Hacker News Reader

Comment by genthree | Hacker News Reader

Apple's office suite is my favorite I've ever used, and it's not close.

After that, old copies of MSOffice.

Next-best would be a hodgepodge of the lighter options on Linux and such. Gnumeric, Abiword, that sort of thing. Not great, but at least they're light on resources and easy to use.

Distantly after that, LibreOffice.

Then, modern MSOffice in last place.

The only reason I'd count any of them as "worse" than modern MSOffice is that ~perfect office compatibility and a bulletproof excuse when things go wrong ("I'm also using MSOffice, don't know why your document isn't working") is non-negotiable in any business context.

[EDIT] Oh I forgot about Google. That's actually the true last-place. Modern MSOffice isn't worse than that. Christ the performance is awful.

View on HN

Crazy how different people experience this.

For me it’s completely inverted; Google is top place, then Libreoffice, then MSOffice, then anything by Apple last place.

That's my exact ranking as well.

I value performance and stability highly, and Apple's productivity programs are so light I can leave them open in the background and forget they're running for months at a time even on fairly old, weak machines. And I'm not sure I've ever seen any of them crash (I can't say the same about, say, LibreOffice or pretty much any other Linux-associated productivity software). That they're a ton more polished and stable than things like Abiword or Gnumeric, and have most modern features I'd expect (even live collaborative editing) puts them solidly above those other light options.

I hate modern MSOffice's UI, plus it's full of slow, heavy webtech which deducts a lot of points from basically anything for me. Google's leaks memory (like most of their software... so do Gmail tabs) and is so slow that it introduces a ton of input latency, which drives me nuts, I hate to type in it, aside from my experience with most of its formatting and editing features being that they're very janky even by the standards of GUI word processors. Both are very heavy on resources, which means they have a huge hurdle to overcome on the feature side before I'd consider them anything but extremely-unpleasant.

Old (like... '00s) MSOffice is pretty good because it's not such a resource hog, and the UI used to be really good.

I have a google sheet with less than 200 rows in it. Not exactly Big Data. When I load it, the first 100 rows appear pretty much instantly, but the following <100 rows take 9 seconds to load! WTF? I don't know any other spreadsheet that takes that long to load more than 100 rows.

Yeah that would by my ranking too. At work is Google because it's the best, particularly for collabotation, personally all in on FOSS.

I do like Keynote (their PowerPoint alternative) but I do agree that everything else is absolute garbage. But I guess someone has to like it.

Google does essentially everything I need. If I were more of a spreadsheet power user these days, Excel. And maybe other Office apps as needed for compatibility.

> Apple's office suite is my favorite I've ever used, and it's not close.

I’ve written many comments criticizing this. Do you use a lot of keyboard shortcuts when you use Numbers or Pages or Keynote or do you use the trackpad/mouse a lot? I generally find these apps and others lacking on the keyboard front, by which I mean that it’s almost impossible to use them without a trackpad or a mouse. I can completely live with just a keyboard on Excel or LibreOffice Calc.

BTW, I hate all the MS Office applications (and find them quite buggy and annoying) except for Excel. Maybe I’m just a lot more used to using Excel.

Can’t you set up keyboard shortcuts for basically any action in a MacOS app?

As long as it has a menu item (easy) or is exposed to Automator/Shortcuts (more complicated).

There are apps to assign a key combinations to any menubar dropdown menus.

You don't need an app for that, you can do it through through System Settings -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> App Shortcuts.

My issue is with the defaults that are (not) available in comparison to Excel or LibreOffice Calc.

You may want to look into Karabiner Elements. Understandable if one doesn't want to have to allow a privileged daemon access to key inputs, but it allows for complex, application-focus-aware shortcuts. In the past I used a "Windows on MacOS" config preset because it allowed for my 60~70 key keyboard to operate similarly across win/linux/macos. Finally killed my last windows boot drive and main linux... but I do have a ritualistic annual step into a windows vm to file taxes on crack err with a crakced turbotax hehehe. In-tooits lobbying malpractice is deserving of petty flippancy

Numbers has a lot of keyboard shortcuts [1]. Are there particular ones you're missing? Or is your issue that Numbers has different keyboard shortcuts from the ones you're used to in Excel?

