Office 2010 compatibility issues in virtual machine??

[bootsanford]

Hello. I am a Mac user, but my job requires the use of Office documents (specifically, Word) with strict adherence to formatting. I've tried using Office for Mac and it works well 95 percent of the time. However, there are those few occasions where words or extra spacing will be pushed together. Unfortunately, this is completely unacceptable for my job!

My question regards setting up a virtual machine on my Mac. Could I run Office 2010 through Windows on say, VMware Fusion and not have to worry about ANY compatibility issues? I mean, would this be identical software as running on a PC or would there still be the occasional issue with compatibility?

I've never had a vm on my Mac before. Does anyone know if an 11" i5 128 Macbook Air with 4G ram would be sufficient? How about battery life? I know that it will suck more battery juice in vm mode, but approximately long could I expect to reasonably work on a document in vm mode along with minimal other applications open at the same time (iTunes, Safari, Skype, etc.)? Should I plan on being near an outlet anytime I need to go into the virtual machine?

Any help/feedback on this would be greatly appreciated. I believe it is possible, but I would love to hear other opinions before I buy the Windows, Office and vm software. Thanks a lot!

 

[Ccrew]

Office 2010 on a Windows VM under Fusion or even Bootcamp is absolutely no different from running it on a dedicated Windows machine.

 

[Hawkeye16]

I agree, although I like Parallels

It will act exactly like you are using a PC and not a Mac if you install Office on the VM.

Thankfully I have not had any of the Mac Office 2010 issues you mentioned because I use mine for my job as well!

 

[johnhurley]

I've never had a vm on my Mac before. Does anyone know if an 11" i5 128 Macbook Air with 4G ram would be sufficient? How about battery life?

As others have said when running in a vm ( any of them ) it is exactly the same software so no compatibility issues at all.

The 4gb of ram is fine to run one vm but it gets kind of tight installing a complete version of win 7 in 128 gb ssd ... it can be done depending on how much space you have available but win 7 takes up a fair amount of room.

You will also need to setup antivirus stuff once you have windows running etc of course.

If you do this I would recommend 60 gb of space for the win 7 bootcamp partition as a minimum requirement and setup and test in bootcamp first before using a vm. The new version of parallels performs nicely although of course virtual box is free.