My kindest regards to Microsoft and a number of things lost. Help appreciated.

For XLD - advice thread from James n please click

James answer is superb so nothing much I can add ... sorry to hear you had the problems, but always glad to hear somebody is junking Microsoft Office. 

To remove miscrosoft office, drag the folder to the bin and if not required your microsoft user folder.

You are probably an X windows user who worries over registry files, but its simply not an issue on mac. I cannot fathom how you damaged so many other things?

I know nothing about it, but if I was removing the program that managed my email address book (Outlook), I wouldn't be that surprised to see my address book gone, or at least a bit hard to find.

I disagree with Guido. I find MS Office to be pretty useful and have no issues with it. My wife tried to work with the Mac spreadsheet/word processor programs for a while, but the clumsy compatibility with the rest of the world resulted in us just installing Office. Never regretted it. We have a multi user version so it is on all our Macs.

Guido,

thanks very very much, it was in fact James n's post I was looking for.

Garyi,

I have Ccleaner on my MacBookPro, and sometimes use it for de-installations too. I wanted to remove Office because I only need Pages for my writing duties and had a feeling that Office was a bit invasive in some not easily identifiable way. I only selected MS Office and told Ccleaner to de-install it. It appeared it regarded 19.000 files, and among those there went my address book, that was part of Mail and had, apparently, nothing to do with Office unless Office, in an access of zeal, decided to take care of everything it found that included words.

Anyway, the issues with XLD and Playback are less easily explainable. I don't actually know what registry files are, but my Mac is not overloaded with apps, has no rubbish inside, and I take care to have it as clean and efficient as I can.

I had de-installed Office from my Mac another time in the past (and had to re-install it to manage a few files that couldn't be handled by Pages), and nothing had happened.

If someone has reasons to believe that Ccleaner is in any way potentially harmful, please let me know.

Thanks,

Macs

@ James n:

James, I re-configured XLD again following your old post. Thanks a lot. I am sorry if I am not too competent.

Macs

Well, I guess your beef is with CCleaner then not microsoft (don't get me wrong I am not defending them)

A good heads up to other people. If you have an unnatural concern that MSOffice is somehow prying into your life*, do not use CCleaner to remove it.

*I would suggest iCloud has far tighter tabs on You and What You Like than an MS port of office but hey ho.

Just use Open Office  for your Mac ... known as NeoOffice does everything MS Office will do and more and not a penny goes Microsoft ... you can save files in MS Office format for those who still use legacy MS Apps ... though anybody who uses Open Office, which runs on most platforms sees the light and their MS days become a thing of past. I show it to everybody I get the opportunity to. Why give money to that lot if you don't have to is my motto. Give it a go - you won't look back. 

Like most I work in a company where Office is defacto. Nothing else comes close, Neo Office looks like a turd on mac and anything beyond simply formatting or calculations simply does not export to Office well.

If other people use excel, then use excel because its the only answer.

I have had no problems using Pages (bought, licensed), safe that just once opening an old Word file I couldn't have proper margins and had to re-install Office.

I will remove CCleaner.

Anyway, the main issue was with XLD and Playback, and I see no reason why CCleaner should have touched them.

All is ok now. I don't have anything in iCloud, and when I wrote invasive, I wasn't meaning on a personal but merely digital plain. The less I have in my Mac, the less I share, the better. Trying not to end up with a PC being a projection of yourself is a full time job by now.

M.

Haha true enough. I find the bigger risk to be my ipad and iphone, all my emails, photos etc and so easy to loose.

Horse - stable door - bolted of course but...

Some years ago in a previous job I had the dubious honour of project managing the localising (translating) of one of the more popular (at that time) "fix it" applications and I have to say that the one thing I took from that project was *NEVER* to use one of those products on any system that I own or have any responsibility for.

It may fly in the face of popular opinion but I think that Microsoft do a damn good job of writing software and OSs on the whole - it's generally (in my experience) poor drivers written by 3rd party companies (who kow that they'll be replacing a product in 6 months time anyway) that cause the issues and I'm actually amazed that Microsofts products run as well as they do given the shaky foundations (hardware and drivers) that the platform often is run on.

I'm absolutely convinced that the reason Macs got their reputation for reliability was only partly due to them jumping on the back of Berkley UNIX as the basis for their OS but was mainly down to them keeping a consistent and long lived hardware platform and hence being able to develop good, mature and well tested drivers. (Look what happened to the reputation of Macs for stability when they started licensing other manufacturers to produce Macs in the 90's.)

As far as I'm concerned the "proof" of this (if proof is needed) is that my 2010 vintage MacBook Pro is *STILL* the most reliable Windows laptop I have ever had.

Phil

Phil.. I agree I use commercial as well as consumer MS software and it is of a high quality and usually works well. Nothing is perfect, but they are superior in terms of quality to several out there in my professional and personal expierience...

And for Guy and the anti-Microsoft brigade use Libre as an alternative. OpenOffice is now under full control of Oracle and that's not a route anyone should take who fears prying/control, or lack of internally driven development.  

I work in a major hospital and fo many years the IT strategy was to avoid licensing and go down the open software route. We used a software called star office for many years as an alternative to Microsoft. 

It was an absolute disaster, and en any documents were sent outside the hospital to other businesses, no one les could read /open th files.

We now havefull Microsoft usage and it's so reassuring that you can do the day to day things without simple nonsense issues

Thanks Andy - I'll give Libre a look. Just installed it. 

It is not the case that I'm anti-Microsoft: one has to admire a company who made a fortune from marketing third rate products. (not an original statement by me but one by somebody who had similar feeling toward the dark empire and sported the initials SJ). 

