Microsoft 365 Subscription vs. Perpetual License

Yes. I have used it several times to get 15 month renewals. There is a delay between ordering and Costco sending the code / generally an hour or less.

1 Like

At least in Europe it’s worth shopping around. Last December I renewed a MS 365 Family license for £46.53, about US$63 from a specialised online retailer, and that includes 20% sales tax. That works out at less than 9 US$/user/year excluding tax. Of course, I work with others chained to the MS ecosystem and I have other 5 relatives using Office apps. Otherwise, I would either opt for Apple’s apps or any of the other alternatives already mentioned.

1 Like

I am chagrined to realize that Excel and Word are the only spreadsheet and word processor, respectively, that I’ve ever used.

I’ve done a few Google searches for feature comparisons of Excel vs Numbers, as well as Word vs. Pages; nothing has been very helpful.

Would you be willing to post some links to comparisons that you believe to be complete and unbiased?

Thank you.

UPDATE 2022-02-10
I downloaded Numbers and Pages from the App Store and am very impressed with them. Indeed, for my purposes, they look like good (free!) substitutes for Excel and Word.

Thanks so much for this recommendation! Today I got an email that my 365 subscription was going to auto-renew shortly at $99/12 months, went over to the Costco site, and got the $89/15 months deal. Now it shows my next auto-renewal in June 2023.

Dave

1 Like

You should be able to disable auto-renewal, in which case, you’ll be notified when your subscription is about to expire, instead of when it will auto-renew.

See also:

1 Like

I don’t do word processing, but have used Pages for a number of years for large-format printing, which it does well and is accurate to a very high degree in page-layout mode.

However, I can say that you can indeed track text changes with Pages. It also has built-in versioning, which is very nice.

I don’t think I saw anyone mention Apache OpenOffice (https://www.openoffice.org/) Very similar presentation and functionality to MSO so not much learning curve if you are already an Office user. From my limited experience with Numbers and Pages, I found it hard to predict how the formatting would transfer to Excel, and Pages is more like MS Publisher than Word. Since I am exchanging files with Office users, being sure of what they will look like for them is important.

It’s in the same family tree as LibreOffice:

  • Originally, there was StarOffice, a cross-platform commercial office suite. I may be one of the few people who bought a copy for OS/2, which I used for several years (since Microsoft never ported any of their Office apps to 32-bit OS/2).
  • Later on, Sun bought StarOffice. And Oracle bought Sun. The last version, Oracle Open Office, was discontinued in 2011.
  • In 2000, Sun released an open source version of StarOffice, as OpenOffice.org. This community project was quite popular for some time, but Oracle stopped supporting it in 2011, selling the code to Apache.
  • Apache OpenOffice is the result of continuing development of this code, after Oracle sold it to Apache.
  • At about that same time, another open source group forked the OpenOffice code into LibreOffice, mostly over concerns that Oracle might remove the code from open source or otherwise change the license terms in unacceptable ways.
  • Finally, it’s worth mentioning NeoOffice, which is a Mac-specific fork from the OpenOffice code-base.
6 Likes

The irony being that even if you use the same version of MS Word, you can’t be sure what a document will look like when someone else opens it (or sometimes even when you open it sometime later)! :sweat_smile:

2 Likes

Didn’t’ know that…but then I don’t use either and didn’t use them with MS products before…shoulda looked before I posted I reckon. Sorry ‘bout that.

So true! Working in commercial printing, customer supplied Word files were always problematic! One good feature of Pages, is that at least it will identify missing fonts in a file whereas Word just substitutes whatever is available! I guess I was thinking more of spreadsheets. I think we are in danger of hijacking this thread…

1 Like

Can you please expand on this?

I downloaded both Pages and Numbers after @neil1 suggested them. They work a little differently than Word and Excel so it is taking some effort to transition to them. However, I’m pleasantly surprised to see how functional they are.

As far as versioning and tracking in Pages are concerned …

  • Versioning: Typing “version” into the Pages Help menu brings up File → Revert to … So, I assume that “versioning” in Pages means rolling back to a previously saved copy on your own drive, which is effectively the same as opening Time Machine.
  • Tracking: Typing “track” into the Pages Help menu brings up Edit → Track Changes. This seems to be a way of identifying all changes by author and includes the facility of accepting or rejecting individual changes made by authors other than oneself.

Neither of these capabilities addresses my use case:

  1. Someone like my lawyer sends me a Word file with a proposed contract.
  2. We talk on the phone and he agrees to make changes.
  3. He sends me a new Word file that he says has all and only the changes that we talked about.

I’d looking for a way to compare the two files to make sure that I agree with the new contract prior to signing it. Printing it out and re-reading it is laborious and error-prone. Having the attorney “redline” all the differences in a printout is is that as well as expensive.

Using Word to compare two Word files is a very useful feature and it appears to be missing from Pages.

