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Comment by jmduke | Hacker News Reader

I used to complain about iWork all the time, but now that I'm a complete cog in Apple's diabolical machine (MBA, iPad, iPhone), I've realized two things:

1. Office for Mac is terrible relative to Office for Windows, to the extent that I get actively frustrated when I try and use it (which I sorta suspect was a design goal.)

2. Google Docs hasn't particularly improved since I started using it.

Seeing as I've more or less given up trying to do heavy Excel work, I need to basically do pretty markup, pretty data, and pretty presentations for non-technical clients. Being able to display it easily on the iPad would be wonderful.

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What problems do you see with Office for Mac? Honestly curious.

I for one find the interface positively infuriating. I don't have it installed any more, but when I was using Office 2011 for Mac I found that its integration into the OS, from copy/paste to basic UI principles, was horrible. It felt, frankly, as bad as using OpenOffice -- software which is designed to run mostly as-in on Linux, OS X, and Windows.

It sounds like Office for Mac is just like iTunes for Windows, then.

Precisely :)

Or, depending on who you ask[0], precisely the opposite.

[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=iwx...

Counterpoint: I'm a several-times-weekly user of Word and PowerPoint in Office 2011, and I don't find them troublesome to the extent you do. My workload is small documents and presentations (usually < 50 pages, but with lots of graphics, typically 0.5-40MB all told). Typically exchanging documents with Windows and Mac users.

I often use PPT to lay out simple diagrams, for instance, in preference to Illustrator.

I could see how some things can get on your nerves (auto-formatting, reformatting of pasted objects, and I don't like the spelling and grammar check either) but I couldn't call it infuriating. And it did not approach using OpenOffice. I think you must be exaggerating there?

It's funny, I thought I was the only one -- I too find it drives me nuts, but there's no single overarching reason why, it's hard to explain.

There's just so much about it that's "not right" -- it doesn't feel like a Windows program, doesn't feel like a Mac program, performance issues... it's hard to point to any one thing, but it's just not pleasant.

(Whereas I used Office on Windows for years, and it was great.)

Just a random example, this morning I was trying to use Cmd+A to select all the text in a field in a dialog box, which kept activating a button which started with A instead, and there wasn't even a visual cue for it. That's not Windows OR Mac behavior, just totally broken behavior. And it's just full of those things.

Oh god, yes. I noticed that cmd+a thing (I really want to call it a bug) a while back. That's the kind of nonsense I expect (and receive) from something like GIMP on OS X. But a program that was coded from relative scratch to run on the Mac?

It's really bizarre all around. Surely they don't want it to suck for the purpose of driving people away from the Mac... wouldn't they just want people to use their format?

I wonder if Word:mac is the bastard-child of corporate conflicts of interest...

Huh, when did you start using Google Docs?

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