Office applications

I’ve Libra office on my personal laptop and it’s never failed me, having said this, I rarely ever use my own laptop for anything other than downloads or sorting CV/cover letter.

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Thanks for your replies everyone!

I did have a Personal 365 subscription, but recently cancelled it as I found out my Uni offers it for free.

Think I might keep the uni stuff under MS, but perhaps trial using Google/Apple/Libre for non-uni stuff.

My work is MS all the way, so that will stay Office. Be good to try something different for non work/uni stuff though. :blush:

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This I’ve found in the deciding factor. Using both msoft and Google of late both seem fine.

I never really got on with the apple suite (slightly ironically since a tonne of offices use Mac these days) - I guess it never really got in with the enterprise suite (in my experience)

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Is this really the case?

I’ve never worked anywhere large that has an abundance of Macs for general office work.

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Another reason why I use Google for personal stuff, but MS for work stuff is that now that I work from home, and use the same PC for both work and personal use, I find I like to have 2 completely different ‘ecosystems’ to keep my work and personal stuff separate.

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MS has two different OneDrive syncing desktop applications, one for personal OneDrives and one for business (this includes education), so you can use MS Office and keep your files and syncing separate if you run both applications in the background.
It’s easy to change the syncing/editing account within the MS desktop apps from the top right.

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Office 100%
I also actually love OWA over Gmail nowadays for email interface as well.
I use Outlook every day (by choice, I decide what our company uses basically) but I had a go with OWA and it was so much better than the olden days, I am tempted to go OWA over Outlook for doing a lot of tasks.

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OWA is getting good now, there’s also a beta outlook desktop app which is totally redesigned.

The web apps for word and Excel have massively improved and I prefer over them over Google because they can be opened in the desktop office apps seamlessly without worrying about formatting.

With personal 365 you can get email at a personal domain with a 50GB mailbox per account via go daddy although there’s a workaround to get it to work with any registrar.
£80 or so a year for 6x accounts with 1TB storage each, office desktop apps and email at your domain is great.
It’s mostly exchange at the backend so you get plus addressing and exchange online protection etc.

My mother runs a charity and uses MS Office on an M1 Mac Mini. Her staff all use MS Office on PCs but they regularly exchange Excel and Word docs without any issues.

I’m impressed that even in her early 80s she edits documents with the iOS MS Office apps on the go :slightly_smiling_face:

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A good number of firms I’ve worked at (I do work in tech so may be biased) allow a choice of tech when joining. And a lot of folk do choose mac.

Just my experience though, as you note a load of firms are also fully windows based.

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In my (anecdotal) experience, regular companies very much run on Windows.

I also work in Tech, and they do get to choose what they want (mostly Macs). That said, Finance and other parts of the business are still mostly Windows.

It’s the opposite I think - google docs has not had significant upgrades in years. I use an ultra-wide monitor for my main - let’s compare and contrast the experience…

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Also people seem to missing that paid m365 is not Microsoft’s competiting product with google documents - it’s office online which is completely free and has no desktop software included.

That is what “profiles” are for - I just switch between my work and home profile in office and it switches - same in Edge.

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No in business GSuite full license costs much about the same as a full license for o365 with apps.
Gsuite and o365 do have web only/lesser licenses but Gsuite limits space quite a bit.

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  • Gsuite completes with M365 - you are right there is a version of M365 with just web-apps but most corporate users don’t use that licensing model.

  • Gdocs completes with Office online - these are both entirely free and intended for consumers.

(obviously there is overlap with m365 for consumers…)

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I’d disagree with this. There have been many small updates over the last two years which have really improved usability.

Meet integration is awesome to present docs / sheets super quickly. I also really love the @ menu in docs for inserting content easily.

Even something as simple as docs.new and sheets.new is a massive time saver multiple times a day. I could go on.

I prefer Excel, but I can and do use sheets.

For the others, much of a muchness for me really. I don’t know any of the others well enough to have a preference.

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I do still wonder irregardless of tech why the apple office suite never really took off at enterprise level.

Office is actually v good but Google seem to by making great strides in this space too. I’ve yet to see our work for a company where keynote/numbers are the prevalent choice

I suspect it might be because Office and Google are both cross platform (for Windows, Mac and even Linux to a certain degree) - whereas Apple’s Office desktop applications are only available on Apple Devices.

The web version of the Apple apps on icloud.com are actually not that bad - probably comparable with the web versions of MS Office apps but not as good as the desktop Office Apps, but Apple have never made a feature and promoted the icloud.com portal and I’m not even sure if you can sign up to that without an Apple device? And even if you did, the basic free storage tier on it would make it difficult to use as your only Office service.

I’m not going to tell a $300Bn company what they’re doing wrong - but some recognition of the icloud portal and given it a bit of a refresh would be appreciated (such as putting other Apple services on there as well - like Apple Maps, TV, News+ etc) so those of us who use the services at home can also access them in work via a browser would be nice.

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