I read through the original post and said to myself, “Myself, that never happens with a Mac.”
A while back I set up my iCloud Drive, with I just call my Cloud. Now everything saves to my Cloud. Word processing? I use “Pages”. I purchased it once for about 1/5th of what Office costs. It runs on mu iMac, my MacBook Pro (which is what I am using now), my iPad and even my iPhone…OK, I don’t do any word processing work on my phone…but I could! That’s the point. Same goes for my graphics work using Pixelmator. All my custom aircraft skins? All done with Pixelmator. Something like 1/25th the cost of Photoshop. Excel? Mac’s Numbers works just like it. And, I could use Numbers on my iPhone if I wanted to.
I know, I now, I’ve gone over to the Dark Side…it happened in 2012 (long story)…however, I’ve never lost a document since.
Yeah, I made the switch to GIMP last year and have grown to be OK with it. I felt that some of PhotoShops auto-correction tools are a bit better (give better results), but overall I’m pretty happy with it.
I did try Libre Office and generally liked it. Once in awhile it has issues with BMP files that I drag into it - it displays them as all black. Opening those BMPs (that were created in GIMP) and resaving them in Paint makes the problem go away.
The only reason I tend to stay with MS Word is that my publisher and his staff seem to like the format and it is probably a bit less hassle for them to deal with stuff I send them that might not be 100% compatible.
A bigger question should be, IMO, should your office suite be tied to your cloud storage solution, and if so, which one bests suits your computing habits. For SMB businesses this is usually Office 365/Azure, but for home, it’s arguably more complicated since you might be using multiple platforms. For instance, in my home we use GMail (via private domain) for email and calendar, Dropbox for cloud storage, but have Apple devices, which are tied most efficiently to iCloud. We also have a couple of iMacs which get shared, and to top it off, the kids use Chromebooks at school. Since the school has a STEAM focused curriculum and because parents are largely involved with homework and home projects, often we are “encouraged” to submit that work via a Google login. My two businesses use Office 365.
To that end I’m in the middle of consolidating what has been a continually moving target.
My wife did IT for a company that ran Mac’s, not quite. Would it have been worse with PC’s probably, but they certainly were busy deal with all the fun issues Mac’s can have as well.
I use 1password. But my wife is delinquent. I’ve refused to help with passwords now because she won’t use the solution I’ve given her which would solve every problem she has.
As for office:
I use LibreOffice. Pretty good and free and none of that cloud crap.
If I want to do something in a cloud to have it available on phone and Laptop (very very rare) I use Google Drive.
But if it is only text I use Notepad++ which is a brilliant piece of software. SO much stuff it can do.
For graphics stuff I use Inkscape (for vector graphics) and Paint dot net (if simple) or Gimp (if less simple) for pixel graphics.
Yes it is, and I thought about mentioning it. Not sure if it works on a Mac though. That said, before I “turned to the Dark Side” I gave GIMP a try. I didn’t like the interface - purely a personal thing, I know as many people really like it. I went with PaintShop Pro from Corel. In fact Corel still sends me update deal emails. It was fairly inexpensive and has a couple of plug in capabilities that work well with FSX graphics.
I always use the same password, to wit, “Iforgotit”, because when the computer asks me my password I also have the same answer, “I forgot it”
Actually, my last few years in the Navy were difficult. Three levels of computer systems (all air gapped from each other) requiring three different passwords (that had to be significantly different for each system), each requiring to be changed every three months (to something significantly different from the previous password and, of course, significantly different from the other systems passwords).
It it is a wonder that I can still remember my own name…wait, don’t tell me…it starts with a “W”…
Trying to find Office 2019 but MicroSatan is pushing 365 hard and I can not find a link for 2019 anywhere on their site. Prefer the Pro version but depending on what it has in it the Home version might be ok?
Buying for a 75 year old man who is not interested in any other products. Not worth the time or effort for me to try and convince him to try something else either.
