I just recently bought me a new macbook. I need mac office for school purposes. Have it just haven't installed it yet b/c I wanted to find out first if this was really true. I heard that if you install mac office it will slow it down and you are just as prone to viruses as a pc. Can anyone tell me if this is true or not?
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is this true??? (will MS office cause slowdown and virus danger?)
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It won't slow down the whole computer at all times, but you might notice the program runs a little slower than most native Mac apps. MS just has this reputation. As for making you susceptible to viruses, this isn't the case at all. A program alone isn't going to have the ability to open up the OS to the same problems that Windows has. No worries.
The answers are no and sort of.
Macs don't generally get slowed down by software "installs." In fact, I've yet to see it in all my years.
As a user of Office, it is possible to be a "carrier" of an MS virus that could go on to infect other Macs with Office, as well as Windows itself. Just to clarify, these viruses do NOT affect the Mac itself, only Office. In that regards, you can simply spread the infection. I'm not sure if the problem still exists with the latest Office for Mac, as macros have been removed, I believe.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
Macs don't generally get slowed down by software "installs." In fact, I've yet to see it in all my years.
As a user of Office, it is possible to be a "carrier" of an MS virus that could go on to infect other Macs with Office, as well as Windows itself. Just to clarify, these viruses do NOT affect the Mac itself, only Office. In that regards, you can simply spread the infection. I'm not sure if the problem still exists with the latest Office for Mac, as macros have been removed, I believe.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
While it sounds like utter crap, there may be a hint of truth. You see Office programs like Word and Excel has the ability to run Macro scripts, these can sometimes be malicious programs that can harm your computer or erase files. However it is extremely unlikely that a normal user will ever encounter one of these, and if you can set your security settings in office to ask if you to enable Macros each time you open a document containing macros. (Under Tools>Macro>Security... I believe).
Also day to day performance of your computer should not be affected at all, I have office 2008 running on my Mac at home and it doesn't impact the system unless I'm running stats through excel (which is very computational grunt work).
Considering that the new versions of Office:Mac no longer support VBA macros, I think you can stop worrying about macro viruses.
Actually Office 2008 doesn't have a VBA editor (a big minus in my book), it will still run Macros on an existing workbook.
Then the only thing that would change is that you have a VBA editor... and then you might want to check your 'launch on startup' applications for Entourage, and delete it!
Seriously, avoid Entourage if you can, complete bloated junk.
Then the only thing that would change is that you have a VBA editor... and then you might want to check your 'launch on startup' applications for Entourage, and delete it!
Seriously, avoid Entourage if you can, complete bloated junk.
That's not entirely true; there is a difference b/w 04 and 08. Running Office 04 could cause some performance issues because it doesn't run natively on the intel macs. Office 2008 runs natively on both Power PC and Intel, and in my experience you can really see a performance difference.