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How interchangable are iWork and MS Office files
- Thread starter fjs08
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I have no problem opening .doc files on Pages, but I've had difficulty opening .pages files in Word.
http://www.macworld.com/article/1133922/iworkoffice.html
http://www.macworld.com/article/1133922/iworkoffice.html
Yes, you can. Also, if you ever need to use a DVD drive, you can either buy the Apple USB SuperDrive or use Remote Disc.
As long as you remember to save files as .doc, there's no issue with using Pages. On the other hand, if you have Word and someone sends a Pages file, it can be a real pain.
The general rule of thumb has always been that if you need to share files, don't bother with iWork.
This is simply not true. The problem is not Pages. Pages does an excellent of importing Word files. It does a good job of exporting Word files. However, no non-Microsoft application can be relied on to produce Word documents as final product. In fact, files produced by Word are problematic if the source and destination versions of Word are different.
One should never ever accept Word files from other sources without first proofing and correcting their translation errors in Word.
Shudder... When I was working I remember all the issues just moving word files from one version of Word to another. The only way to be sure is to make sure every system uses the same version of word. Thank god I don't have to deal with that anymore now that I'm retired.
I wish it was available on all Macs, not just selected ones. It would come in handy if an optical drive failed.
It is built into Lion for all machines. System Preferences -> Sharing -> DVD / CD Sharing. Looks like this started with Snow Leopard.
Perhaps that's true for machines that shipped with Lion or SL, but not all that were upgraded. I know for certain that it's not available on all machines for SL. The Apple article states:
I've tested it, and it doesn't work for all Macs, but it would be great if it did. I can't think of a hardware limitation that would prevent it from working on any Mac.
This hasn't been an issue for some time now, files between 2007 and 2010 on PC are 100% compatible in my experience.
97-2000-2003 were pretty compatible also.
"pretty compatible" does not feed the bulldog when it comes to a final document. Based on my personal experience and that of my colleagues, Word 97 through Word 2007 has major issues among different versions. For the most part, these are not issues compatibility, per se. Rather, they are issues of a large number of glitches. Taken separately, each glitch may appear to be small. In a document, however, the combination of these glitches means that a document created in one version of Word must be proofed and corrected in the destination of Word.
Caveat No. 1 All bets are off when it comes to documents with VBA-based forms. For example, I recently had to complete a US Government form in form of a Word .doc file. It did not work properly in Word 2004. It could not work in Word 2008. It did not work properly in Word 2011. It had issues in Word 2007. The only version in which the form no significant issues was Word 2010.
Caveat No. 2 My personal observation is that a significant percentage if not an outright majority of Word users do not know how to use a word processor application. This exacerbates the little glitches that Word is heir to.