iPinions Part II: Office '08 & Quark 6 Alternatives?

[SteveO]

This is Part Dough of my Mavs / El Cap software dilemma (from a few threads down):

On a mid-10 MBP 2.4 / 16gb RAM, 1tb HDD, and Mavs:

Office '08 works fine with Mavs except for Entourage which I have to force-quit multiple times daily. I could reinstall (and I probably will), just wanted to see what everyone is using after Office '08 and Quark 6...that, and I'm somewhat concerned about security holes in Office '08 since it hasn't been supported in years.

What do you guys like for solid (read: easy, no-hassle) alternatives to Office 2008 and Quark 6? I'm not gonna do a subscription which I think is the current model of MS, Quark and Adobe. What do you use for Office? Is there a version that works well with El Cap (or Mavs in case I don't upgrade)...how easy and seamless are OpenOffice and Pages for Office docs? Not real excited about saving 2 versions of every freakin' doc.

What do you use for light to medium graphic design stuff? Flyers, greeting cards, etc. Anyone use Inkscape and like it?

Also wondering if whatever version of Pages El Cap uses is comparable to Quark. I like the versatility of Quark with leading, kerning, etc. There is also InDesign but again, I don't like the subscription model. THANKS!

P.S. Yeah I'm planning on getting an SSD - 1tb for $100 when prices come down.

[ztirffritz]

I use LibreOffice and like it. I don't have a need for Quark or Inkscape, but I have used Inkscape and it works well enough for what I needed.

[jdc]

Have you tried to rebuild your inboxes for E-rage?

Quark is not subscription based.

I use Libre office as well, but my needs are limited.

this really sounds like a huge undertaking... you might have to spend some $ to upgrade software, and hardware. You MBP is begging for a SSD.

[Sarcany]

Entourage was garbage from start to finish. Almost anything's better, but you have Apple Mail/Calendar/Contacts bundled with the OS.

LibreOffice is an able substitute for Word and unless you're doing something exceptional, Excel as well.

Keynote for Powerpoint. Free from the App Store, tho you may not be able to download it if you don't already have a version installed. (Current version requires Sierra.)

As for Quark 6, it's either upgrade to a more recent version of Quark and use the Quark Document converter to update old files, or go with InDesign and the Q2ID plugin. You can play with Pages for free from the App Store (same as Keynote), but you'll find very quickly that it's good for little more sophisticated than printing labels and making holiday newsletters for the family. Latest Quark and ID require OS X 10.11.

[anonymouse1]

SSD makes a WORLD of difference. I wouldn't upgrade without it.

[SteveO]

Thanks everyone for the great info.

Yeah I've done the rebuild thing, it helps for a little while. I probably need to do a major purge and that would help. Good to know that Libre is a good alternative to Office; I have iWork '09 so I think my upgrade path to Keynote is probably doable if I end up going to El Cap.

[jh]

Stand alone Office 2016 should run on your system 10.10 OS is the minimum. Price may or may not be a concern. Walmart has one license for $180.00.

[jdc]

With E-rage -- can you start a new user? Or a new main inbox? And then swtich back to the old for archives... for some reason I remember having to do that.

Or was it export the inbox, start fresh and import?

[SteveO]

jh wrote:
Stand alone Office 2016 should run on your system 10.10 OS is the minimum. Price may or may not be a concern. Walmart has one license for $180.00.

Thanks jh, yeah - price is kind of a concern. I prefer to buy late-model Office suites at a discount. I bought '08 in '09 or '10 for less than $100, and that was a multiple license version. If I end up needing to upgrade, I'll probably look for some version of Office '15 or similar.

>With E-rage -- can you start a new user? Or a new main inbox? And then swtich back to the old for archives... for some reason I remember having to do that.

Or was it export the inbox, start fresh and import?

jdc - I will probably just drag my Main Identity out of its nesting place, trash and reinstall the suite, and then drop Main Identity back where it goes and see what happens. That would be similar to your second solution. Thanks again!

[D. Lawson]

As mentioned above, Quark 6.x won't run on 10.7 and above since it requires Rosetta.

I had a few non-profit clients who used the free Scribus for many of their print layouts. I haven't dealt with it in several years, and wasn't impressed with the quality and compatibility of its PDF output at the time, but it may have improved and may meet your needs.