office and it has suited me well for the most part.

2
12ihaveamac•

Apple stores do have Office on all of their macs. They even sell Office there.

6
DanablOP•

Great advice..not sure why I didn't think of it before. Just watched a video on YouTube. While it's not the most well designed UI, it looks totally workable. Hopefully the mythical Office 2014 update will be more attractive.

3
WinterCharm•

Honestly, Running Office in a VM is the best way to go. Office for Mac is not very well optimized, and its great for small things.

But, as someone who does really intensive research, generates 200 MB + power points, and 50 MB + excel spreadsheets with millions of data points, the apps slow to a crawl.

Both, PowerPoint and Excel for mac are restricted to a single Core, and dont use the GPU to render graphs. :/

Word is all right.

Generally, I use keynote and excel exclusively, and alternate between Pages and Word depending on what type of document I'm working on and what features I need.

6
Orange_Astronaut•

If they're a teacher they could just use OpenOffice/LibreOffice to open excel files and convert them to numbers. I've never seen a teacher need to deal with any major data sets.

1
DanablOP•

Yup, no need for Excel at all, actually. I'm a history teacher. For my personal budgeting, I use Google Sheets because it's perfectly dumbed down.

1
Gaff3r•

They have to update it at some point, and they'd be hard pressed to make it worse =p

1
Orange_Astronaut•

I run VMware to use windows with no issues. Office for Mac isn't as good as the windows version , but there are some rumors that a new version is just around the corner.

1
musicman76831•

The Apple Store will have Microsoft Office running on their display Macs. You can find it in Launchpad or in the Applications folder. Post up for a minute and play around. Get a feel for it. I can speak from experience though, that Pages and the other iWork programs have come a long way in the last few years. I didn't even touch Microsoft Office when I was in college, even though it's the only thing my professors used.

2
Rand_o•

Run a virtual machine to run windows on, it is pretty easy to set up (I use VirtualBox it is free) and I use Word/PPT/Excel/Visio when I need to for college. You can set up shared folders to sync files or dropbox. All you need is a Windows ISO

10
WinterCharm•

Personally, I love VMWare fusion. Although you have to pay for it, the interface is super nice and you can actually use your bootcamp partition as a virtual machine (so you get the best of both worlds - native or virtualized windows, as needed) :)

3
mredofcourse•

I've worked in offices where I've had to use MS Office on a PC. If you're doing really major stuff in say Excel, then I could see the advantage of MS Office for Windows, but otherwise, I'm good with the Mac version.

MS Office used to come with Entourage which I preferred to Mail.app, but when they switched that out to Outlook, I suffered with it for a long time before switching over to the much better Mail.app.

I use Word a lot, bu also find myself using Pages for a lot of stuff... usually when I want to put together a heavily formatted document mixed with charts, graphs and spreadsheets (like reports) that I want to send as a PDF.

Also Keynote really rocks.

Most Apple Stores have MS Office. I would suggest bringing in example spreadsheets and documents on a thumb drive and test drive MS Office on when of their display Macs.

7
DanablOP•

Thankfully, I won't be needing to use Excel. All of my spreadsheets are super basic and I use Google Sheets for those. I like the idea of bringing my thumb drive, though.

So you think they'll have Office installed on the machines?

1
lgn12•

They'll probably have it on their machines. I know in the past they've even had some Adobe CS stuff on them. Considering it's one of the things switchers ask about, they want to show it to them.

2
DanablOP•

Makes sense. Thanks

1
aristideau•

Just like numerous people have said, I use VMware unity. It allows you to run windows apps in osx so you can run osx and windows apps concurrently. I found that running windows with bootcamp would make my MBP overheat and shutdown, but under VMware it runs cool .

4
kccrasp•

PowerPoint is a big pile of shit! I am a big fan of PowerPoint on Windows. I use it almost daily for work. I have to remote into my windows machine just to use PowerPoint it is that bad. There is so much just plain missing from the application. The other apps are all pretty much the same as their windows counterparts and are really powerful. PowerPoint blows.

3
stiggy_5•

I run both and I see that the iWork suite is better for me when I am doing a pamphlet, essay, or really anything at home and dont need to be constantly sharing and reviewing with others, just finish, export, and done. But when I need to share with people constantly or am just in school with others, i'll use the Office suite for ease of transition. What I have noticed is that at least with older hardware iWork is MUCH more optimized and just runs better. Well of course Apple apps are optimized for Apple hardware, duh (except for the App Store). And the Office suite looks out of place in OS X, but thats just my opinion.

3
newmanowns•

While anyone would understand what you meant, I think the word "opinion" is what you want instead of "idea."

2
stiggy_5•

Oh damn thanks yeah sorry guys, I fail at the internets sometimes...

1
x65535x•

I've used Office on my MBP for 6 years and never had an issue. Works just fine. Don't know what others have issue with exactly.

3
sureguy•

I think the problem stems from the fact that it doesn't work exactly like Office for Windows. If you work in a mixed environment, it makes it tough. For instance, in Excel, neither F2 nor fn-F2 edit a cell's contents. That shouldn't be the case.

1
x65535x•

That could explain it. I avoid Windows well and don't use the F-keys when using Office programs.

1
sureguy•

If you really want a Mac, and discover you cannot stand Office for Mac, you can always use bootcamp or a VM. I personally don't much like office for mac, but it's from 2011, and is due to be updated shortly (I have an office 365 account - it's worth the $99/yr if you've got multiple computers or family members with computers that use office).

