What are your favorite Office Software for the M Chip Series MacBook/Air?

[Brian K. Mitchell]

Question: What are your favorite Office suite, word processor, writing, or DTP software for the M Chip Series MacBook/Air?

 

[Solly]

I actually find Apple Numbers, Pages, and Keynote meeting most of my needs. If needing something more like Microsoft Office, LibreOffice is good for many general purpose jobs. An interesting project for automated page layout for academic and technical papers is LyΧ, a graphical frontend to the ΤeΧ/LaTeΧ  typesetting system. All three options are available at no cost, though the latter two appreciate donations. 

 

For RTL languages folk have mentioned other very good choices in the forums. This forum thread mentions tools for more complex situations: 

https://forums.accordancebible.com/topic/21805-mellel-4-released/

 

--Joseph

M1 MacBook Pro

Sonoma 14.5

Edited July 17 by Solly
added system information

[ukfraser]

I still prefer ms office over the apple equivalents. Sorry solly. 
for dtp, adobe InDesign. The underlying automation tools for formatting references etc make life so easy for me.
 

But these are both something Ive used for ages so am very familiar with them and found my workflows which make my life easy and know what features I use and where to find them.
 

others have their favourites but it so depends on what features you need and use.

[Solly]

2 minutes ago, ukfraser said:

I still prefer ms office over the apple equivalents. Sorry solly. 

 

I still have MS Office on my Win 10 desktop system and use it for many things on that system. I just never bought it for the MacBook and I refuse to play the rental game. 

 

--Joseph the frugal

 

[Leopold Green]

44 minutes ago, Solly said:

 

 

For RTL languages folk have mentioned other very good choices in the forums. This forum thread mentions tools for more complex situations: 

https://forums.accordancebible.com/topic/21805-mellel-4-released/

 

--Joseph

M1 MacBook Pro

Sonoma 14.5

Interestingly I got an email from Mellel saying there was about to be a beta for a new version of Mellel for iPad - I am so excited about this as Word is underwhelming on the iPad and Pages doesn't have the 'academic' features I need... he says it will be almost equivalent to Mac version - that would be a godsend 

[Dr. Nathan Parker]

I discussed this in another post, but I can update you here on what I've consolidated to if you need me to. :-)

[Rev. Dr. Timothy M. Hall]

As much as I want to use Paper, I like MS Word. I have pretty much switched to Keynote over PPT (not as many options, but more beautiful slides). I use Numbers and Excel for different uses. I use Numbers for keeping track of my hours (it does the pie chart easily and beautifully). I use Excel for keeping track of mileage & expenses and other things.

 

That is probably not helpful, but it is what I have worked out ...

[Brian K. Mitchell]

Thank you @Solly , @ukfraser , @Leopold Green , @Rev. Dr. Timothy M. Hall, and @Dr. Nathan Parker for providing your feedback!

 

 

[Brian K. Mitchell]

On 7/18/2024 at 3:02 AM, Dr. Nathan Parker said:

I discussed this in another post, but I can update you here on what I've consolidated to if you need me to. 🙂

@Dr. Nathan Parker if you do not mind please do so here. I would loved to hear what software you think would suit the M chip line best.

[Dr. Nathan Parker]

I've consolidated a "little bit". Here's my short review on all the major players:

 

• I don't currently use Microsoft Office since I don't want to deal with a MS 365 Subscription or even the cost of one standalone license, plus I've been burned one too many times by it.
• I use Pages for "nice-looking" documents like letters and flyers, kind of my "Microsoft Publisher" alternative. I use numbers for personal spreadsheets, and I use Keynote for all my presentations.
• In place of MS Office, I'm using Softmaker Office. I use TextMaker as my general word processor, Planmaker  as my Excel alternative, and Presentations to open PowerPoint files.
• I love Nisus Writer Pro and recommend it, but I'm trying to consolidate my use of it under TextMaker.
• I'm still using Mellel to assemble my PhD dissertation for publishing. When I'm done with my PhD dissertation, I may try to consolidate it under TextMaker if I can.
• I still use Nota Bene for academic writing and keep my citations in Ibidem.
• I've used Ulysses and like it, but I dropped it since I didn't want the subscription. I also use Scrivener and Scapple for planning my papers.
• I tried LibreOffice, but I'm not using it at the moment.

What are you wanting to particularly do with your office software?

[ukfraser]

The interface of Text maker looks incredibly similar to ms word.
But has Textmaker sorted the creation and use of styles and incorporation into your own templates?
 

MSWord has always been very buggy in this area to the extent I have virtually given up on it and just work around it with a couple of files that i use as my basis for each new document which isnt ideal.  Styles and setting up proper reusable templates has always been a major weakness in MSWord compared to the now defunct but infinitely better style handling in AmiPro. 😪

Edited July 19 by ukfraser

[A. Smith]

Depends on what I need to do. I find pages much more flexible for my discourse charts and also use it when collaborating with other apple users. However, there are only two other apple users in my org and one of them is my wife, so we are few. This leaves me little option besides MS office, which I despise. But I've not found another app that legitimately imports/exports office files with accurate formatting, etc. Also, the power of excel really can't be beat. Numbers is a joke if you need to do real spreadsheets with complex formulas and macros. These days we're using google docs for most everything though. I don't like google either. I avoid it whenever possible. But I have to play well with others, so . . .. 

