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Mac and Office
- Thread starter blueicedj
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Simlply put, nothing comes with it unless you pay for it as far as office. It does come with iLife, but I feel it all is about as useful as wordpad is for windows personally (I know others will argue that to the death of me, but it's my opinion). With an education discount the Office package is pretty cheap, and you'll enjoy having it going between university computers and yours.
I assume you mean Apple's version of Office? Mac is a product group, not a company. And the answer is if you want good Office compatibility the Office:Mac or perhaps Neo Office are the way to go.
NeoOffice is a decent product, but for school, you should get the Student version of Office, because that will help you share files with other people - i.e. group projects, turn in assignments electronically, etc. You'll want to run it in the OS X environment, not reboot all the way into Windows just to read a word file. FYI there's a new version of office coming out soon, so Office 2004 is heavily discounted now.
Actually its still Microsoft´s version, not Apple's seeing as how they don't own it. It is also made for Mac, not for Apple, hence the Office:Mac, seeing as how you install it on a Mac, the product group, not Apple, the company.
@OP I've had no problems transferring my files from my Mac to the university computers or vice versa - no formatting issues, no read issues etc. So I would just buy it for Mac, and forget about installing bootcamp and XP unless you have other Microsoft specific programs that you will also want to run.
Microsoft Office Student and Teacher Edition 2004 for Macintosh is what you want. It will have everything you need for school. I just bought my MBP for school too. I recommened buying it from Amazon because you already get the $125 price, and then a $20 mail-in rebate. Buying Office directly from Apple is going to cost you $25 more 
http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Off...0958?ie=UTF8&s=software&qid=1185307127&sr=8-1
http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Off...0958?ie=UTF8&s=software&qid=1185307127&sr=8-1
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You might want to hold off getting Office:Mac 2004, its very good and has some extra features not found in the PC version, however it is PPC not Universal.
wait until the next version comes along and spend your 125 bucks on the newest and Universal version.
Macs come with a 30 day trial version. I am not sure if you just need to enter the serial to convert it to the full version or if you need to reinstall.
If you do not need it asap then definitely wait until you do before you buy and in the mean time just use the trial version.
I don't want to promote piracy so i'll just say...
cereals are easy to find
wait until the next version comes along and spend your 125 bucks on the newest and Universal version.
Macs come with a 30 day trial version. I am not sure if you just need to enter the serial
to convert it to the full version or if you need to reinstall. If you do not need it asap then definitely wait until you do before you buy and in the mean time just use the trial version.
I don't want to promote piracy so i'll just say...
cereals are easy to find
Don't buy Office from Apple.
Don't get the "Student and Teacher Edition".
Check with you college bookstores, IT shop, and department. Most schools buy volume licenses for students to purchase.
My copy of Office was $17 from the campus IT shop.
Your tuition has already paid for it, so why not benefit?
Don't get the "Student and Teacher Edition".
Check with you college bookstores, IT shop, and department. Most schools buy volume licenses for students to purchase.
My copy of Office was $17 from the campus IT shop.
Your tuition has already paid for it, so why not benefit?
Listen to this man (woman?) and save money. You campus IT store probably ill sell you a copy of Win XP and/or Vista pretty cheap as well - for bootcamp purposes.
$17 bucks?? My Campus Computer Store sells it for $99!! I am gonna wait till the newer Office comes out...for now, I am using NeoOffice.
Many schools are still using the older versions of Office on their networks. I know that everyone at my school (Florida State University) that has the new 2007 Office on Vista has to convert their documents to .rtf's if they want to print at school, which is a pain in the butt.
$17 bucks?? My Campus Computer Store sells it for $99!! I am gonna wait till the newer Office comes out...for now, I am using NeoOffice.
What your school is selling you is different. Your school is selling you a single license that you can use forever (well, as long as possible anyways). The $17 deal is temporary, and when you leave school, you won't (at least technically) be able to use it again. Of course, for a poor college student, it's still the best deal around and you should take full advantage of it if you can.
