I am a student and an Office 365 subscriber (thank God for the amazing student deal for it!). For submitting our term papers we upload them in a designated folder in our University's information system. We are not exactly required, but generally expected to submit them as Word documents. The system then converts it to a PDF and some other formats which are available to you and your teacher.
I have had no major problems with using Office for Mac, save the obvious complaints about its antiquity and alien look/feel/interaction compared to contemporary Mac apps, but over the years I have had some minor problems with the compatibility of its docx outputs. Especially when dealing with my school papers, the converted PDFs tend to have some small but noticeable layout differences. Sometimes I would change the document's font or do some changes; sometimes I'd just submit it as a PDF. When speaking to my classmates who use Word for Windows, they said theyd never had such problems. Yesterday I finished a paper, uploaded the docx to the schools web and checked the resulting PDF the layout was off! I tried changing the document in a lot of ways and nothing really helped. Then, I opened the document in Word for iPad, selected the whole document, copied it, created a brand new document and pasted it all in. I adjusted its layout (but there was little to adjust, the clipboard contained all of the formatting, footnotes, etc.), saved it to OneDrive and uploaded the result to the schools system. Lo and behold, everything is perfect now.
I guess the new iPad version uses a different docx specification or something like that, but for me it means one thing I stopped trusting Office for Mac to be 100% compatible while Office for iPad gained my trust. This might eventually change my workflow and habits, unless Microsoft releases the mythical new Office for Mac soon, which would, I guess, use the same, more modern basis. Come on Microsoft!
I have had no major problems with using Office for Mac, save the obvious complaints about its antiquity and alien look/feel/interaction compared to contemporary Mac apps, but over the years I have had some minor problems with the compatibility of its docx outputs. Especially when dealing with my school papers, the converted PDFs tend to have some small but noticeable layout differences. Sometimes I would change the document's font or do some changes; sometimes I'd just submit it as a PDF. When speaking to my classmates who use Word for Windows, they said theyd never had such problems. Yesterday I finished a paper, uploaded the docx to the schools web and checked the resulting PDF the layout was off! I tried changing the document in a lot of ways and nothing really helped. Then, I opened the document in Word for iPad, selected the whole document, copied it, created a brand new document and pasted it all in. I adjusted its layout (but there was little to adjust, the clipboard contained all of the formatting, footnotes, etc.), saved it to OneDrive and uploaded the result to the schools system. Lo and behold, everything is perfect now.
I guess the new iPad version uses a different docx specification or something like that, but for me it means one thing I stopped trusting Office for Mac to be 100% compatible while Office for iPad gained my trust. This might eventually change my workflow and habits, unless Microsoft releases the mythical new Office for Mac soon, which would, I guess, use the same, more modern basis. Come on Microsoft!
