MS Office for Windows - performance question under Parallels

I use MS Word for my job, which involves large documents with track changes. I use a 2011 MacBook Air (1.6Ghz i5, 4GB RAM) with OS X 10.8.2 and MS Word 2011 (v14.2.4).

Word is rather sluggish and crashes a lot in track-changes mode - the screen goes blank, I get bizarre network and memory errors, and then it crashes totally and quits. I've lost quite a lot of work over the last few months.

I've been using my wife's PC gaming rig sometimes (3.something GHz i7, 16GB RAM), and Word is super fast (can scroll through a 400 page document in seconds, etc) and very stable.

However it's a pain to keep switching computers.

My question is: if I install the Office for Windows under Parallels on my MacBook Air, will I get Windows-like performance from Word, or is it just going to be sluggish as hell and unstable, like the native Mac version of Word is?

I would rather use Parallels than BootCamp, as I'd like a seamless system without the need to keep rebooting.

I haven't tried it, because it would mean buying Office and Windows (and Parallels), and I'd rather see if anyone else has had similar experiences before I commit.

Thanks!

Well, I took the plunge and am now running MS Office 2010 for Windows in Windows 7, in Parallels 8. It works brilliantly - it's a fraction slower than on my wife's PC, but even so, it is faster and more stable than the Mac version of MS Office. Even simple things like scrolling through documents is vastly superior.

Deleted Mac Office, and will never buy it again. The Windows version is brilliant and runs perfectly in Parallels.