Office Drama on macOS

deathanatos seems to be referring to predecessors as a document macro system, not ancestors as a programming language

That it referred to XLM — that it is both older than VBA and still supported is quite surprising to me. (Given that VBA is no spring chicken.)

All of those except C++ are younger than XLM. (And C++ has seen — comparatively — regular updates. XLM has faded into obscurity.)

I use Pages as my go-to word-processor and Numbers (on account of its table-in-sheet paradigm) is my favourite spreadsheet by far. I wish they’d beef the latter up a bit with ODBC access and support for iterated solution (very useful for balancing projected cashflow where interest-on-short-term-debt & amount-of-short-term-debt depend on each other) and something more akin to pivot tables.

Pity, it could really be a thermonuclear option, instead they just add useless stuff like collaboration features and smart annotations....

I’ve never really used Keynote because that simply isn’t in my line of work.

I really think Apple has a winner on their hands and are handicapping it deliberately either out of neglect or because they didn’t want to scare Microsoft off back in the day and have some kind of gentleman’s agreement going...

Mainly I use it when people send me documents to proof/ comment on.

Learning org mode is on my todo list. (Ironic?)

I'm unaware, what is the issue with later versions?

If I click "Update", I get a spinner in the upper left of the App Store window, but nothing appears to happen otherwise.

Pages is not a suitable Word replacement at all!

Send a Word attachment to _anyone_ to collaborate. They can open, read and edit the file (cross platform: Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS)

Send a pages attachment. Receiving party won't know what it is and won't be able to open or read it let alone edit it.

From context, I don't think "change tracking" here is being used as a general category of programmers' revision control systems. When you're working with editors at publishing companies or magazines, you need document revision tracking. Embedded comments, being able to see changes the editor made and being able to accept, reject, or modify them. And your program needs to be able to do this in a way that makes round-tripping the document between you and the editor absolutely bullet-proof. If the editor is using Word (and they are), that means you either need Word yourself, or you need something that's so good at doing that round-tripping with Word that the editor doesn't notice you're using something else.

And, speaking as someone who really doesn't like using Word and has searched for various solutions, this turns out to be really hard. I haven't looked at LibreOffice in the last two or three years, I confess, so it may have solved this by now -- but neither it nor OpenOffice could consistently manage this. There are other word processors that don't even try. I eventually settled on using Apple Pages, which so far seems to manage this well enough that no editor has called me on it.

I can see people raising their hands to object to my assertion that the editor is using Word, because they submitted to a mathematical or engineering journal that accepts submissions in LaTeX. And, sure, there are meaningful exceptions out there, but I can assure you that if you peruse the submission requirements for virtually any non-technical publisher, they are going to either mention Word or just expect Word because it's the industry standard for manuscripts. It doesn't matter how much better any other system is -- Penguin Random House ain't gonna change their workflow to accommodate you.

I believe kayodelycaon is saying change tracking IS critical - specifically Word's implementation of it (aka "Track Changes"). Many authoring workflows I've witnessed heavily rely on all parties being able to see the changes made in a Word document.

WYSIWYG is not relevant here. The structured document format, very much is. Chapters, footnotes, references, quotations, tables, etc. It's more like Org mode + TeX + git.

For the record, I am publishing stories, not writing code. To work with publishers, I need to use their format. That format is Microsoft Word. Specifically, the Windows or macOS versions of Word, _not_ the online or iOS versions. The only workable alternative I know of is Pages on macOS.

Word's Track Changes feature is used to show where an Editor or Author wants to make changes, ask questions, or make comments. If you do not use Word, you risk comments or changes going silently missing. Worst case, complete, irreversible corruption of the document. This is not theoretical, publishers have horror stories about authors using Libre/Open Office or incompatible versions of Word.

Word is very much the "real format" for most of the process. You may be thinking of typesetting, which uses different file formats depending on which application is used. As an author, I don't see that part of the process.

The meaning there was that the web page is a web page with content pre-installed and everything, as opposed to an enormous but content-free javascript container that then does a lot of unnecessary work on your machine to fetch the content, piece by piece, and assemble and render the content that should have been assembled at the server before sending it to you.