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Office for Mac -- Is it OK?
- Thread starter kenglade
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I have the latest version of office on my Macbook, an i personally prefer it to the windows version on my desktop. I think it is layed out better and you can do more on it.
As for compatability issues, i regularly switch between mac (home) and windows (school), and have never had a problem. Basically, I save the file for a pre '04 computer and it will open on both the newer and older versions of office.
As for compatability issues, i regularly switch between mac (home) and windows (school), and have never had a problem. Basically, I save the file for a pre '04 computer and it will open on both the newer and older versions of office.
*shrugs*
I've never found a need for MS Office in all the years I've been using OS X.
I open, modify, and manipulate thousands of Word docs every year, but somehow I've never felt the need to pay several hundred dollars for commercial software when there are perfectly functional open-source replacements...
I've never found a need for MS Office in all the years I've been using OS X.
I open, modify, and manipulate thousands of Word docs every year, but somehow I've never felt the need to pay several hundred dollars for commercial software when there are perfectly functional open-source replacements...
Also had the same question when I switched to Mac...
As others have said, depends on if you sharing docs with Windows users. In my experience, when it comes to complex docs with all sorts of formating created in Windows, it works best on Office Mac. For example, numbered bullets would all change to "1" when opening the doc in any other program besides Office Mac. For simple docs, any office suite would be fine.
Do what I did...download OpenOffice and NeoOffice, and get a trial version of Office Mac and iWorks, and see on which programs the docs works best.
A far as Excel, its not too wonderful on Office Mac. On a MacBook, there is a smaller screen to work with, and the lack of Home/End/PgUp/PgDown keys make navigating a bit troublesome, but not too bad. And the normal F2, etc shortcut keys dont seem to well, so editing formulas is not so quick...you have to edit formula's in the Formula bar on top. Office Mac also doesnt seem to have the same cell format options as in Windows.
Currently I have Office Mac 2004 as my primary office suite, along with NeoOffice and OpenOffice...just for the heck of it
As others have said, depends on if you sharing docs with Windows users. In my experience, when it comes to complex docs with all sorts of formating created in Windows, it works best on Office Mac. For example, numbered bullets would all change to "1" when opening the doc in any other program besides Office Mac. For simple docs, any office suite would be fine.
Do what I did...download OpenOffice and NeoOffice, and get a trial version of Office Mac and iWorks, and see on which programs the docs works best.
A far as Excel, its not too wonderful on Office Mac. On a MacBook, there is a smaller screen to work with, and the lack of Home/End/PgUp/PgDown keys make navigating a bit troublesome, but not too bad. And the normal F2, etc shortcut keys dont seem to well, so editing formulas is not so quick...you have to edit formula's in the Formula bar on top. Office Mac also doesnt seem to have the same cell format options as in Windows.
Currently I have Office Mac 2004 as my primary office suite, along with NeoOffice and OpenOffice...just for the heck of it
The question is : do you work with people that own PC and have Micro$oft office ? and do you deal with these files yourself ? If yes, then you should purshase it.. otherwise, Openoffice version 3 is sufficiant for you, and it has numerous think that office dont have : databases, draw, etc..
But as far as I am concerned, like people said, i prefer the mac version to the windows version : it offers so much things.. as if micro$oft worked more on the mac version than the windows versions...
But as far as I am concerned, like people said, i prefer the mac version to the windows version : it offers so much things.. as if micro$oft worked more on the mac version than the windows versions...
It takes a little getting used to but Fn+arrow keys gives you PgUp/PgDown/Home/End. You're right, it's inferior to a real numeric keypad but it's as good as it gets. What do you mean by editing formulas only in the Formula bar? I can edit directly in the cell.
What I find aggravating is that it's 2009 and I still have to pick between Exel compromises. Excel 2004, which doesn't run natively, Excel on Parallels, again non native, and Excel 2008, which has no VB support.
I've found it to be very compatible with the rendering. macros, I've not used them on the mac so I can't tell you if that's ok.
The last version of office for the mac I've owned was the 2001 version, since then I found other alternatives such as using NeoOffice. I also use iWork for some light stuff but to be honest, I'm not too used to the numbers interface. I'm more used to the excel interface so I can fly on NeoOffice's spreadsheet faster then numbers (though numbers produces a much better looking spreadsheet).
I'd buy MS office in a heartbeat if they'd do two things. One bring back VBA support and more importantly remove the artificial performance penalty. I remember running a vba macro on a spreadsheet (office 2001). It took in excess of 2 minutes. I ran the same VBA script on my PC, 20 seconds. navigating around and working with office on the mac is slow as molasses. There's no way I'm paying for that when I can get a better product (for free).