Yes it is easier to exchange documents if everybody adopts the same lowest common denominator and suffers the same, but you cannot help be sad to see far better products outdone my marketing and other tactics. WP 4.1 for the Amiga from 25 years ago is still preferable to Word - if you want to create documents. Uniplex from the 90s was vastly superior to MS Office.

Yes Apple's rock solid OS was build on Steve's work with NeXT, which in turn used a Unix flavour as its underlying operating system and a user interface that smacked of Intuition. [By the way I used to be an ace conflict catcher and I really like System 7 ... bring back HyperCard the world needs it to manage its metadata] 

We have seen some excellent systems not just, the Amiga, but Tripos, Archimedes, Dick Pick, Intergalactic Digital Research, Quarterdeck, Novell, DEC and its ilk obliterated by marketing machine ... it could have been so much better ... ,still the world went out and bought .... so did the world want mediocrity because if that's what they wanted then that's what happened. 

The genius that was Seymour Papert when asked why progress was so painfully slow in the computing world suggested that the abolition of standards would be the enabler for us to leap forward. But here we are in the 21st century with folk still using MS Office: a program that not even now is as good as one release 25 years earlier. 

By the way, why do I need a Thunderbolt cable to get my new hard disk going and why isn't it in the box. At least we all agree who makes the best hi-fi  

Still OS X and iOS with a sprinkling of Linux do me fine. 

Star Office was Sun's Open Office ... sad if Oracle has pushed in there .... bring back Informix. and Ian McNaught-Davis (a true hero). 

So yes Cbr, if everybody had used WordPerfect then you could have happily exchanged documents irrespective of the platform others used - but the marketing machine from the darkness was never going to allow that ..... hmm beginning to sound like a Michael Moorcock novel. Still seems like Meliadus has gone, his empire is fading and I must get that jewel removed (now replaced by McCarthy, of course).... 

All the best, Guy

PS: Tip - If for some extraordinary reason you suffer my fate of some years ago of being obliged to speak at a MS office then take care your and your teams apparel - they are quite fussy and, for reasons I still cannot fathom, disliked out red hats. 

Love them or hate them the fact is Office is the defacto suite of products used the world over. There is simply nothing that comes anywhere near the power of Excel. Word is a turd yes, but again every one uses it, its not unusual for me to get word documents simply to send me some jpegs. 

These other office wannabes are just so utterly terrible on mac, I have had a play with them all. They are all clearly amateur jobs by a bunch of well meaning guys, but they are just terrible. A bit like all these linux variants, and the dross app son them like 'gimp'

There is a reason they are free for sure.

Actually I do believe there was a time when WordStar files started to become a recognised document editor across applications and OS and even many of the keyboard shortcuts were supported across platforms. The only other cross platform alternative was Vi which was a nightmare  for large docs I seem to remember. My first (relatively primitive) GUI OS I wrote for DSP  application software in the 80s was in Pascal and WordStar editor commands were a Godsend for my various editors and debuggers. I later used my GUI/OS it to develop some custom software for a Dentist practice to manage dental records and sold it for some some quite pricey dental work i needed doing at the time... Those were the days..

A bit harsh ... all of critical systems run on a Linux distro - we wouldn't dream of using Windows (with a reboot here and a reboot there, a virus over there and a blue screen here). I don't use Word, but create my documents in HTML and PDF format ... yet to find somebody who can't read them.

I'd agree with you Excel, the 2012 version of Visicalc (how did they get away that?), is the best part of MS Office. Word is just awful and I detest PowerPoint and what that's funny database they use ... have these guys never heard of FileMaker. I used to find Visio useful, but they ruined it. 

Still iOS is slowly taking a grip - they only rival that I find of any interest is the Kindle ....  great web browser. 

> The only other cross platform alternative was Vi which was a nightmare  for large docs I seem to remember. 

WordPerfect ran on almost everything ... WordStar was OK. VizaWrite was excellent and ran on lots of platform VIC 20, CBM 64/128, Amiga ... 

But I love vi (vee eye) my favouriye visual editor .... give me vi and nroff and I'm happy. Word drives me loopy with its limited search and replace function in vi just hit escape and type s/<reg expr_for_old_text>/ <reg_expr_for_new text>/g and it just works [and the wonder hit '.' to repeat a command]... I never got on with emacs ... vi and sed are great tools, you can keep edlin (the best the other lot could muster). 

If I have to write a bit of perl these days I always go back to vi .... 

The earlier Mac OSs were written in Pascal ... then somebody showed Apple C ... horrible syntax ... I like Pascal, but my programming days were mainly with a LISP.

I only answer to this because I have no intention to take part in a pro/anti-Microsoft quarrel.

Phil,

thanks for the post; it's an interesting read. I simply don't know enough but I know enough to know that now it's between Apple and Microsoft, 50 years ago it was between The Beatles and the Stones, let's leave Israel and Palestine out of this of course but in another 50 years it will still be between man and woman..

I was convinced that my issue had been generated by Office; if it's not so, I virtually apologize. It's a fact that when Office is installed on my Mac everything seems a tad slower, but it's probably due to size and to nothing else.

I have removed CCleaner. If necessary I will re-install or update my MacOS. Everything seems to work now. After all, I should be used to this kind of issues, being into Naim since the late 80s and having learned enough about 3rd parties...

Cheers,

Max

Hi Guy -

Of course, back in the day, real men used ex.  :-)

During my years at Sun, I had the pleasure of meeting Bill Joy many times. He is a really good guy, and vi is just one small reminder of his many contributions to the advancement of computing.

Hook