 

For academic writing, I don't find MS office terrible. Though I don't do much with Hebrew. I'm a fan if mellel as well. But I don't find it as essential as others do, especially if you already use tools like Zotero. Which, if you're doing academic writing and not using Zotero, idk what to say 

[Brian K. Mitchell]

12 hours ago, Dr. Nathan Parker said:

I don't currently use Microsoft Office since I don't want to deal with a MS 365 Subscription or even the cost of one standalone license, plus I've been burned one too many times by it.

@Dr. Nathan Parker the afore mentioned is my secondary reason for avoiding  Microsoft Office.

 

12 hours ago, Dr. Nathan Parker said:

I use Pages for "nice-looking" documents like letters and flyers, kind of my "Microsoft Publisher" alternative. I use numbers for personal spreadsheets, and I use Keynote for all my presentations.

@Dr. Nathan Parker I haven't used Nisus Writer Pro, TextMaker, or Ulysses. 

 

 

12 hours ago, Dr. Nathan Parker said:

What are you wanting to particularly do with your office software?

@Dr. Nathan Parker I started this thread because I am very curious what other macOS users use.

I am not looking for new office software at the moment.

 

 

 

[Dr. Nathan Parker]

Thanks! 

[Andrew Patterson]

I am a longtime Windows user, and my laptop is still a Dell XPS 15 running Win11. I've migrated most of my practices to my Mac mini workstation, but I've adapted them a little.

 

For documents in need of formatting (i.e., academic papers or simple handouts), I still use MS Word. I prefer it to other word processors (including Pages) because it's consistent, universal, and feature-rich. I am annoyed at how difficult it is to use MS Word templates on Word for Mac—it's much easier on Windows. I also use MS OneDrive to sync all my files.

 

For sermon planning, I use MS Excel; it loses certain features on Mac, though.

 

For design and DTP, I use Affinity Publisher; I started using it on Windows, but it's much nicer on Mac.

 

For sermons, note-taking, rough drafts, etc., I use Obsidian; I really love markdown and I appreciate not getting distracted by formatting while I'm studying.

 

For PDF manipulation, I use pdfSAM [Split And Merge].

 

I tried using Scrivener several times for various things: sermons, books, papers, etc. . . . but I don't love it. Just not my thing.

[Andrew Patterson]

Oh, I don't make presentations much, but I do prefer Keynote to PPT. I usually have to convert to PPT anyway for implementation, though.

[Brian K. Mitchell]

thank you @A. Smith and @Andrew Patterson for recent feedback to this thread.

[Leopold Green]

12 hours ago, Andrew Patterson said:

 

 

I tried using Scrivener several times for various things: sermons, books, papers, etc. . . . but I don't love it. Just not my thing.

Have you tried Ulysses - it is deceptively powerful and markdown based... much better sync than Scrivener and generally just a pleasure to write ib

[Brian K. Mitchell]

My current favorite or rather most used MacOS word processor software:

 

(1) Egword Universal 2  (link to an article about it) by a company called Monokakido (link). Egword was first released back in 1984 and it has gone through over 16 different main versions the past 40 years.

 

(2)Apple's iwork suite's  Pages. if is niffty free of charge program that works across all my apple devices and has a nice GUI. It does most of the basic things I need to do. Its support for Japanese is decent although not as good as Egword and it's Hebrew support can not match that of Davka Writer.

 

(3) Collabora Office (Desktop) if you have used LibreOffice then basically you know what Collabora Office is like. I started using OpenOffice back in 2003 and moved over to LibreOffice in 2010/11. I am trying to use Pages more, but sometimes there is just some functions that Pages can't do but that Collabora Office can.

 

 

 

[Andrew Patterson]

On 7/20/2024 at 6:46 AM, Leopold Green said:

Have you tried Ulysses - it is deceptively powerful and markdown based... much better sync than Scrivener and generally just a pleasure to write

 

I hadn't, but at your suggestion, I started trying it out.

 

Man, it's nice. Its export features are much nicer than Obsidian's. I think I'm going to start using it more regularly. The only sorrow I have is that I cannot use it on my Windows laptop.

[Dr. Nathan Parker]

It is a great app, although the subscription is a bit of a pain.

 

On Windows, you can use Joplin or Inspire Writer. Inspire Writer is the closest to it:

 

https://www.inspire-writer.com/

 

You can store files in markdown format instead of Ulysses format and store them somewhere besides iCloud, then it'll sync perfectly with Windows. I actually did this once.

[discokvn]

wow, lots of MS 365 dislike, personally, having the TB of storage on OneDrive is worth the price of 365 each year.  plus, it's cross the board on my ipad/phone. 

 

i've continued to use pages as well, but more often and for all around universal "open" word is my processor. 

[Dr. Nathan Parker]

I've just been "burned" one too many times on Word to use it as my primary word processor, both on Windows and Mac.