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Office for Mac -- Is it OK?

K

kenglade

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Dec 20, 2008
278
1
I'm switching from PC to Mac using a G5 running Leopard. My word processor on the PC, of course, ahs been Word, ver 2007. I'm thinking of getting Office for Mac and i would really appreciate some feedback on how Word and Power point work in a mac environment.

One important concern, e.g, is can I transfer my Word 07 macros to Office for Mac 08?

All comments welcome.
 
You'll get lots of opinions, naturally. Office 2008 for Mac works great for me. Word 2007 macros will not run on the Office 2008, as there is no Visual Basic support.
 
GGJstudios said:
You'll get lots of opinions, naturally. Office 2008 for Mac works great for me. Word 2007 macros will not run on the Office 2008, as there is no Visual Basic support.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the quick response. I thought at first that I could get by with out Office but I'm about to get engaged in a long-running project in which everyone uses Word and PP. I understand there are conversion programs but it seems much simpler just to go to Office for Mac.
 
It runs OK. On thing to be careful of is creating Word docs with embedded graphics which you then share with PC users. They can end up with a Quicktime icon that says something like "an uninstalled plugin is required to view this media" instead of the graphics you had placed in. Installing Quicktime on the PC doesn't fix this. When sharing documents with any graphics in them I always open in Office for Windows to see how it looks and often have to re-paste in graphics. If you only share finished documents in PDF you obviously won't have this problem.
 
kenglade said:
Thanks for the quick response. I thought at first that I could get by with out Office but I'm about to get engaged in a long-running project in which everyone uses Word and PP. I understand there are conversion programs but it seems much simpler just to go to Office for Mac.
Click to expand...
Except for the macros, with Office 2008 you can open, create, modify and share documents with Windows users. I've never had compatibility issues and I do a lot of work with Windows users in Excel, Word and Powerpoint.
 
GGJstudios said:
Except for the macros, with Office 2008 you can open, create, modify and share documents with Windows users. I've never had compatibility issues and I do a lot of work with Windows users in Excel, Word and Powerpoint.
Click to expand...

Oops. One more quick question: Can you create custom dictionaries?
 
kenglade said:
I'm switching from PC to Mac using a G5 running Leopard. My word processor on the PC, of course, ahs been Word, ver 2007. I'm thinking of getting Office for Mac and i would really appreciate some feedback on how Word and Power point work in a mac environment.

One important concern, e.g, is can I transfer my Word 07 macros to Office for Mac 08?

All comments welcome.
Click to expand...

I too think it's just ok, it will do the job, though the windows version feels a lot "snappier". :( It was embarrassing when it first was released, it got slightly better with the recent updates. I think it could be a lot better but your expectations shouldn't be to high if you think that you are dealing with a microsoft product....
 
bmacir said:
I too think it's just ok, it will do the job, though the windows version feels a lot "snappier". :( It was embarrassing when it first was released, it got slightly better with the recent updates. I think it could be a lot better but your expectations shouldn't be to high if you think that you are dealing with a microsoft product....
Click to expand...

I use office 2008 for the basic day to day work, and it works great for me so far. I do notice a few things missing from excel on the Mac but I certainly can get around that though.
 
TheIrishKro said:
I use office 2008 for the basic day to day work, and it works great for me so far. I do notice a few things missing from excel on the Mac but I certainly can get around that though.
Click to expand...
I pretty much live in Excel. What have you noticed that's missing?
 
Best of a bad bunch....

For me its the best of a bad bunch....

iwork is fine but shoots itself in the foot by not having the ability to save MS office document format natively (you have to use export). No VBA support either.

Openoffice /Neooffice is also ok but the user interface looks a bit dated IMO. VBA macros seems to work OK though.

Office is generally slow to open but is fine after that apart from powerpoint which runs like a dog if you have much in the way of 'smart' graphics. Doesn't support VBA macros at all so you can basically forget it.

Much as it gauls me to day this but Office 2007 is a very good product. It escapes me why there isn't a really good competitor on the Mac platform for those of us that need to share lots of docs with the rest of the world. It seems that neither MS or Apple want to put the effort in to get a great product out there. I am sure that if Apple built proper MS office support into iwork they'd get a load of converts.

