UKC

Hello one and all, once again I ask the UKC collective for advice!

I use windoze for work and mac (OSX10) for casual browsing.

It has come to be that I need to write stuff in MSWord and do stuff in Excel on my mac. Never been faced with this yet and I know ten minutes of googling would find me answers, however I value real user experience over online reviews so I ask you, best free office suite for mac? Again, its for creating .doc and .xls files or editing existing files created MSOffice

Thanks in anticipation!

In reply to wilkie14c:

I haven't tried many... But haven't had any problems with open office. Does everything I need it to without a problem.

In reply to wilkie14c:

I have used Libre Office. It's OK. Some docs lose their formatting a bit, but it's generally not too bad.

In reply to wilkie14c:

A second vote for Libre Office, though Pages and Numbers are ok (will open and write to .docx and .xlsx file formats) and they probably came with your mac.

Deek

In reply to wilkie14c:

Check with your IT guys at work. We rolled out Office 365 and staff are allowed to install it on thier own personal PC's, Tablets, Latops etc.. under our licensing agreement.

In reply to wilkie14c:

You get free basic versions of Word, Excel etc with an Outlook account. Have to be online to use them though and might not have all the features you need.

In reply to wilkie14c:

Hi
I use a macbook and just format stuff up in pages and numbers then export as Word or Excel respectively, if I want to be absolutely sure the formatting stays perfect ( usually it is fine) - but say for a CV - I will exports as a PDF.

B

In reply to David Staples:

Also check to see if your employer has a Home Use Program agreement with Microsoft. If so, you can get a full Office package for £10. I got an email this morning saying they are extending it so you can get both PC and Mac versions (not either, but both), for your £10.

In reply to wilkie14c:
Pages, Numbers and Keynote are the Apple equivalents of Word, Excel and Powerpoint. They are often free with your Mac or relatively cheap (I think £20 or £10 - £40 for the lot). They all do a solid export to their equivalents but slightly less reliable on import.

Pages is like a simpler version of word without all its clunkiness, however Word aficionados don't tend to like it much, and it has got slightly worse in recent years as Apple tried to make the iOS and desktop versions the same.

I personally find Number miles easier to use than Excel but I expect it isn't quite as sophisticated for the hard core. Keynote is highly rated by most people who use it and I find it great.

(I should caveat this by saying that I have had a deep hatred of Word and Powerpoint for many years).

Alan

In reply to Alan James - Rockfax:

My feelings are virtually identical to yours on this. The big snag with Pages is that the latest version (5) has removed almost all the advanced writing features, such as the essential Outline view, and we don't know how long Pages 4.3, aka 'Pages '09', is going to survive. I'm still using OS Yosemite, though apparently Pages '09 still works fine on El Capitan. Hopefully, Apple will always keep two versions of Pages going (i.e one for laptops and larger computers, and one for iPads etc). ? ?

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

We are now onto Sierra (10.12.3) and Pages is now on version 6!

Apparently v4 (Pages '09) still works in Sierra though but I agree that this is probably on borrowed time - It is pretty tricky to get hold of v4 these days mind. v5 doesn't work on Sierra however you wouldn't want it to since v6 is better and a free upgrade.

In reply to wilkie14c:

Open office is fine for their word and excel equivalents....like the OP I can do most of what i need at work but need to do the odd thing at home on the mac. Google docs is also okay if you are connected to the inter web.

In reply to Alan James - Rockfax:


Does v6 have an Outline view and Footnotes facility?

And - sorry about all these questions! - does Sierra 10.12.3 have any problems? I heard some quite bad things about Sierra when it first came out.

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:


Yes to Footnotes, no to Outline view.


No problems with 10.12.3, there were a few with 10.12.0 but nothing major. It didn't add much mind, but we are pretty much forced to upgrade here due to us using a lot of the developer apps from Apple for the app. Security wise though it is always a good idea to keep the system software as up-to-date as you can.

Alan

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

I have Sierra running on both the iMacs we use daily and haven't found any problems that could be pinned down to Sierra.

I have had the search function in Mail fail a couple of times - but it did that on Yosemite as well. The solution is to get Spotlight to rebuild its indexes.

Similarly, Time Machine has a tendency to throw a wobbly if I make any change at all to the Time Capsule configuration. It decides that it's never seem the time capsule disk before and initiates a length and unnecessary full backup. Again, it used to do this on previous versions of MacOS as well. I think there's a persistent problem either in Time Machine or Time Capsule. I suspect the latter, if for no other reason than that Apple are dropping

I obviously can't guarantee that some of the applications you use won't have problems with Sierra, for the simple reason that I don't know what you do use. None of the applications I use have had problems with Sierra, bar a few small utilities which I'd forgotten I even had until I spotted that they had the circle with the diagonal bar overlaid on their icons in the Applications folder.

In summary: I'm not aware of any issues with Sierra itself that would justify holding off upgrading to it now. But I would still make sure that I had an up-to-date Time Machine backup on hand before starting the process.

In reply to Martin W:

Thanks Alan and Martin for these helpful replies.

In reply to Martin W:

Time Machine seems to be a regular source of problems with third-party NAS devices; it generates a regular stream of woe on the WD forum, where WD usually gets the blame (unfairly, in this case). Some poor woman asking for help at the moment, having lost all pictures of her baby, thinking she had a TM backup, and had checked it had completed, then had her Mac wiped to revert to Yosemite, only to find, on trying to restore the backup, that it appeared to have nothing in it.

I dont like automagic things like that, especially ones that compress and do compressed deltas. My backup regime is a simple, one-for-one copy that I can quite easily verify. I handle version control using other, simple means. When I need to.

In reply to all:

Many thanks to all here. I've downloaded and installed open office now and the ease of use is great, seems to work fine across my two platforms very well.
cheers all!