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NbinHD

macrumors 6502
Original poster
One question before i buy my new Macbook Air. If i have a Windows based laptop with Microsoft Office 2010 and a OSX based laptop with Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac, will they be cross-compatible - meaning if i start a piece of work on the windows and want to work on the mac at a later date will it use the same template and convert over - or vicer versa. Do they have and use the templates, etc etc? How different is the UI, easy to learn the Mac version?
 

Abazigal

Contributor
Jul 18, 2011
19,458
21,847
Singapore
It may or may not be an issue, depending on the complexity of your files. They will try to use the same template and all, but the mac2011 version is sadly not 100% with the windows version. You may still encounter minor formatting issues here and there. For example, I can open a document on my mac and find the tables and images all out of alignment because the margins and borders are different.

The UI is also slightly different, but not really enough to bother me.

If you want perfect compatibility, I think the only way is to run office 2010 via parallels.
 

James_C

macrumors 68030
Sep 13, 2002
2,815
1,819
Bristol, UK
The compatibility between Office for Windows 2010 and Office for Mac 2011 is very good. Have not really had an issue with it. Most of the issues related to formatting tend to be related to people using fonts that are supported on one platform but not the other. Word and Excel are usually fine, but you can have some image conversion issues with some documents, particularly Powerpoint.
 

yusukeaoki

macrumors 68030
Mar 22, 2011
2,550
6
Tokyo, Japan
They are pretty good.
Never had a problem here.
In fact the 2011 Office and my friends old Office 2003 windows version worked fine.
 

seveej

macrumors 6502a
Dec 14, 2009
827
51
Helsinki, Finland
99% of the time, you will have no issues, and the UI is less different than between any two windows office versions.

And btw, the Mac version is not incompatible with the windows version. It's the windows version which is incompatible with the Mac version. :D

RGDS,
 
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