Imagine you buy a hammer. You take it home, you put it in your toolbox, and you use it to smash nails into pieces of wood. It is your hammer. You paid for it. Then, a few years later, a man in a grey suit from the hammer company knocks on your door, walks into your shed, and welds a metal cage around the head of it.
“You can still look at the hammer,” he says, with a smug, corporate grin. “But if you want to actually hit anything with it again, you’ll need to pay us ten dollars a month. Forever.”
You would call the police. You would unleash the dogs. And yet, this is exactly what Microsoft is about to do to millions of unsuspecting computer users around the globe.
If you are currently sitting at a desk, typing a strongly worded letter on Microsoft Office 2019, I have some catastrophic news for you. Very soon, Microsoft is going to pull the plug. Your software will soon go into what what they call “Reduced Functionality Mode.” But they aren’t just stopping updates. No, no. They are effectively locking the doors. Your shiny, paid-for copy of Word and Excel will transform into an expensive, digital museum. You will be allowed to open your documents, and you will be allowed to look at them. But the moment you try to change a single letter, or add up a column of numbers, the software will say: No.
It is the digital equivalent of a hostage situation. Microsoft wants you off their old, reliable software and forced into the subscription hellscape of Microsoft 365, where you pay them until the day you die just to have the privilege of typing the word “the.”
This is just a latest in a trend where Microsoft seemingly want to be the most hated tech company in the world. Ask any Windows user and they will likely tell you they hate the latest version of Windows or the fact that Co-Pilot is everywhere and they make you pay for it… without making it clear you don’t need to.
And let’s not mention them buying Skype only to kill it in favour of that fever dream Microsoft Teams.
It is, quite frankly, a sickening display of corporate greed. But there is a solution. And it doesn’t involve giving a single penny to Redmond, Washington.
If you own a Mac, an iPad, or even an iPhone, you already possess the antidote to this madness. Tucked away in your applications folder, usually ignored in favour of Microsoft’s bloated behemoths, are two pieces of software called Pagesand Numbers.
Now, for years, people have looked at Pages and Numbers the way a seasoned chef looks at a microwave. They think it’s a toy. They think that because it’s free, it must be useless. “Real businessmen use Excel,” they mutter, while staring at a spreadsheet that looks like a spreadsheet from 1995.
But they are wrong. They are completely and utterly wrong.
Why Pages Beats Word
Let’s start with Pages. Microsoft Word is a mess. It has a billion menus, three thousand toolbars, and if you dare to move a picture two millimetres to the left, it completely destroys the formatting of the entire twenty-page document, moving your bibliography into the middle of the introduction.
Pages, on the other hand, is a masterpiece of minimalism. When you open it, it is just a clean, white sheet of paper. The tools only appear when you actually need them. It doesn’t shout at you. It doesn’t try to predict what you’re writing. It just lets you write. And because it was designed by people who care about aesthetics, anything you produce on it looks like it was formatted by a professional graphic designer, rather than a confused accountant.
The Excel Myth
“Ah,” the tech-boffins will say, “but what about Numbers? It can’t handle macros! It can’t do complex statistical modeling for international banks!”
Well, guess what? You aren’t an international bank. You are calculating the cost of a garden fence, or tracking how much money you spent on wine last month.
Excel treats a spreadsheet like a giant, infinite grid of misery. Numbers treats it like a canvas. In Numbers, you can have a table here, a chart there, and a block of text over there, all on the same page. It is intuitive. It makes sense. It doesn’t require a degree in computer science to make a pie chart that doesn’t look like an explosion in a paint factory.
The Great Migration
But about all your files…they are .docx and .xlsx! I am sure you are thinking, If I switch to Apple, I’ll lose everything!”
No, you won’t. Pages and Numbers can open Microsoft files with absolute ease. And when you’re finished editing them, you can export them right back into Microsoft’s formats so your colleagues—who are still trapped in Microsoft’s financial chokehold—can read them.
Making the switch is ridiculously simple. You don’t need a technician. You don’t need to put in a credit card number.
But regular readers this – website of rant – will know that I have been saying this for years and in fact just updated my 2017 post about Pages and Numbers. You can find it here.