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/numbers/tana45192591/m...

Actually both.

A lot of menu options don’t seem to have keyboard shortcuts. I know I can assign them, but defaults should be better.

But the second one hits harder for me: “Or is your issue that Numbers has different keyboard shortcuts from the ones you're used to in Excel?” Considering that Numbers came much later than Excel, some of the common ones could’ve been directly adapted with Mac specific substitutions (like using Cmd instead of Ctrl).

I liked the way Pages 09 looked - it was beautiful - but the compatibility wasn't there. Modern Pages is hideous.

And you hit the nail on the head with the whole 'Office = the document always opens/looks right' thing.

It's not pretty, but both Pages and Numbers are pretty powerful in their modern incarnations. If you actually need Microsoft Office, then you need it, but a lot of people who don't think they could get away with just Apple's freebies probably could.

(Disclosure: I write 99% of my stuff in Emacs now, so I'm not going to go that far out on a limb for iWork. It's just that it's the best "Works"-style suite that I've used.)

Needing VBA is more common than you think. Excel really has no competitor.

> If you actually need Microsoft Office

I also like Apple's office suite, the problem is network effects. I'd even argue most people don't actually need MS Office. The amount of people using PowerQuery, VBA, etc. is probably less than 2% of users.

The problem is, because everyone else (in business) already has and uses office, if you want to collaborate, that's what you have to use. Open file formats didn't win out in the end.

> the problem is network effects

This is absolutely the problem - with the added issue of platform support.

I’m the only Mac user in our company of 15, which means I’m also the only person that can open a .pages file. Anyone can read a .docx, and if authored in word it will actually look the same on both computers.

Is it 2% who author content using those tools, or are you also including anyone who might need to open and use a spreadsheet using one of those technologies?

> Open file formats didn't win out in the end.

It's not "the end" yet. Many governments and sufficiently motivated orgs are switching to ODF - it's only over for proprietary file formats that pretend they can stand toe-to-toe with docx. By eschewing open formats you're making all the mistakes of .docx with none of the upsides of the network effect.

Personally, I like Apple's iWork. Keynote is slightly less fiddly than Powerpoint. I like that in Numbers you can have multiple movable tables on one screen without constraining column widths etc to each other. I also like that Pages is simpler than word with much more manageable styles, especially when copy and pasting from multiple other documents. But lots of people don't have Macs or like iWork, and in most businesses you eventually need MS Office to work with outside parties so for work the choice is really iWork plus MS Office vs MS Office.

MS Office collaboration features work well these days but when you are using Office 365 for work, it's almost inevitable that different files get saved locally, on MS teams, Sharepoint, and OneDrive. It's a version control nightmare.

I really like google's suite for work because it nudges everyone towards using only one location for all files, without a other places to save a copy. And it's good enough with Office files that you might only need a few roles to also need MS Office.

You can drag a pdf into Keynote, and get a vector quality image. This feature is great for science when a plot is made elsewhere (R or matplotlib). Or you can even drag in an SVG, even from something you find in a browser. Drag, drop.

Why in heaven's name is it nearly impossible to do the same with Powerpoint is a mystery. You still have to paste a bit image.

And below everything else is the web version of MSOffice. How I hate whenever I’m forced to use that…

I used word for windows 2.0 well into the early 2000s. My needs aren't crazy and I don't think word has added a single feature I've cared about since. Pages is my current go-to.

>and it's not close.

This line right he is where I will always stop reading any reply, and block any YouTube channel that uses it in a title. Mind numbingly overused. It's literally verbal clickbait.

Frankly, if you think that, you're not exactly a power user of office suites. Apple apps are a complete joke in the professional world.

Did you really have compatibility issues with MS office in the last 15 years?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com