That’s it. I’ve had enough of you, Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac.
Your days of unremembered window positions, sluggish performance on an 4 core (8 threaded) CPU with 16Gb RAM, and frequent RDP crashes and disconnections galore, are through!
I’ve had Pages ’09 for a while, but have never really used it much until recently. But having tinkered about with it in some depth yesterday, I’m really rather impressed. It can save documents as Word for portability and has a sensible default window position that means I don’t have to keep dragging new document windows to the centre of the screen every time!
I’ve taken the liberty of converting all my stories, story ideas, notes, letters, etc. etc. to Pages format. Additionally I’ve ditched Microsoft RDP and replaced it with CoRD, an open-sourced RDP client that works (as in: it doesn’t crash) and offers me better performance than official Microsoft client!
Longer term, I’m planning to push all stories, notes, research, etc. to go through Scrivener and screenplays to be developed within Scrivener and Final Draft 8.
I may still have to keep Excel around for a bit, but I’m considering either using LibreOffice, Google Docs/Drive, or Apple Numbers.
But Microsoft products are no longer welcome on any of my Macs. Not until they show a bit more commitment to the platform rather than just developing for the clown OS they call Windows 8 and the new Office 2013.