Just a quick breakdown $99/yr gets you 5 windows or mac installed (mixing is fine) as well as 5 tablet/phone installs.

3
DanablOP•

Very true. And I'm definitely planning on an Office 365 account...with the 1 TB per user of cloud storage, it's a steal. It's currently $65 on Amazon.

3
sureguy•

It's a steal at $99 in my opinion, at $65 it's a no brainer if you use office and are looking to upgrade, or have another computer in need of a license.

1
DanablOP•

Yeah, we do, and my husband is in desperate need of the cloud storage.

1
72ChevyMalibu•

For the love of everything holy. Don't write a dissertation on it. Once I hit around 10000 words in Word, it has all but started dragging like a 10 year old laptop. Otherwise it works fine just don't expect all the same options. No Access either. Just FYI.

3
DanablOP•

Thankfully, I finished my Masters last summer (with the help of Word on my Windows laptop). No PhD for me as I can't find a local or online program in American History.

Don't need Access. Just Word, really.

2
72ChevyMalibu•

It really isn't bad. Just for this one thing. Remember if you still have your .edu address you could swing a student discount.!

1
DanablOP•

I do, and I'm teacher. Currently eyeing a refurbished MBP with 8gb of RAM and the 256 SSD, though. I prefer the screen on the Pro and the price is similar to the Air with that configuration.

2
BorgDrone•

Thankfully, I finished my Masters last summer (with the help of Word on my Windows laptop).

You actually passed with something made in Word ? Did you only use it to write the text and then have it typeset in something else or did you do the whole thing in Word ?

1
sunsource•

I can attest to this. Many pages, even on the fastest of Macs, will bog down Word like hell.

Google Drive all the way.

2
ESPNnut•

I have always thought it was great. I prefer pages though.

2
[deleted]•

Just another option - the Office 365 web apps. I just got one of those OneDrive Personal subscriptions from Microsoft. While Excel works ok, it feels very sluggish at startup. If you require only the basic feature set, I've found the web apps to much, much faster.

2
DanablOP•

Good point. Whichever I get I will be purchasing an Office 365 subscription for the 1 TB cloud space for each user.

1
rebeltrillionaire•

Working at a startup I double-dip a lot in terms of Windows/Mac.

Office for Mac is great in fact I prefer Office '11 to Office '13. Paired with Office 365, and Exchange on my iPhone, I'm never unsatisfied. What's great about buying a Mac though is that you get your choices for iWork vs. Office and with a PC you only get Office.

Things I like:

  • iWork has much cleaner templates. For Simple docs/spreadsheets I can just pop in some data write a few paragraphs and I'm set to print.

  • Keynote. I like it way more than Powerpoint. Especially in practice vs. just creating the document.

  • 2011 UI is more established and a natural upgrade from 2008 (Mac), 2007 (Win), and probably has some hidden upgrades from 2010 (Win). The 2013 Ultra Flat design is cumbersome and makes items feel hidden when they are in fact right in front of you. I hope when Apple designs their 2015 Office they make better choices on minimalism, if not I don't mind keeping '11.

Everything else:

  • Excel cannot be replaced. It's just a superior product. It does crash though and that can be really scary. My advice is set auto-save for very often if you are dealing with large spreadsheets. Numbers is interesting and pretty, but Excel is Excel.

  • Word may be a little chunky looking compared to Pages, but I feel more free using it. I just wish it had tabs for multiple documents instead of a new window every time.

Hope this helps.

2
DanablOP•

Thanks for you detailed reply. I have used Pages (I used it for year with my iMac then MBP) and I never liked it as much as Word. Like you, I feel more "free" using Word. I found some things easier in Pages, but for me the learning curve was quite steep. I did not find it as intuitive as other Apple programs. Also, I remember previously forgetting to save files as a doc file, and it would be disastrous the next day when I needed to finish them, share them with colleagues, or if I needed them to teach. iCloud.com and downloading as a PDF saved me more

1
michesbianan•

3 years with Office2011, pretty decent, does the job. Quite sluggish though compared to iWork at least with Word/Excel vs Pages/Numbers. Excel does crash (Application not responding) often which is a bummer.

2
computerwhiz1•

Its not really that bad. Totally useable, but definately not as swift as iWork. Office mainly takes forever to start up and open a document compared to iWork, but once you get it going it never lags out on me. Excell is probably the worst offender though. It seems to lag out and lock up when using even the simplest of spreadsheets. Nothing that makes it unuseable just annoying.

2
abeliangrape•

I need seamless compatibility when editing Word documents

I haven't used Office in over 5 years now (I use LaTeX or Pages for document editing, I prefer Keynote or Beamer for presentations and I don't have much of a spreadsheeting need so Numbers works OK for me ). However, what I recall from using Office back in the day is that Office for Mac was 95% compatible with Office for Windows. If you don't use anything too fancy, everything will work seamlessly. If you have lots of weird Excel macros, very involved style sheets and the like, you might have some problems. Like I said, take this with a grain of salt because it's outdated info (hell, I think Office was still Carbon back then), but that's what my experience was.

2
[deleted]•

[deleted]

2
jglol•

I dont have any issues really

2
giantspeck•

Office 2011 for Mac is fine. The only problem is that it's really, really starting to show its age. I can only hope Microsoft hasn't abandoned plans to update it.

2