I’m curious why you use Word/Office. Is it because you always have, or because you deal with others who always do, or… ?
Battery replacement on a “mid-2012 MacBook Pro” is “straightforward” (OWC) or “moderate” (iFixIt) for both 13" and 15" models. I’ve done it several times on different mid-2012 MacBook Pros. It is a little easier than replacing the hard drive with an SSD. Replacing the battery is much more difficult on the 2012 Retina MacBook Pro.
I use it because I have clients with formatted documents that don’t seem to come over well into Pages or others (admittedly haven’t tried in awhile). As it is I curse Word’s formatting often and think back fondly to Word Perfect’s reveal codes.
Excel has better formulas than anything else I’ve tried either. I’ve been using Excel since it came out in the 80s. Word I just use when I need to.
For those reason I buy the cheap single non-subscription license and use it for years.
Diane
I have to use Word because I am working with editors and need to exchange documents with Change Tracking to verify that changes have not caused mistakes. Change Tracking is horribly complex and other word processors cannot be trusted to get it right. Unfortunately, Microsoft had lately made changes in formatting that break Change Tracking documents into three parallel documents, at least one of which is too small to read easily on my 27-inch screen.
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I have a perpetual license for what I think is Office 2019 (the file was created in December 2019), and some of the “features” appear to have been changed in the updates. For example, at some point in 2021 or 2022 they created a “Review” panel which is the only place where you can perform a fresh spellcheck of the document after editing it. These “features” are changed with no notice, and make it more difficult to use Word, so I regard them as bugs. They similarly changed Change Tracking by creating a separate third column for comments, which shrinks the font used to too tiny to read easily.
I use it because despite the availability of open source alternatives, every one I have used has been lacking in one way or another. Something doesn’t format the way I expect, or some spreadsheet formula I’ve been using for years produces different results, or embedded objects render/print differently.
I have Libre Office, and I use it on occasion (mostly for importing my most ancient documents that MS can’t import), but for all but the most trivial documents, I never end up with the exact content I started with.
Apple’s suite is even worse. Pages/Numbers/Keynote don’t even try to mimic the Microsoft documents. They may work great for new original content, but the majority of what I work on is files I get from third parties and documents I’ve been updating for decades.
Since I really don’t like the idea of fixing the formatting for every old document that I load, it’s far easier to just stick with Microsoft, which, despite occasional bugs, does “just work” with all but my oldest documents (e.g. those composed using Word for DOS).
And the subscription pricing I currently pay (most recently, $90 for 15 months from Costco, for four computers in my home) is quite reasonable (vs. paying for four perpetual licenses every 3-4 yerars).
Word Perfect made my life a misery at two different jobs where I had to use PCs, and I was driven nuts with its formatting. It tended to render type badly. It didn’t adjust to differently sized documents well, or if the documents had images in them, or even different sizes of type or multiple fonts. Setting up Styles, which is a breeze in Word, was nonexistent in WP; I don’t know if this is still the case. WP couldn’t even add or delete crop marks.
And a very big factor is that if you were working on anything that would be sent to an imagesetter, all of them would refuse to accept it even when it had been converted to PDF. The files are just too problematic, and they don’t even play nicely with InDesign or InCopy.
I did work with a legal publishing company for a few months, and the journalists there used Word Perfect on PCs because it had features that were used in the industry. But the production team, who had Macs, always had to do MAJOR clean up before sending the files to press.
Ah I forgot, WP was never as good on the Mac as on the PC, and I’m going back way before InDesign. :)
I thought it had a fit to page or xx pages feature, where you could say “I want this document to be 3 pages long” and it would adjust font or margins. I’m really stretching my memory for that one though.
Diane