Alex WellersteinVerified account

But for what it is worth, with Excel 2008 for Mac they forgot to put in the feature that would allow you to add text to charts. Office 2008 was full of crap like that — "oh, we didn't have time to add a basic feature, so we disabled it." Just amazingly poor, even for MS.

(The Mac version, specifically. Office 2008 is also where they just disabled all scripting because they didn't have time to upgrade it so it would work with changes to OS X. "Well, hope nobody uses scripts!" is how I imagine the developers' conversation.)

It’s frankly surprising that Apple never really upped their game with Pages and Number to compete with a software suite so ubiquitous but horrendous on their operating system. Everyone dropped the ball on professional Mac users not involved in video/photo editing.

I even tried OpenOffice and LibreOffice. Everything is crap. I know so many MacOS users writing academics papers or their thesis using a text editor & a markup language now. I tried [& failed] to learn R to overcome the awfulness of MacOS Excel.

It has been years since I tried OO and LO but from what I saw they were trying to just emulate MS products, warts and all, and doing so in that too-many-engineers-not-enough-managers way of a lot of FOSS stuff. A recipe for consistently subpar software.

And I agree that Pages, etc., seem to have never been given more than a half-hearted attempt by Apple. I think serious writers, academics, etc., are just not a big enough market for anyone to really care, esp. on a Mac platform.

All that said, again, if one is doing things relatively — I have had far fewer problems with Office 2016 than I've had with previous versions. When I talk to academics who complain loudly about Word on a Mac they are ALWAYS using 2008. It is seriously sub-par.

I got hammered during my PhD viva because the Word document I sent to the printer somehow lost its entire style sheet when I hit ‘save’ and emailed it. What my panel received looked like a high schooler’s book report w/o my knowledge. I always have the latest update installed.