I live in a Microsoft world. Lawyers are going to send me Word or PDF files, not Pages files. I need a way to compare Word or PDF files. I was hoping that at least I could open the Word files in Pages and compare them in Pages. Alternatively, I suppose that I could use BBEdit to compare the text of two Word files, but I’d really like something better.

I was hoping that Pages could at least compare two Pages files. If it can, would you please point it out to me?

1 Like

(parenthetically: at least your lawyer is not sending you WordPerfect files! )

I haven’t had to do this on a multiple-page contract in a while, but AFAIK, redlining in Word is pretty easy to turn on. Can you explain what you mean by this being “expensive”?

I’m also interested to learn if Pages can in fact be used to “redline” a document as @nello has described. I have not discovered this tool either.

I think the issue is that there’s no way to guarantee that the other party (a) kept “track changes” on throughout and (b) did not “accept” any changes (removing the tracking indicator). Word lets you effectively derive the “tracked changes” document from the initial document and the final document so you can see 100% of the changes regardless of what the other party may have done. So in a potentially adversarial exchange of versions, you would want to generate the comparison rather than depending on the change indicators stored in the file.

Without this feature, generating a tracking history from the document versions would require more time and effort.

Dave

4 Likes

Thanks for this cogent analysis. I never considered that the other party would try to hide their changes in a mutually agreed document. I guess I’ve been lucky (so far)!

And it doesn’t look like Pages performs this task as well as Word.

What about a text editor like BBEdit?

Oh, sorry. I was referring to it to being expensive to have an associate redline by hand. I’m showing my age. There is no (marginal) cost to redlining with Word.

And yes, I remember the WordPerfect days.

1 Like

Yes, that’s a possibility, as I said in my post:

Alternatively, I suppose that I could use BBEdit to compare the text of two Word files, but I’d really like something better.

This is getting off the point though, which is whether, as @GFS said:

you can indeed track text changes with Pages. It also has built-in versioning, which is very nice.

I’m saying that I don’t think that Pages is capable of meeting my need to redline even two Pages files, much less two Word files (which I’m more likely to get from someone).

1 Like

This morning’s daily summary for NMUG contains this link to an offer of a perpetual license (for only one computer) for Microsoft Office Home and Business for Mac 2021—list price $250—for only $50:

UPDATE 2022-02-15
I ended up buying this perpetual license through an AppleInsider link to this this offer. Apparently, you can buy only one license at this price for each email address you submit to them for purchase.

Pages, Number, and Keynote are worthy applications. In the end, however, I just had too much FUD to give up Office at this time.

I didn’t understand that you need to compare 2 documents, as opposed to tracking changes in a single document. Pages cannot do this per se, which I believe is down to how it stores data.

However there are a couple of possibilities.

Firstly, Apple seem to have recently ramped up how iCloud document sharing works. I haven’t tried it myself, but from their online description, it appears that when multiple people are working on a document, each individual’s changes can be easily tracked. NB, this works online, so a Mac isn’t required. I suspect it’s easier for Apple to implement comparison/tracking in this way, as opposed to within Pages itself. You can test it yourself if you have 2 computers and you’ll need 2 iCloud accounts.

Secondly, comparing documents can be done online using free services. These sites simply employ public domain js or jquery code. So if privacy isn’t an issue this would be free and easy (although if privacy is a concern you could always replace all names etc., prior to using a service)
Google Search

Thirdly, you could build an online style service into an app like Filemaker. From a cost point of view, this is counter-productive, unless you already have an FM licence, however, if you could build something in under 30 days, you could then continue to use your file for free on the iOS and IPadOS platforms ad infinitum. The nice thing about this, is that you can make it what you want, from literally just 2 text fields, all the way to having a dedicated database tracking changes over time, being able to search the entire database in a flash etc. etc. The limit is really only your imagination. For a basic setup an old vs of Filemaker would be ok, but this is an area that Claris are concentrating on and the current vs has some important changes, but by no means essential.

1 Like

For diffing Word files I thoroughly recommend Kaleidoscope. It’s not cheap, but it works beautifully and I find it easier to use than the change tracking tools built into word processors. Depending on your needs, the only drawback may be that with Word files, Kaleidoscope can’t copy changes between files, whereas it can do that with text files.

I’ve tried hard to use Pages, SoftMaker Office and LibreOffice to work with Word files, but in my experience this just doesn’t work if you need to collaborate with Word users – some formatting, footnotes or links always get lost.

Pages at least is polished, and is great for using solo or between Mac people (change tracking is particularly nice). SoftMaker Office looks good, but I found it buggy, especially with ODT files. LibreOffice is just horrible, I’m afraid. ODT ought to be the future, but I do wish someone would produce a simple open source app that didn’t try to copy everything Microsoft can do.

2 Likes