Normally I try to provide a valuable piece of advice. Today I’m just mad so I’m going to rant about Microsoft Office for a moment. I apologize for not having something smart, witty or informative today but I just need to get this off my chest.
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I’m a Mac user.
More appropriately I am exclusively a Mac user. I’ve been on some form of Apple computer for more than a decade, it really “just works.” I have Windows 7 as a Boot Camp partition that I can also boot in VMWare, but I prefer to only do that when absolutely necessary. The one part of the Mac experience that I can’t stand is…MICROSOFT! I can’t seem to get away from it. I want a Microsoft-less existence but no matter how hard I try I can’t shake it loose.
Today I had the all-too-familiar issue of Exchange and iCal not playing nicely together. It drives me bonkers. As the only Mac user in my office I have to integrate with the same system everyone else uses; which would be fine if it would work.
Unfortunately a bug in Apple’s iCal has caused it to break its connection with Exchange; I think it was a recurring event. The benefit of using iCal over Entourage to manage my calendar is that I could also see my personal schedule right along side of my work schedule; iCal has my MobileMe calendars and also my Google calendars. MobileMe has never failed me as a calendar, mail and contacts syncing solution.
Entourage
For a while I used Entourage for email, calendar and contacts but managed to get my company email working in Mail.app for Mac, calendars syncing to iCal and my OSX Address Book syncing to the company Exchange server; so I stopped using Entourage, thankfully. While I was using Entourage it crashed 3-5 times per day from regular use.
So obviously I’m not happy about having to use crashy Entourage again. So I look online to see what my options are and low and behold Outlook for Mac has been released. I would like to get that and replace Entourage. Unfortunately I have to buy the rest of Microsoft’s Office Suite to get Outlook.
I use Word, an overly bloated word-processor with a mind of its own and a habit of crashing. I use Excel which I generally have no problem with. I refuse to use Powerpoint, 1) because I use the vastly superior Keynote and 2) because I just plain hate the interface.
I can’t buy just the one program I want…no, I have to buy 3 others that I don’t want.
To be clear that this is a rip off I filled a cart on the Apple store with software. For less than the cost of MS Office 2010 with one program that I want, this is the software you could get from Apple…
So for the same price you can get Pages (Word Processing), Numbers (Spreadsheets), Keynote (Presentations), iMovie (Movie Editing), iPhoto (Photo Editing), GarageBand (Music/Podcast Creation), iWeb (Web Authoring Tool), iDVD (DVD Creator), 1 year of MobileMe and the newest Apple Operating System and still have $20 to go grab a few beers.
Microsoft needs to have its collective head examined. All I want is ONE program that I need to replace the current MSFT program that crashes constantly. I will be so pissed if I buy this new Office suite to get the one program I need and it’s crashy.
Can we please get some customer-centric pricing?!