First Encounter -eq First Blog Post

First off, what is ‘-eq’? It means equal in Powershell; I have to do something different to have Advanced in the name. While writing my About page’s content, I was using Apple’s Pages program; why not it’s free. I’m using a Macbook as my primary computer and I don’t have Office installed. While I was enrolled in school, I was given a free O365 subscription which was great. Then after graduation that went away. I don’t feel tied enough to Microsoft to pay for it, especially with all the other options these days. I have a Google workspace account to which I had saved my pages files. I want to keep my files off my computer in case I need to switch devices and to keep space free on my laptop since it’s my personal machine.

Why not just save it in iCloud and you can log in from anywhere and work on Pages? I thought about this, but the iCloud free tier is only 5GB and while that is enough for now I’m thinking it will begin to shrink quickly. Also, Apple’s formats are less flexible, when you enter their ecosystem you are locked in. 

I didn’t realize my issue until the next day. I couldn’t open the ‘.pages’ file in my Google drive; back to the drawing board. I want to use GDrive because I have already paid for more drive space – this is why I’m not paying more to upgrade my iCloud space. I also started a numbers file and a keynote file, all saved to my Google drive. I personally like having localized apps vs web-based. My experience has been that the application has more features than its web counterpart. That could be wrong, if it is then it just means features on the web are more difficult to find, either way, I like a local application. It was easy enough to export my pages file to a docx, which Google will read, open, and edit, which is how I quickly moved through the issue.  See the picture below:

While there is a convenient export option, I don’t want to be doing this every time, so how to proceed?

There are four options I’m considering. One is to continue using the Apple apps that are fully functional and free, the second is to use Google’s provided office suite, the third is Microsoft, free if you use the office products online, and the fourth OnlyOffice.

I’m going to wrap this up and I get a few write-ups, I’ll post about which I made the decision! As of writing this, I haven’t made the call, I want to give each a try before I just give a recommendation.