A primary reason I am comfortable shifting to a Mac at home after 40 years of using Windows is that so much of my computing is now done online. The primary exceptions are photo/graphics and video editing. Let’s take a look at how my use of productivity applications has evolved.

Word Processing

My first experiences with word processors were in the 1980s with Scripsit and Telewriter-64 on my primitive TRS-80 Color Computer. Later I used Digital Research GEM on the more advanced Tandy Model 2000, one of the very few personal computers that used the 80186 microprocessor.

The first professional word processor I used was a dedicated Wang terminal when I worked at the Oklahoma State Department of Tourism in the summer of 1985. It was next to a noisy 10-megabyte hard drive that was about the size of a washing machine.

A year later, I started working for Scholars Programs at the University of Oklahoma, where I learned WordPerfect 4.2 for DOS on a personal computer, which was a relief to use compared to the venerable Wang. I had Multimate for my Tandy Model 2000 at home, which was reminiscent of the Wang in its features and interface. I also experimented with WordStar, Microsoft Write, and Lotus Symphony. But learning WordPerfect at work led me to get it for my Tandy 2000, and I would end up using WordPerfect continuously for about 30 years.

After coming to Bartlesville in 1989, I eventually had to learn Word to collaborate with some coworkers, but I never liked Microsoft’s word processor, preferring the tighter and far less confusing control that WordPerfect offered. It used embedded codes for functions that you could make visible for precise control, while Word, particularly in the old days, was far more opaque. But Word gradually overtook and then marginalized the superior product. Thus, back when I sold a physics curriculum, I made sure to include editable versions of the student handouts in the Word format along with their true master versions in WordPerfect. I steadily updated WordPerfect until version X7 in 2014, which was the 13th update of the software I used.

My career shifted in 2017 as I went into administration. I was recruited to lead the district’s technology and communications efforts, and a big focus was on deploying Chromebooks for students and teachers. So I made a point of using Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides instead of WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, or Presentations in the Corel WordPerfect Office suite or Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in the far more popular Microsoft Office suite.

For the past seven years, the only time I’ve used Microsoft Word instead of Google Docs has been when editing a document someone else created or for complex tasks like a mail merge, which is still beyond the capability of the free online version of Word and requires the desktop-based application. So while I have oodles of legacy documents in old formats, Google Docs is all I need at home for word processing. Since Apple Pages is free for Apple users, I could also play around with it, but for convenience I plan to just use Google Docs.

I no longer have much use for Desktop Publishing applications, but back in the day I used CorelDRAW, The Print Shop, and Microsoft Publisher. I also did a few small jobs with Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress. The only desktop publishing service I’ve used recently was the online Canva, when I was testing it out to decide if we would set up Canva cloud licenses for the school district.

Spreadsheet

My first spreadsheet was Lotus 1-2-3, which we used occasionally when I worked at the University of Oklahoma in the late 1980s. The “1-2-3” in the name referred to how Lotus was originally billed as an integrated product with spreadsheet, database, and graphing functions. I bought Lotus Symphony for my Tandy Model 2000 at home, which added a word processor and a communications program, but the spreadsheet was the main attraction. Symphony cost the equivalent of $2,000 in 2024 dollars…business software was expensive back then.

I gradually started using Microsoft Excel in the 1990s, and I gained the most experience with it once I started doing the numbers for the teachers’ bargaining team. When I became the Chief Negotiator for the team, I also served on the superintendent’s budget committee. I built complicated salary analyses, picking up a few Excel tips from the district’s directors of finance.

I also learned how to load the Analysis ToolPak in Excel to perform various statistical analyses so that I could show students how to test their science fair project data for statistical significance. I learned statistics beyond the basic concepts of mean, median, mode, and standard deviation in graduate school, where we did the various types of t-tests, Chi-Square, z-tests, ANOVA, and non parametric ones like the Mann-Whitney U Test and the Wilcoxon signed rank test.

However, most of my spreadsheet work is now in Google Sheets. I used it extensively for tracking data and creating charts throughout the COVID pandemic in my role of chairing the school district’s Pandemic Response Committee. I seldom find I need Excel over Sheets, although since it is installed on my Windows systems at work and at home, spreadsheets automatically open in Excel, so when I use Sheets it is mostly files I created myself; I rely on dozens of them in my job.

Presentations

WordPerfect released the MS-DOS drawing program DrawPerfect in 1990. It became WordPerfect Presentations and added slide functionality. I used Presentations for some detailed graphics work from 1993 to 2020, but I never used its slides capabilities. Nowadays I do most such work in Google Draw. Although I use Adobe Illustrator for some graphics, such as district logos, I know very little of its functionality, and most of my graphics work is vector-based drawings, not bitmapped paint stuff.

For slides, I of course used Microsoft PowerPoint, although it could really frustrate me when it came to sound. PowerPoint was very bad about allowing one to incorporate a video or music, but then the sound not working when you exported a file to take it on the road. It was so bad that I sometimes would convert a presentation into a video file that I would manually pause to ensure the sound worked.

I enjoyed grumpy Edward R. Tufte’s The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within, which was useful in avoiding the worst PowerPoint faux pas, although once you read the book, you’ll truly suffer in many meetings.

Since 2017, I have always used Google Slides instead of PowerPoint, although I have also created online interactive presentations with Prezi and Pear Deck.

Databases

The first database I used was dBase III. I was working in Scholars Programs at OU where my boss had paid a student to write a scholarship database for them. That student had graduated, and I got the thankless job of trying to update its programming, having never seen a database before. Thankfully I knew a tiny bit about fields and records from learning the BASIC computer programming language at home and in high school.

We survived the experience, but I was glad when my boss got the funding to pay the university’s COBOL programmers to create a new database on the university mainframe. That was far more powerful, but my boss was angry about the revision costs. He would complain, “If I need to have just one @#$ing letter changed on a screen, I get a bill for hundreds of dollars!”

So when he needed a health fee waiver database which scholarship recipients could access, he paid me to write it in BASIC one summer. I subcontracted my friend Jeff Silver, who was doing database work for a living at company that made trucking logistics software, to help me with the roughest parts. The health fee waiver database was set up and running on a personal computer in the university library for a few years. It was cheaper to pay me to write a database from scratch and buy a computer and monitor to run it on than to pay to build the database on the university mainframe, and that was too long ago to simply have the database on the internet for students to access.

Almost a decade later, the Y2K crisis was in the news because lots of old software used two digits for the year, and the year 2000 meant old programs like that would malfunction. I remember thinking that my health fee waiver database was definitely not ready for the new century. Thankfully, it was of course long gone by then.

I generally found I could handle most of my data storage and manipulation needs using a spreadsheet, although in the 1990s when Bartlesville High School hosted a state Student Council convention, we had to track housing for hundreds of students across dozens of households across town. My former student council co-sponsor roped me into helping by creating a housing database. I either used FileMaker Pro or FoxPro for that, but I can’t readily recall using a desktop database application after that.

Nowadays at work I access multiple online databases on a regular basis, but I have no other need for them.

Getting the Picture

So you can see that I now do most of my work in the cloud. Hence I hope to avoid installing Microsoft Office on my Mac, and if all goes well I plan to not renew my $100 Microsoft 365 Family annual subscription at the end of June.

However, I have 340 GB of photographs on OneDrive, which is the online backup of over 130,000 of my photos that I also have on my Windows PC. There will be more on the photos situation in a coming post.

Meanwhile, happy computing!