Back on May 11, I promised to try and live without Microsoft Office in a “corporate setting” for 30 days. It’s been seven weeks in my iWork vs. Microsoft Office challenge now. And I’m none too happy to report that a copy of MS Office must go with me to the desert island.
However, in an interesting twist, it turns out I can’t live without iWork either. Follow me after the jump to discuss what worked and what — surprisingly — didn’t.
iWork vs. Microsoft Office
The Achilles’ heel of this whole project, as I suspected back in May, was going to be email and calendaring. I know Mail will work with Exchange, just as I know there are plug-ins for iCal that will enable some measure of Exchange integration. But this is 2008, and three separate applications for scheduling, contacts and email is just arcane.
Even Mozilla decided to party like it’s 1996 and finally add PIM-like features to Thunderbird through the Sunbird plug-in. Sadly, Thunderbird and Sunbird both overtly fail to support the mail server that 95% of people who don’t have to wear nametags to their jobs are required to use. (I say overtly, because you try and raise the notion of Exchange support in the Thunderbird forums, and see how hard you get flamed — go ahead, I double-dog-dare you.)
The productivity applications
When it came to living without Word, Excel and PowerPoint, life became a whole lot easier. I found no instances where I was offered an Office document and was unable to work on it. In fact, I found that producing professional-looking deliverables for clients was actually easier in iWork than in MS Office. iWork’s speed, as well as its ability to make documents that just sparkle, really won out.
My only gripe: the built-in grammar checker. This issue is pervasive in applications that use OS X’s built-in spelling and grammar checking. (The problem even occurs in my new favorite writing tool: Scrivener.) If you’re reading this before one of the guys has a chance to clean up the mess that I call writing, it likely comes as no surprise that I’m dyslexic. I really rely on those green and red squiggly underlines to tell me when I’ve made some bonehead mistake.
I didn’t notice the difference until I started to use Pages to compose posts for Cult of Mac in lieu of Word — honestly, I didn’t notice the difference then either, but a whole lot of you all did. It was enough that I took one particularly illiterate article and pasted it into Word, Pages and Scrivener to see the results. Redmond’s word processor identified nearly all of the goofy little errors that my co-workers now refer to as “Leigh-isms.” (My favorite: my usage of “antidotally” instead of “anecdotally,” as pointed out by reader Paddy.)
The big surprise
The big surprise is that I also can’t live without iWork. Did you know that iWork is more Office-compatible than Office? Who’dathunkit, right? It appears that Microsoft’s removal of Visual Basic for Applications from Office for Mac created all sorts of compatibility problems. (Note: This removal also obviates most, if not all, the viruses identified in my May 11 article.)
This is just an anecdotal observation but there were a number of Excel documents forwarded to me from Corporate IT that had embedded VBA that Excel 2008 was simply unable to open for editing. Oh sure, it’d open it read-only, but what good does that do me?
Enter Numbers, the best thing to happen to spreadsheets since VisiCalc. Numbers had no problem opening the spreadsheets. It stripped the offending VBA code right out. Plus, it even went so far as to unprotect the worksheets so I could do my own sorts and such. Why they were locked in the first place: Corporate IT didn’t want my job to be too easy.
All in all, I’m giving my experiment a 75% pass rate. It is certainly possible, and even pleasurable, to live quite nicely without MS Office, assuming you’re not an illiterate forced to use Exchange.
Final questions in the iWork vs. Microsoft Office debate
I’ll put these questions to the crowd:
- Is there a way to get a better grammar checker to replace iWork’s built-in one?
- Is there some single Calendar, Mail and Contacts solution for OS X that is Exchange-compatible?
If we can crowdsource good answers to these two, I’m happy to give swearing off MS Office a full quarter in the name of science.
Leigh McMullen leads the Advisory Services & Strategy practices for the professional services arm of one of the Big-Five firms. He has written several books that would cure any insomnia you might have, and is an avid Mac junkie.
