I have been breaking connections with Microsoft in several stages. The first break was with Outlook. There have been a number of incompatibility issues between Outlook and Exchange Server and the Mac operating system. You would think that Outlook would be the best program to interface with Exchange Server, but it is not. We had a lot of sync breakdowns with both Contacts and Calendars. And then there is Microsoft’s handling of Tasks, which do not sync between their various products (Outlook, Microsoft Tasks, Microsoft Todo, Microsoft Project, Microsoft Teams) or which only sync a couple of fields between products. And Outlook tasks would frequently just lose tasks and they would disappear forever. Especially repeating tasks.

So I moved my calendars over to Google/Fantastical, which has been absolutely brilliant, and tasks to Todoist, which is the best task management system for me and has some great features.

Because my boss is retiring, and I am now running my own business, other than giving him a few hours a week for admin/tech support, I talked him into switching from Exchange Server to Google and moved all of our remaining data across to Google, which halves the monthly fees. He’s been much happier with the search functionality and group email abilities (another thing that doesn’t sync across Microsoft products.)

I guess I actually moved away from OneNote before getting out of Outlook. Again, you can’t use the same functions across various operating systems (Windows, Mac, online, and iOS all have different abilities) and I discovered that there is no way to get your data out of OneNote into another system, not even between OneNote Business and Personal. The only way to get information out is to print or copy/paste one note at a time.

So now we are down to just using Word and Excel. I really don’t like the monthly fees. Because boss is retiring, he and his wife may be able to switch to personal or family editions for cheaper, but I still need a reliable Word Processor and Spreadsheet for my business. I have also had some issues with Word corrupting or losing changes on my book files, and losing a session of writing because it decided not to save properly is really a problem.

Dumping OneNote, Outlook, and Exchange Server was very freeing and I have no regrets there.

My editor uses LibreOffice, and there are some occasional incompatibility or bugs that pop up when switching between platforms sometimes. I’ve had times where the files he has sent back to me have corrupted comments, circular links, or are missing portions. So it was natural to try switching to LibreOffice to avoid any compatibility issues in the editing process.

I ran into problems with LibreOffice Write being extremely slow when switching to a directory it hadn’t previously opened (I assume some background indexing going on there,) and with not hooking into the MacOS. I don’t know much about how it was programmed, but it operates like it is in its own world instead of being within MacOS. You don’t get the MacOS context menu when you right click or double-click, it doesn’t work with any Mac utilities or plug-ins, it doesn’t let you use Mac keyboard shortcuts, etc.

Then LibreOffice Calc corrupted a couple of Excel spreadsheets (one of them with over fifty tabs and thousands of calculations that broke). And I just couldn’t deal with that.

Now, I am writing my books as md files within Notebooks App (synced across devices using Dropbox). Each chapter is a separate file, which I then compile into a single book file and convert to docx or odt to send off to my editor. The only stuff I’m still doing in Microsoft Word is my boss’s stuff, including his book which has a lot of index cross-referencing in it. For my stuff, Notebooks and TextEdit do just fine (TextEdit can produce/edit simple docx files) and I use Vellum for my final book production.

Excel is another story. I’m not sure where I’m going to go with that. I have a number of large Excel files with more complex calculations than I really want to learn in another program. I’ve played with Google Docs a bit, but Google Sheets is very slow and clumsy. So for now, I’m still using Word and Excel as necessary.