Wanting to leave my Office 365 subscription, I’m thinking of buying two perpetual licenses of Office, one for my MacBook and a second one for my upcoming Studio.
The question is: should I pay the $149 full price for each? Or are any of the low-cost alternatives (selling each copy for less than half the price) trustworthy? Any of them known to be good or bad?
Interested in your experience and opinions.
Thank you!
Ricky
For many years now I have used OpenOffice (free) instead of MS Office. It is not 100% compatible, but close enough for my needs. It really depends on your type of usage whether or not it is an acceptable alternative.
Free would be nice, but unfortunately I need Excel to do complicated technical work for which OpenOffice may not be the best choice. Not having time for experiments, I’ll play it safe with MS Office…
Thanks nonetheless for your suggestion!
What do you call "low-cost alternatives"?
The incompatible part of Open Office or Libre Office vs MS Office is the macro language. Simple thing is try to run one of your spreadsheets and see what happens.
If you still want to get MS Office, go to Microsoft.com, search for "Office 2021", this will let you pick it for PC or Mac.
JC
I meant dealers selling MS Office for significantly less than MS itself.
A good outlet was recommended to me, so I already made the purchase. Thanks.
As covered in the Mac forum on DPreview, the $40 special has probably expired by now.
It seemed like a great deal because it purports to provide updates, although who knows for how long.
I talked to my wife about it, and decided not to buy. My employer provides Office for Mac and it's really annoying how frequently updates occur, even for applications I don't use such as Notes, Teams, and Outlook. I'll save time by dealing with whatever incompatibilities exist between Pages and MS Word, rather than downloading software updates multiple times per week.
Powerpoint 365 on Windows is semi-incompatible with Powerpoint for Mac, so I no longer use Powerpoint except for viewing other people's slides.
No. Use Numbers instead of Excel (it understands Excel spreadsheets just fine). Buy Nisus Writer Pro instead of Word. It's a far better word processor and won't choke if your document gets more than a 32-bit size can define (dirty little Microsoft secret). Better email and notetaking clients exist than Outlook and OneNote.
Nisus Writer Express may be all some people need. Free demo version for both Express and Pro are worth checking out to determine if Express is sufficient or Pro is the better option. Nisus usually participates in the Winterfest and Summerfest festival of Artisanal Software sale. Summerfest usually starts toward the end of June. Nisus Writer Pro has had a 25% discount ( but not Express) and its not that much to begin with (currently $65).
how interesting , I run Office 365 on a corporate issued PC/Windows notebook and update are rare... I got one update today (that req' me to restart some apps like Outlook), but the prev. one was several month ago ... that office on OSX is updated multiple time a week every week sounds strange...
I do as Thom says and have been Microsoft free since at least 2016. (That’s a statement of fact, not a political position.) However, I would also advise that Numbers isn’t a replacement if you make extensive use of Excel macros. If you need Excel, you need Excel.