Given that you need to use office 07 files and macros, then your only realistic option is Openoffice. At least its free.
The only other alternative is MS Office 2004 which is actually quite good, but you'll have to watch backward compatibility if you are using 07 specific features.

Hope this helps....
 
Signal-11 said:
I tried 2008 but went back to 2004 just so I could run VB scripts. :(
Click to expand...

That's interesting. However, I may be able to do without the VB ability to avoid a backward compatibility issue. I have piles and piles of files written in MS 07 but I've saved them all as 'doc" as opposed to 'docx."
 
Other than the annoying things like blank cursor, sluggish performance and hiding behind other apps or following when switching between spaces it gets the job done.
I hate it though. Microsoft products always seem to change little things on you for no reason causing lost time and aggravation.

For instance I was using Word today and on page 3 of my document at the end of a sentence I pressed enter to place the cursor at the beginning of the next line. Instead the cursor jumps a few spaces to the right on the same line. Using down arrow put the cursor on the next line but indented. Backspace brought the cursor back to the previous line. I had to down arrow, then left arrow a few times to do the same thing enter was doing all throughout the document up until this point.
After fidgeting with it for 5 minutes, it just started working right again.

When Apple gets serious with Pages and makes it professional grade I will be the first in line to buy it.
 
22Hertz said:
Other than the annoying things like blank cursor, sluggish performance and hiding behind other apps or following when switching between spaces it gets the job done.
I hate it though. Microsoft products always seem to change little things on you for no reason causing lost time and aggravation.

For instance I was using Word today and on page 3 of my document at the end of a sentence I pressed enter to place the cursor at the beginning of the next line. Instead the cursor jumps a few spaces to the right on the same line. Using down arrow put the cursor on the next line but indented. Backspace brought the cursor back to the previous line. I had to down arrow, then left arrow a few times to do the same thing enter was doing all throughout the document up until this point.
After fidgeting with it for 5 minutes, it just started working right again.

When Apple gets serious with Pages and makes it professional grade I will be the first in line to buy it.
Click to expand...

I totally agree about MS, but right now there doesn't appear to be any choice. Before I was forced by my job to switch to Word I was using WordPerfect and loved it. But i fear it has fallen so far behind by now it isn't a viable option. I don't know if it even has a Mac version.
 
Have you considered NeoOffice? I use that it feels more like an office suite then MS Office. Plus its free
 
maflynn said:
Have you considered NeoOffice? I use that it feels more like an office suite then MS Office. Plus its free
Click to expand...

How about compatibilty? I'm going to be creating documents for Word users. Does it offer many of he features of Word, such as custom dictionaries? Macros?
 
I tried '08 and it was just completely confusing and seemed to be all over the place. It was a weird experience. I too came from a PC to Mac and am one of the few who said that Office 07 was amazing. In fact, i said on my blog that it couldn't be beaten. It was great. But i got iWork for my mac and wow, i really retract that statement. I love it and think its fantastic. It also lets you import and export .doc files.
 
equalsabracket said:
I tried '08 and it was just completely confusing and seemed to be all over the place. It was a weird experience. I too came from a PC to Mac and am one of the few who said that Office 07 was amazing. In fact, i said on my blog that it couldn't be beaten. It was great. But i got iWork for my mac and wow, i really retract that statement. I love it and think its fantastic. It also lets you import and export .doc files.
Click to expand...

Hmmm. That's another one to consider. I'd sure like to get out of the MS chain although, like you, I was pretty impressed with MS Office 07.
 
The main reason (Only reason really) I continue to use Word is that I must have compatibility.
I'm a student and cant take any chances on putting hours/days of work into a research paper only to find out it will not display correctly on my professors PC or lab PCs in an emergency to print or fix an error.

If I were not a student and not working in an environment where compatibility was of dire importance I would drop Word like a hot potato and try the other options.
I'm almost tempted to put Windows on my Mac so I can use Word 07. I will eventually have to use Windows anyway for engineering software if I cant find alternatives top each program, which I am currently investigating.
I'm not looking forward to allowing Windows anywhere near my Mac :(
 
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