One Man & His Experience Installing Office for Mac
So I have had the wonderful fortune of having not had a Windows machine for three or four years now. Best computer-related decision I ever made, and I’ll never even think about going back. Today I was reminded why.
Firstly, this isn’t an “Apple does everything right / Microsoft does everything wrong” article as much as it is a “Yeah, Microsoft does do everything wrong” article. So I have Apple’s iWork, and the Numbers app is notorious for not being able to open up spreadsheet documents, specifically Excel spreadsheets that a client sends over all the time. Google Docs can’t open them either, so I don’t know if the problem lies with how they’re generated or simply that Excel files are best left to the Trash…but anyway, the situation lead me to this: I needed to download a Microsoft Product, Office for Mac 30-day Trial
- The website was kind of sleek looking, so that’s one good thing I can say about the experience.
- The download was enormous, and I really only wanted Excel, not every piece of the Office Suite. That, as a free trial, was not available.
- After I started installing it, I was greeted with a message I hadn’t seen in forever. “You cannot install this software without shutting down the following program: Google Chrome.” I hadn’t seen it in forever because Mac programs don’t ask you (or rarely enough do that this is the first time I’ve seen it) to shut down other programs so that they can install, they just install. Somehow M$ managed to bring this problem from Windows over to Macs.
- Installation took about 15 minutes, loading all types of Clipart and other stupid extra garbage I won’t need and probably will never be able to fully delete from my hard drive.
- The end result? My wonderfully clean dock now looks like this:
That’s right, 1, 2, 3…8 icons installed automatically into my dock. I mean, c’mon M$. Come. On.