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by somecallitblues 2528 days ago
After dealing with Microsoft’s subpar effort in porting their apps to Mac you won’t find too many people who will enthusiastically install another MS product on their Mac. Especially one so crucial to their workflow.
2 comments

> After dealing with Microsoft’s subpar effort in porting their apps to Mac you won’t find too many people who will enthusiastically install another MS product on their Mac.

Subpar effort in porting? They've been excellent for something closing in on a decade now. And VS Code is practically a mainstay with mac developers now.

Are you talking about Office or something else? Do you actually think the Office port is good? I’m surprised how bad it is every time I use it. Excel is soo sluggish and to me everything feels a bit off and non-native in the ux. (Vscode is good though)
Excel on a Mac is better than Numbers. At least Excel can handle tens of thousands of rows without becoming unusable.
Excel for Mac, while better than Numbers, is worse than Excel for Windows on the same hardware.

Ignoring the missing functionality (power-anything), even the one ported is buggy. It manages to crash with the same ODBC drivers, that work fine with Windows version (namely psqlODBC).

Office is fine? I mean, yes, it feels "non-native," but there's not much left that feels "native" anymore. The concept is as dead as brutalist architecture. And it's not sluggish at all on my 2015 MB Pro.
Of the three dozen or so apps on my work Mac, Mircosoft Office and Adobe are is the only ones that don't adhere to the Mac UI.

Off the top of my head:

Drag a file thumbnail from Finder onto the program icon to open the file? Nope.

Click on the name of the file in the title bar to rename or move it? Nope.

I understand that MS wants to make the interface familiar for people who use Windows, but it really is a PITA, and I wouldn't use it if I didn't have to.

“Drag a file thumbnail from Finder onto the program icon to open the file? Nope.”

Maybe it wasn’t always that way but it works fine in the current versions of Office. I’ll give you that clicking on the title bar does not let you rename or move the file though right-clicking does show the path to the file and let you open the folder in finder where I guess you could do those things.

Four years ago, Mac Office was more sluggish and lacked a lot of features. Now, the performance is fine for such a full featured app and many of the missing features have been implemented.

You can argue that you don’t like Office in general but the Mac port is no longer embarrassing.

A few of us are still bitter about Word 6 being a port, unlike 5.1.

https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-word/5x-mac

I should probably give that up. It was almost 30 years ago.