Even if you do work with people that use MS Office (as I do), OpenOffice may be sufficient. Its support for MS Office files is quite good, and most users can probably avoid purchasing MS Office in the first place.
It`s a great application man. U should definitely get it. The 2008 version is even better than the Microsoft office for PC . Just decide which will be best for u. cause the `teachers one` is more expensive
Solid application
Solid application
What I meant was on Windows, I can press F2 and quickly edit the formula in the cell. No such luck on Mac. Still cant find any equivalent of "F2" on Office Mac. Can double-click a cell to show and edit a formula. But I usually have big complex spreadsheets with many formula's, so when checking if the formula's are correct and referencing to the correct cells, its easier and quicker to just press F2 to check and make adjustments, and then move on to the next formula, and so on.
Not a major headache, just not as fast as on Windows using F2...unless I'm missing something...
It's pret-ty pret-ty pret-ty good..
Seriously though, since Apple refuses to implement a decent cross-reference tool in Pages, there's no other package for academic word processing. It's by no means perfect, as I find myself constantly struggling with the layout of a document, which tends to shift e.g. pictures around for no apparent reason. Don't even get me started on page/section breaks..
But there's mostly a way around all of the quirks, as long as you can spend a few hours to find the solution and don't throw your computer out the window in the meantime..
[edit]
Oh yeah and starting up Word is so slow that I've decided to disable the Dock icon bounce.. It was just too annoying seeing that ball bounce for half a minute (on a 2.2 GHz C2D Summer 2007 MBP).
Seriously though, since Apple refuses to implement a decent cross-reference tool in Pages, there's no other package for academic word processing. It's by no means perfect, as I find myself constantly struggling with the layout of a document, which tends to shift e.g. pictures around for no apparent reason. Don't even get me started on page/section breaks..
But there's mostly a way around all of the quirks, as long as you can spend a few hours to find the solution and don't throw your computer out the window in the meantime..
[edit]
Oh yeah and starting up Word is so slow that I've decided to disable the Dock icon bounce.. It was just too annoying seeing that ball bounce for half a minute (on a 2.2 GHz C2D Summer 2007 MBP).
Awesome! Guess you do learn something new everyday
Yeah well, when you figure out how to reassign that to a more reasonable shortcut that can be done with either hand, you'll have to tell me.
I've pretty much abandoned Office 2008 in favor of iWork 09. I've been using Keynote for years, but only now do I have I switched over to Pages and Numbers. For my uses, which are graphically-intensive, they're not the better option. Pages now works with EndNote and will allow you to place your graphics where you want, instead of the crappy jumping image placement in Word, and graphing is easier and nicer with Numbers than with Excel.
I've Office for years, both Windows and Mac. The Mac version is....ok.
Currently trying NeoOffice, still in the learning curve but looks good for now, no compatibility issues, ( other than the annoying compatibility check warnings whenever you save a doc ).
Currently trying NeoOffice, still in the learning curve but looks good for now, no compatibility issues, ( other than the annoying compatibility check warnings whenever you save a doc ).
There's a new free add-in to replace the Analysis Toolpack for Office:Mac 2008. For more details, check out this blog post: Now available: data analysis for Excel 2009.
Regards,
Nadyne.
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
Hence why I, when possible, send PDF's to my professors....they get the same exact formatting that I see on my mac
We announced last year that VBA support is returning in the next version of Office. That blog post has plenty of details about it, and links to previous posts that detailed why we had to remove it from Office 2008. I've seen demos of working code for the next version, so it's coming along quite well.
lopoz said:
Make sure that you're completely up-to-date with your Office patches (we're at 12.1.7 as of this writing), because we've made plenty of performance improvements. If you check out the MacRumours threads for each of our patches (they usually get listed in the Page 2 Rumours), you'll see reports from other folks here that they've seen performance improvements with each of the updates.
If you've got a lot of fonts installed, one way to improve the start time of the apps is to turn off the WYSIWYG font menu via the preferences.
Regards,
Nadyne.
My copy is fully up-to-date, but it is still a lot slower to start-up than Word 2004 was.. I do agree that the performance has been improving over the last updates, so I'm happy to see it's being worked on.
Thanks for the tip on the WYSIWYG font menu's, but I'd rather keep them enabled.
I was venting some frustration from having to fight the jumping layout of the paper I've been writing (thank God it's done
).