M$ Office on a macbook-the best way to run it.

[johnsy]

I have a problem. My friend is soon to be mac convert (white macbook). The problem is that she is a hard core M$ Office user (particularly Word). I hate Word and all other crap M$ produces. But this is not a place to vent out. The problem is this- she has some important documents written in M$ Office 2003-2007(mostly) and all formatting looks like crap using other program than M$ Office. I tried NeoOffice, Pages, Bean, Open XML converter and so on. Using any other program than M$ Office makes these documents to look awful. I believe it is because she used a lot of macros, tables and so on. To redo all these documents is out of a question. So my ideas how to help her are these:

1 Office 2008 for Mac.
Problem is that Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications is not supported on 2008 Mac version and I suspect all her documents will look like crap.

2 Windows XP (Vista basic)+ Office 2007 using Bootcamp.
Sorry it might be a dumb question, but I was not using Windows OS for a while and not sure if XP and Office 2007 is compatible or can Vista Basic be used with bootcamp?

3 any other suggestions?
Thanks!

 

[lomolomo]

Besides the s* of M$ and their inexistent of document and software standards....
You could do the following:

Use parallels to run Windows, so you don't have to reboot OSX when you need to use Office
(http://www.parallels.com/eu/products/desktop/)


or you use an old copy of office 2007 which supports VB- However I think Steve Balmer will soon ship the next office which supports VB again, maybe even before he gets fired....
http://www.pcworld.com/article/145814/microsoft_to_bring_back_visual_basic_in_office_for_mac.html

http://2010.newsweek.com/top-10/tech-predictions/Microsoft-Pushes-Out-Steve-Ballmer.html

 

[NewMacbookPlz]

The lack of VB shouldn't affect the way the documents are formatted unless she specifically used VB to code her documents.

Hell, Microsoft even has a free 30-day trial for Mac Office: http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/Office2008/trial-download.mspx

Do that first and see how it goes

 

[johnsy]

I personally use VMware Fusion. I tried Parallels, but somehow Fusion worked better for me (personal preference).

I think for a convert to mac (she never used mac in her life besides playing a few minutes on my mbp), bootcamp might work better because if you get a panic attack you might just boot to Windows... However I afraid that she might get stuck with windows...

I personally think that M$ Office is the worst product M$ made (not that they made anything good ). Obsolete, incompatible formats even within different versions of M$ Office.

 

[miles01110]

I personally think that M$ Office is the worst product M$ made (not that they made anything good ). Obsolete, incompatible formats even within different versions of M$ Office.

Office is kind of like most Apple products these days... a lot of people complain about it, but not to the point where they won't buy it. In the big picture there's nothing that matches the functionality of Office, mainly due to Excel.

As for your friend's problem, just go with Office 08 for OS X. VBA doesn't have anything to do with formatting, really, and chances are it'll be fine. Running a virtualization suite just seems like added expense and headache to me.

 

[TheZA]

I personally think that M$ Office is the worst product M$ made (not that they made anything good ). Obsolete, incompatible formats even within different versions of M$ Office.

Sort of like iMovie.

I have OfficeMac 2008 loaded on my Macbook, and Office 2007 loaded on XP via Bootcamp. At work I use Office 2007 now with Vista (work just upgraded to Vista from XP!). On my Macbook, my preference is to work the Mac side whenever possible. I very rarely find something that will simply not work on the OfficeMac programs even if they have been dumbed down from the Windows versions. I would say about the only time I use Microsoft products on Bootcamp is for Visio and Microsoft Project, which don't have Mac counterparts. I would consider myself to be a fairly advanced Word and Excel user, and I don't find much of a need at all for the Windows-side. The Window's side sucks down battery power faster, and I just hate that environment compared to OSX.

 

[johnsy]

I downloaded Office 2008 trial. First impression is not that bad- I briefly used 2004 Mac trial and didn't liked it at all. The most advanced Word function is spelling and grammar checker. I cannot match this feature with any other office program. Was quite impressed. Friend's documents (made with Office for Windows) look fine. My friend would hate to buy it just for Word and might be occasional Powerpoint use. I still hate docx format, because none of the programs will display it correctly and older versions of Word I believe will fail to do that too. Converting from docx to doc using Word, renders different documents. Ribbon "feature" seems not the best idea either...