Home Forums FineTunedMac Community Lounge Possible SPAM / Unwanted Targeted Marketing

Had an interesting email arrive this morning listing my "Safe/Blocked Senders List Summary". I immediately parsed it as unsolicited junk mail from a marketing push to get me to enroll in their security program(s) and moved it into my Junk folder.

Then I went to work to determine who they were and where they were based and try to understand how they got my email address so I could close that hole.....turns out the organization which originated that email to me is based in Sunnyvale California, they have a very legitimate business model and web presence, and the hole that provided their marketing approach to me appears to be from Microsoft as I recently registered a new installation of Office 2016 for Mac.

Anyone else here been approached by ProofPoint to establish an email security program? If so, were you also a recent registration for any of the Microsoft Office products?

Is it necessary to register Office for Mac 2016?

I never registered my Office for the Mac 2011 and never had a problem (manually) updating it right up to version 14.7.7 at the beginning of this month. (I plan to keep it right up until I wind up on the wrong side of the grass.)

My experience with registering anything (from coffee makers to apps) has been consistently negative. One seems to get put onto a universal mailing list that one can never get removed from.

You've got to register Office to get tech support, but for no other reason of which I'm aware.

Maybe they bought email addresses on the dark net, i.e. from hackers, in order to take advantage of Experian jitters.

I hadn't thought about that.
On the other hand, Office for the Mac 2011 has operated flawlessly over its entire lifespan — for me at least, with my modest demands — which is something that most products can't boast.

With Office 2016 for the Mac, the installation process has been changed.....you HAVE to have a Microsoft account in order to install the program(s) in Office. It's treated as if it were an Office 365 registration, but you get to have the software installed instead of using the online version(s). It totally sucks! So no longer is the registration process optional, it is now a requirement.

The only reason that I went to the 2016 version is because the 2011 Office for Mac is compiled as a 32 bit program and WON'T BE RE-COMPILED. As Apple moves away from any applications that are not 64 bit, Office for Mac 2011 will become locked out.

It totally sucks! is probably the kindest thing you could say about it.
Either I'll have to abandon MS's Office down the road or perhaps someone will have come up with a hack-around by that time. Since I rarely use other than Word productively, I should be able to find an alternative to suit my needs.
MS's penchant for providing "readers" for those who don't use Office products should suffice for anything else.

As you said, "[That required registration] totally sucks!"

I'm in the same boat you were in...running Office 2011, but since I use only Excel, and for not very complicated purposes, I finally gave Numbers a try yesterday, and it looks like it'll do, although there'll be a bit of a learning curve. (No big deal, but too bad I wasn't smart enough to think of Numbers before I blew $60 on Office. )

And don't forget that Apple's Pages can open MS Word documents as well as save in that format. Ditto with Numbers and Excel.

Thanks for upgrading my post to add that Numbers is able to open Excel docs; my bad for forgetting to mention it.

Wait... Did you just say that Numbers can save docs in .xls format? If so, that makes it even more useful.

LibreOffice and NeoOffice both do an excellent job of handling MS Office files.

NOTE:

• NeoOffice recently switched from OpenOffice to LibreOffice as the underlying codebase because LibreOffice handles MS Office files better
• NeoOffice runs as a native MacOS app

I tried one of those ...Office apps a few years back and was unhappy with both its display of my Excel docs and the fact that I had to install its entire suite of apps...80 MB as I recall.

Also, NeoOffice is now a $30 app, although LibreOffice is free (as is OpenOffice).

StarOffice/OpenOffice/LibreOffice/NeoOffice are and have always been a single integrated app rather than a collection of somewhat related apps having different roots but shipping in the same box like MS Office. The latest release of NeoOffice Professional is 1.25GB, costs $15, and the database function is far more robust than the $30 NeoOffice in the App Store. (No, that doesn't make any sense to me either.) NeoOffice can run barefoot in MacOS, but the database function in NeoOffice Professional requires the Java Development Kit (JDK) version of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and not the more common JVE. If you are into database NeoOffice Professional is well worth a look.

Thanks for that.

Numbers will suffice for my current purposes, but I"ll keep NeoOffice in mind against future need.

This and this explain the price and other differences between NeoOffice and Neo Office Professional.

Numbers has one major avantage over other spreadsheet products, it runs as a native app on MacOS, iOS, and iCloud.

Thanks for the heads-up, but knowing me, you should have appended a to the iOS/iCloud part.

For you and some others the may be appropriate, but given the ownership statistics that heads-up could be crucial to the vast majority of Mac users who also have iPhones and/or iPads and an absolute necessity for tens of millions more iOS device users who do not own a Mac.

Yes, Numbers can export as .xlsx and open Excel documents, .xls or xlsx. Same with .doc and .docx in Word.