How does Office 2004 work with Office 2003/2007?

[swingerofbirch]

I am taking an online intro to software design class. The teacher is sending out assignments in Office 2003 format. I am opening them in Pages 06 and filling in the answers and sending them back in PDF format. Well, turns out he doesn't like PDF.

The thing is that I think he has special "fields" for fill in the blank and other "fields" where I am supposed to initial to indicated I promise that I have read a chapter in the book for example. Those fields don't show up in Pages, so I just draw a text box with a red border and enter my initials, or enter in the text for the fill in the blank where this macro field is supposed to be.

I am a little annoyed at the teacher as it was never mentioned until we got our first assignment that these files would be in Office 2003. He said it slows him down to read the PDF files and wants me to use Office. I GUESS I can get Office 2004--but I want to make sure that would work with these Office 2003 Macro fields etc? Later on I may be sharing files with students who are using Office 2007--anyone know if that is Office 2004 compatible?

Argg---I hate proprietary standards!

EDIT: the other reason I don't want to get Office 2004 is that I have an INTEL mac, so it's like buying lameware, IMO

 

[vanmacguy]

My company uses Windows and I use a Mac at home.

We were asked to fill out a complex Excel spreadsheet and I sent it to myself to do at home and pretty much none of the macros and special formatting worked on Office 2004 on the Mac.

Now I'm not saying that no macros will work, but certainly the ones on the workbook I tried didn't work.

Sorry.

 

[rogersmj]

I hate Office 2004 for Mac so much that I basically keep a Windows XP Parallels virtual machine running solely for using Office 2003 (Office 2007 is OK, but crashes on me too much). With Coherence and everything it's a good solution for occasional use, and it guarantees you'll be compatible with anything a Windows user throws at you. And Office '03 runs faster through a VM than '04 does on the Mac natively.

 

[geofflilley]

My company uses Windows and I use a Mac at home.

We were asked to fill out a complex Excel spreadsheet and I sent it to myself to do at home and pretty much none of the macros and special formatting worked on Office 2004 on the Mac.

Now I'm not saying that no macros will work, but certainly the ones on the workbook I tried didn't work.

Sorry.

I'm in a similar situation as vanmacguy (I use both a PC and Mac at work, and a PC and Mac at home), but I have certainly found that macros and special formatting make life extremely interesting. Things I can tell you from experience:

• Macros can and will work between Office 2003 and Office 2004. Exceptions are macros in 03 that make references to the Win32 API, hard-coded file paths (i.e., C:\Templates), and the registry.
• Any spreadsheet that you or a co-worker created on a Windows version of Excel that has ActiveX controls (combo boxes, calendar controls, radio buttons, etc), you open on your Mac at your peril. My crash rate with this type of spreadsheet is high 90 percent.
• If you create a Pivot Chart in 03, you won't be able to edit it in 04.
• Most formatting, I've had little trouble with; colors can look different sometimes, though.

On the whole, I would say that 03 and 04 workbooks can get along most of the time. The narrow exceptions I've run into are stuff that not everyone I work with messes with.

 

[Sayewhat]

Not trying to get to off subject of Office, nor hijacking but does NeoOffice's spreadsheet run the macros that Office 04 can't?