MS Excel (intel) on M3

[Alan Browne-]

Used my 2019 installer to install MS Office on my M3 Mac.

Smooth install and the app appears to run flawlessly (cringing at all
the updates that are about to come ...).

There is a license issue, so I have to see how to get the license "off"
of the i7 iMac and onto this one. There is download of a license
uninstaller, but I want to understand the process well before leaping.

There's also a registration key, so may look for a way to get that "in"
and de-register that from the other Mac.




Haven't tried Word yet, but expect it to be smooth.

[Joerg Lorenz]

Totally insane to use this Microsoft-Crap on a brand new M3.
Use Apple-software or even better Libre Office:

https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download-libreoffice/

It masters all their proprietary file types.

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[Alan Browne-]

On 2023-11-13 03:56, Joerg Lorenz wrote:
> On 12.11.23 22:34, Alan Browne- wrote:
>>
>> Used my 2019 installer to install MS Office on my M3 Mac.
>>
>> Smooth install and the app appears to run flawlessly (cringing at all
>> the updates that are about to come ...).
>>
>> There is a license issue, so I have to see how to get the license "off"
>> of the i7 iMac and onto this one. There is download of a license
>> uninstaller, but I want to understand the process well before leaping.
>>
>> There's also a registration key, so may look for a way to get that "in"
>> and de-register that from the other Mac.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Haven't tried Word yet, but expect it to be smooth.
>
> Totally insane to use this Microsoft-Crap on a brand new M3.
> Use Apple-software or even better Libre Office:

Excel blows Apple's numbers out of the water. A lot. It is much
easier to use and has functions Numbers does not.

Pages is quite good, better than Word in many respects, but Word
suffices 99.99% of the time and it's what I'm used to.

Libre-Office is fine unless your clients, suppliers, collaborators, etc.
are all using MS Office - which is my use case.

Having to "export" out of a LibreOffice doc isn't worth the additional
churn - never mind finding bizarre formatting error that occur.

[Your Name]

You'll get formatting issues even using MS Word thanks to various
reasons - even tiny differences in font defintions of the supposed same
font can cause havoc.

If the people files are being sent to do not need to edit them, then
PDF is by far better option (although that too can have compatibility
problems with various readers, colour shifts when printed, etc.), so
the app you use to create it becomes irrelevant.

[Your Name]

LibreOffice (and other similar free "office suites") is ugly, awful
garbage that is disgusting to attempt to use - it is even worse than
trying to use the awful MS Word. I only have LibreOffice on my Mac to
very-occasionally convert really old AppleWorks documents.

[Alan Browne-]

With clients it's usually agreements, proposals, contracts and specs
that go back and forth, sometimes between several people at each end -
all in markup until everyone has "improved" or "clarified" it. No bad
issues with formatting - if something changes it's because somebody did
so deliberately. It's boring stuff and usually in a boring basic font
like Helvetica or Arial - for excitement may be in Times New Roman.

PDF is of course the best when no changes are anticipated.

Regardless, when sending to Europe (or receiving) the biggest issue is
page size (letter v. A4 for example) - and that no matter what the
compositing app is - fortunately my printer will receive an A4 and
automatically print to letter. Not all printers do this seamlessly.

[Joerg Lorenz]

See!?
LO is superior. You like to troll a little bit. I told you this years
ago when you were trying to tell iPhone users what to do and what not
but you have no clue of smartphones at all because you do not have any.
Seems to be the same here ...

[Alan Browne-]

Being useful in a niche case is not superior.

If LO were so good (and free!) corporations worldwide would abandon
their expensive MS Office licenses.

(Akin to Linux - which despite being free doesn't have much uptake in
the desktop world).

[Your Name]

LibreOffice is slow, buggy, looks awful, and is even worse to attempt
to use for anything. It's free for a reason: it's complete and utter
crap. Same with Open Office and all the other similar products. As
usual, you get what you pay for.

The biggest reason they are such garbage is because they're simply lazy
ports of the Windoze or Linux versions, with little or no consideration
of MacOS ... even less than Microsoft's rubbish Office product does.

[Alan Browne-]

You've always had this glorious hate-on for MS Office. Yet, it is very
good, very reliable, very popular. Need to chill a bit.

[Your Name]

MS Office is none of those things, but it is a step up from LibreOffice
and OpenOffice. MS Office isn't even remotely popular. It's
ubiquitously used because the business world took it on as a defacto
standard (partly thanks to it being cheap / bundled with cheap Windows
PCs) so many people are now forced to use it at work, etc., but most
people detest using it.

Apple's Pages / Numbers / Keynote are better, but those too can be very
cumbersome to use. The old AppleWorks suite was much better.

[Alan Browne]

No they are not. While Pages is fine for basic documents it is a pale
shadow of Word for building large complex documents.

As to Numbers, its user interface is a time consuming brake and it lacks
functionality useful (needed) in business and engineering.

Of course I use both and can plainly see the difference. All you do is
refresh your decades old objection to anything from MS as a pavlovian
reflex.

Too anyone new at it, Excel is daunting, to be sure, but it is a
powerhouse tool and takes time to learn. Companies do well to bring in
instructors from time to time to train newbies (on Excel, Word,
Powerpoint and Project) and improve the skills of those who are
comfortable with them.


--
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- John Maynard Keynes.