Review by Brian Connors

It’s fair to say that if you install MS Office, you probably know what you’re getting. That said, unless you’re doing something that absolutely requires MS Office support, it’s hardly worth it (except maybe for the fonts, and those only if you know how to dig them out of the .app bundles). At least OOXML is a more-or-less open file format, so importing and exporting is easy, and at least you can still buy a non-subscription version of Office.

For the rare occasion I need office programs, I use a mix of iWork and LibreOffice, both of which are no-charge. To switch to MS Office, there’d have to be a very compelling reason to do so, and I just don’t see it. The ribbon might be a better approach to the toolbar hell of LibreOffice, but I still don’t really like it on the desktop (it works fine on the iOS version of Word though). And I really, really don’t like that it expects me to use my Microsoft account to use it; it’s nice to have cloud access and such there, but seriously, if I want to work offline, there’s no reason that should be a problem. And, like I said, the fonts that it comes with are generally pretty nice (Franklin Gothic, for example, or the ClearType series), but if you don’t know the internal structure of an .app bundle, you’ll never find them or be able to use them outside Office.

Basically, it’s really hard to recommend going out and buying this when the alternatives cost you nothing but download time and everything reads and writes Office file formats anyway. It’s not terrible, but unless you have some VB scripts in your Excel docs or absolutely need PowerPoint instead of Keynote or LO Impress, why bother?