Office for Mac, or in Fusion?

Office will run fine under a virtual machine.

Pros: Absolute, 100% compatibility with Windows. Nothing at all to learn

Cons: It's not a Mac app.

My company's license with Microsoft allows us to purchase Office for personal use at $10, so I have Office Mac at home. I use Outlook for mail (really don't like Apple Mail) and Word and Excel for personal use. But office stuff I use my MS version while remoting into my work computer.

I got Office for $10 through the home use program. I hate it. I prefer Pages, Numbers and Keynote or (freeware) LibreOffice.

I have win xp and win 7 virtualboxes but almost never fire them up. If you decide you want the windows version of Office, I suggest virtualbox (freeware) or vmware or parallels over bootcamp. BTW you still need a windows license.

When I went Mac, I went cold turkey and cut all ties with windows for home use. I have windows at work if I really need it and I have those virtualboxes for rare tinkering.

For me....

if you want full compatibility go with the Office Windows version in a virtual machine. One upside is VMs eat up a big chunk of computer resources (RAM, HDD and so on). Also, check if your peripherals work nice in the VM version (scanners, printers and so on).

GeoffWillis said:

I also went "Cold Turkey" as far as personal use, but since I work in an "Office" environment, I need 100% compatibility for work products (Proposals, white papers, tech reports...). I will probably buy a copy of Pages, you can't beat the price, but will have to have word/powerpoint/excel as well. Just trying to determine which approach is better, "Native Mac", or in a VM? Intuitively, I would think using Office for Mac would consume less resources (No overhead of the VM). But, is there an advantage of running Office in a windows VM?
Geoff

Click to expand...

If you don't mind littering your Mac with 15 GB or so of cruft, a Windows VM gives you 100% compatibility. A lot of users consider office for Mac better than the version on Windows but again if compatibility is paramount, there's no substitute for having WinXP, 7 or 8 running in a virtualbox with a full copy of Office for Windows.

I have heard that Office runs quite well in Crossover, which is an emulation environment based on Wine and you don't need a Windows license and while Crossover isn't free, you don't end up allocating as much disk space to Windows.

As for resources, we are talking about word processing here. I did my Master's degree on a 25 Mhz 386 computer. That would easily run inside a VM on any smartphone these days. So yes a VM uses more resources but it's no big deal as MS Office (or any other Office app) doesn't require much resources.

If you want the "cleanest" setup, Office for Mac is a good choice but there have been compatibility issues over the years. For instance, there was a version that did not understand MS Office VB macros. I believe it was 2008. So the choice is up to you. Take the simpler, cleaner route of using Office for Mac and assume the risk of the rare and occasional compatibility issue, or deal with installing a Windows VM on your Mac and use Office for Windows.

I have both, but for reasons unrelated to yours so I won't go into that.

I'd say there are two reasons to run Office for Windows: (1) if you need Access or (2) if you plan to do a lot with VBA in Excel.

Mac versions of Office do not have Access. If that's a requirement, you have no choice. However, you didn't mention Access in your original post, so I'm guessing that's not a factor.

Office for Mac supports VBA. If you'll just use it to automate calculations, using and outputting data in Excel cells, you should be fine. In my experience, though, there are some low-level incompatibilities in interface elements and things like building graphs by fiddling with their parameters. It's probably possible to create a VBA application that does these things and is truly cross-platform, but it may be a hassle you'd rather avoid.

Other than those, if you're just going to do standard things with Word, Excel and PowerPoint, I'd go for the Mac version for system-wide consistency. One difference you may notice is that font metrics on the two are slightly different. This can affect line breaks, page breaks and so on when a document is moved from one platform to the other, in either direction. Slide text that fit nicely may spill outside the desired area, hide or get hidden behind a graphic, and other things like that. It won't happen often enough to be a problem, but you should be aware that it can. (In Word, if the people who create documents know how to use formatting tools, it won't hurt the appearance of a document even though it may change it. The problems show up when people do things like using repeated spaces for horizontal formatting or repeated returns for vertical formatting. That may be a mark of their inability to use the software properly, but it does happen.)

It depends on what applications you use and how much you collaborate with other users.

In Office 2011 for Mac, Microsoft really improved the compatibility with Office for Windows 2010. If your main focus is Word processing (word) with some spreadsheet and powerpoint use the Office for Mac is fine.

If you are a heavy spreadsheet user (I am an accountant), then you may want to consider the Windows version operating in a virtual machine. The reason is the calculation engine in the Mac version of Excel, is noticeably slower than the Windows version. You will only notice this if you have large pivot tables or spreadsheets with lots of lookup formula.

The other area is different standards of embedded graphics in Powerpoint between Mac and Windows versions office. Also differences in Fonts between the two platforms. This can mean that moving between the two OS's can cause small visual differences - that normally are most visible in Powerpoint.

Don't get me wrong most of the time compatibility is fine, but from time to time you will come across small differences that will require a little tweaking.

Office for Windows runs fine under a virtual machine like Parallels, and you can run Parallels in 'coherence' mode, which actually hides the Windows UI, and makes running office feel like you are running it native on OS X, with full access to all your local OS X files and folders.