Software Recomendations

New to Mac, 2 days. Looking for thoughts on productivity recomendations. In other words, what would be the best option,number, pages, etc. vs. libre office or ms office for mac.

How does anyone feel regarding this?

G'day and welcome to the forums.

Depends to some extent on your use of your MBP. Best office suite is MS Office 2011.

With all due deference to harryb2488, "best" is what is best FOR YOU. If what you want is to swap files easily with users of MS Office on Windows machines, then his recommendation makes good sense. However, if all you need is word processing for yourself, spreadsheets for yourself, then the Numbers/Pages solution is much less costly than MS Office. However, that latter solution makes it slightly more difficult to share with Office users. Not impossible, just a bit more tricky.

So, how do you see yourself using a productivity suite?

Cost wise, there's really not that much difference.... (About $35)

Pages = $19.99

Numbers = $19.99

Keynote = $19.99

MS Office 2011 Home and Student single install = $94.00 (from several on line re-sellers)

LibreOffice and OpenOffice are free.

LibreOffice is like your first car: it's ugly and barely runs, but it will get you from point a to point b most of the time.

MS Office is like a van: flexible, capable, powerful, large, overreaching unless you need to transport some clowns, but everyone of a certain maturity seems to have one.

"iWork" (the Apple combo of Pages, Numbers and Keynote): that sports car that is incredibly fun to drive, excels in a few areas, so zippy and cool, but Numbers has a rattle in it nobody seem to be able to fix.

Of the three I personally prefer Pages/Keynote (have no use for Numbers, really). If I was an Excel type of guy I guess I'd go with Libre or MS, but thankfully I'm not. I do a lot of presenting so I like Keynote best of them all. I have LibreOffice and use it mostly for demos of what's possible for free, but I find it fugly, buggy and incomplete. It causes my anti-cubicle rash to kick in.

PS. Since you said "productivity" rather than just "office software" let me commend Reminders (LOVE IT), Notes, Fantastical (third-party menubar add-on for Calendar), Evernote (cloud based note/scrap storage) and Dropbox/Box/SkyDrive/Sugarsync/et al.

Thanks for everyone's input, greatly appreciated. The reason I asked about Libre/Open Office is that I use Linux more than windows anyway so I'm familiar with both. Heck even on my windows machines/partitions I use them more than word or Excel.

After reading your responses and thinking about it a bit more, I guess my real question is: Is it easy enough to read/import '.doc' and '.xls' files with Pages and Numbers as I do received a fair amount of those types of files that require me to modify and return?

BTW, glad I found this forum. Looks like it will be one of my new hangouts re Apple.

@ chas_m, I almost went for Evernotes but was scared off by the reviews on the new version. Are my fears warranted?

halw: I wouldn't consider myself a heavy user of Evernote, but it works fine for me. I mostly use it to store articles on the web I want to save, then retrieve later on another device. Nothing's changed in years on that front.

Pages and Numbers can read (and write) Word and Excel documents just fine, like any program (including the Mac version of Office) there can be little changes (mostly font substitutions). It is one extra step to export in Word/Excel format, but again not a big deal IMO. If you are constantly doing this, however, it might be worth the effort to get Office for Mac.

Here is the main thing to think about.

If you are sending and sharing documents to people who are using the current version of MS Office on the windows side, Office for Mac will be your best choice. There will be no compatibility issues even with macros and templates. You will have compatibility issues if you go with a different application suite altogether.

Besides, Office for Mac is a much better and even more stable than its Windows counterpart - in my experiences using both.