This also makes buying increddibly difficult. I'm still not sure which one to go with (although I think I will be going with 2008). I wish Microsoft would introduce backwards-compatability. I think its monopoly status allows it to get away with this
They haven't announced a firm date yet but it's looking like late 2007. I don't know where you got 2008 from.
Word and Excel: No problems.
Powerpoint: I've heard the Mac version has some compatibility issues with files created with Windows. Things like reading embedded media. I don't use Powerpoint, so I've never experienced these things first hand. Maybe someone else can chime in on issues they've found.
Access: I don't you didn't list Access in the initial request, but just in case you were thinking of using it, understand that Access for Mac does not exist.
Powerpoint: I've heard the Mac version has some compatibility issues with files created with Windows. Things like reading embedded media. I don't use Powerpoint, so I've never experienced these things first hand. Maybe someone else can chime in on issues they've found.
Access: I don't you didn't list Access in the initial request, but just in case you were thinking of using it, understand that Access for Mac does not exist.
Why not just set the default save formats to be the Word 2000-2004 compatible formats? AFAIK, this is easy to do, has relatively little downside, and takes less than a minute. Cuz otherwise, get used to the world of managed IT. Why on earth would the university bother to go and install Vista or 07 on their computers when they offer very little value?
There are a couple of issues.... (1) fonts -- Windows and OS X have some different fonts installed. This is usually more of an issue when you go OS X -> Windows, because Windows doesn't have as many licensed fonts. (2) Image files -- this has to do with some quirks about how images are embedded in a file. If you take an image and you drag and drop it in OS X, for instance, it gets dropped into Powerpoint in such a way that Powerpoint believes it needs Quicktime to render the file. This is transparent in OS X, but if you don't have QT on Windows you get an empty box in place of the image. Usually, if you insert images using the insert picture from file option in the menus, this is also pretty much a non-issue. It seems to be more of a problem with Windows reading OS X PPTs (without QT) than vice versa. I'm not sure about video compatibility between platforms. Oh, the other minor thing is that Office 04 has some Quartz-based transitions that Mac users like (like the cube transition) that aren't in Windows. This is pretty transparent -- you don't get the cube, but otherwise, it behaves like you'd expect it to.
I have heard a lot of negative about Excel for Mac. Primarily about keyboard shortcuts and soem fx stuff. I for one am going to play it safe and get XP / MS Office for now since I rely heavily on MS Office and don;t want any chance of compatibility issues.
well the reason for this is if they update their systems every so often, they would need to be installing Vista. By 2008 Dell isn't even going to sell computers without it. I know in the corporate world the computers are updated on a regular bases, so are forced to buy vista based computers.
I use Office 2007 here at work and at home. The new Word format is .docx, but you can save your files to .doc so that older versions of Office can open them.This also makes buying increddibly difficult. I'm still not sure which one to go with (although I think I will be going with 2008). I wish Microsoft would introduce backwards-compatability. I think its monopoly status allows it to get away with this
It's a simple setting when you go to save your document. There's no need to save it in .rtf.
Dell won't sell *you* a computer without Vista on it... when you are buying 10,000 licenses, the matter is somewhat different.
Not to mention that the vast majority of these computers are imaged by the IT staff based on available licenses anyway. It's fairly typical for everything Dell ships on the computer to be immediately wiped off, first thing that's done with the computer. We'll see when 2008 rolls around.Dell won't sell *you* a computer without Vista on it... when you are buying 10,000 licenses, the matter is somewhat different.
This is true. When I bought 50 computers from Dell, they were more than happy to sell me a Windows 2000 machine long after they officially stopped selling them.
FYI: Dell hasn't switched their own computers (that the employees use) over to Vista yet. That's how much confidence they have in the OS. My buddy that works there tells me they're scared to death of it.
Eh, they probably just have unrealistic expectations like expecting it to be compatible with their corporate apps, support their hardware, and be stable.
Either that or they were waiting for better iTunes support so they can use their iPods and iPhones!