The monolithic standard of office software these days is Microsoft Office – particularly Word, Powerpoint, Excel, and Outlook/Entourage. Only a brave few venture out and try something different.
Since switching to the Mac, I’ve preferred to use Apple iWork for any document/presentation work, and the integrated mail/calendar/contacts software included in OS X rather than Entourage. That said, I still have an Office 2004 install disc sitting in my room, though it’s not installed on my MacBook Pro. I’m often questioned as to why I don’t use Office, and why I’d rather convert my files to .doc instead of just saving in that format natively.
In the business world, everyone uses Microsoft Office, and sometimes sets up their company so that document collaboration is a snap using Microsoft software. Just as I’ve suggested that your business think different about computer systems, I’m going to suggest that you look into an alternative to the boat anchor known as Office. So here’s five reasons why I don’t use MS Office:
1. Microsoft Office on the Mac is slow. Really slow.
From using both Office 2004 and 2008, my biggest gripe with the software has been its speed. Word usually takes 5-15 seconds to open, while Pages takes 1-5, and TextEdit opens in a negligible amount of time. Editing anything more than text in a document is frustrating – Word takes inordinate amounts of time to do even the most menial tasks. When I need to pull up and make a quick edit to a document, waiting for an application to load is the last thing on my mind.
2. Documents made in Office lack design value (most of the time).
I know when someone’s using Powerpoint, because they’re almost always using a standard template, exactly as Microsoft intended. Default templates included in Office tend to use bland and cheap fonts, clipart, and charts. Keynote, on the other hand, provides high quality, eye-catching graphics and text. Little things like anti-aliasing, super high resolution, and motion blur make a huge difference. I’ve always been able to distinguish Keynote presentations from Powerpoint, simply by looking at a few slides.
3. The cheapest version of Office is almost twice as much as iWork.
iWork retails at $79, while the student version of Office comes at $149. If you want Automator actions and Exchange functionality, you’re going to have to find a more expensive version of Office. iWork works right out of the box with Automator and Applescript, and integrates perfectly with Mail, iCal, and Address Book. For a student low on money, iWork gives the same features for a significantly lower cost.
4. The UI on Office Mac still doesn’t work.
Though Microsoft went through great pains to make Office 2008 match the Mac OS user interface, they still didn’t get it. Office still feels like a Windows application that was ported to the Mac because they had to, not because they wanted to. Little things like toolbar button focus and overlay tooltips actually do make a difference. The “Document Gallery”, the much-touted feature in 2008, is one of the most poorly-designed features in a Mac application ever: every element of the interface is animated in some form, and uses an Aqua-esque design that looks like an Aqua ripoff rather than an attempt at integrating with the Mac UI. Not only that, but I’ve come across several UI bugs in my use of Office 2008. Call me picky, but when you have to use these applications daily, it does come to bug you after a short time.
5. Tables in iWork run circles around Office.
Tables created in Microsoft Word are incredibly distinct – they’re thin (sized just barely to fit the text), page-wide, and cheap looking. Editing them is a hassle, and adding new rows and columns (not to mention rearranging) isn’t the easiest task in the world. In iWork, press the “Table” button, and a perfectly sized table appears, with a header and drag corners. Creating a professional table doesn’t get any better.
There’s more I’d say about Powerpoint and Excel, but as I use Word more than anything else, I figured I’d right about that. By the way, I was not paid anything by Apple to write this – I love iWork, and wrote this simply out of my personal gripes with MS Office.
John Rust is an occasional contributor to BizHack. He lives in Virginia, USA, and also writes on his own blog, productivetech.wordpress.com
