Office for Mac or Parallels + Office?
Not really much help if you're not a student though; the OP hasn't said he is.
Not really much help if you're not a student though; the OP hasn't said he is.
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Office for Mac or Parallels + Office?
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If you're going to be using Office regularly, and running it in a Windows VM it begs the question why you didn't just buy a Windows laptop 
I run Office for Mac and for the majority of tasks its absolutely fine, with no compatibility issues between the Windows version. The menus are a little different, but you'll soon find your way around.
I have Office 2010 available on a Bootcamp partition (either directly or using VMWare) but very rarely need to use it. The Windows version of Excel is more powerful, and with some additional functionality, but 99% of the time the Mac version is just fine.
Get an Office 365 licence and you can use both and work out which suits you best. My guess is you'll spend more time in OSX
I run Office for Mac and for the majority of tasks its absolutely fine, with no compatibility issues between the Windows version. The menus are a little different, but you'll soon find your way around.
I have Office 2010 available on a Bootcamp partition (either directly or using VMWare) but very rarely need to use it. The Windows version of Excel is more powerful, and with some additional functionality, but 99% of the time the Mac version is just fine.
Get an Office 365 licence and you can use both and work out which suits you best. My guess is you'll spend more time in OSX
Office for Mac or Parallels + Office?
I could understand if you passionately hate Windows 8 - in which case it's quite hard to get a decently specced Windows 7 laptop under ~$1000 (http://blog.laptopmag.com/best-windows-7-laptops-still-available-for-sale) as manufacturers are really trying to sell Win8, then getting a MBP + Parallels seems like a sensible-ish decision, however with some relatively cheap Windows 8 laptops coming out now it wouldn't really make sense unless you really want Win7.
If you're going to be using Office regularly, and running it in a Windows VM it begs the question why you didn't just buy a Windows laptop
I could understand if you passionately hate Windows 8 - in which case it's quite hard to get a decently specced Windows 7 laptop under ~$1000 (http://blog.laptopmag.com/best-windows-7-laptops-still-available-for-sale) as manufacturers are really trying to sell Win8, then getting a MBP + Parallels seems like a sensible-ish decision, however with some relatively cheap Windows 8 laptops coming out now it wouldn't really make sense unless you really want Win7.
May I suggest Pages, Numbers and Keynote? I dropped the Office stuff, even in an environment that ONLY uses Office, about 4 years ago. Now everyone is starting to freak out about 365Live monthly pricing and I happily sit back and build everything in Pages and export it to Word as they need; with absolutely no worries about updates or pricing schemes. I've been accessing my documents ( in the Cloud ) just as you can with 365 for the last 3 years or so.
If you cannot do Pages, Numbers and Keynote; I suggest Open Office as a much better alternative to Office.
I agree if you are referring to iWork '09, but it isn't really feasible with the latest version of iWork. If exchanging MS Office files are a significant priority, the I can't really recommend LibreOffice or OpenOffice. In my experiences, I have found them to be less compatible than iWork '09.
Office 365 subscriptions are a decent deal if one needs to use it on more than one device. $99/year for 5 PCs/Mac + 5 tablets. I bought mine for $65 for the year... a pretty decent price to get the whole household a copy of Office.
I found iWork (Pages/Numbers) to be poor alternatives to Office. The tools, formatting and capability are really quite inferior to Office. With Numbers, I found the compatibility to be quite problematic, especially if you work an office that you send spreadsheets. You don't want Numbers to strip out formulas because they're in Excel but not Number.
Formatting/compatibility with Pages is also problematic, I found that it alters the look of the document. Again if you're in a collaborative environment, you can't have an app that alters the document.
As for LibraOffice (most people use LibraOffice over Open Office at this point), I'd say its ok, but again the compatibility isn't all that stellar.
What if you own a company with 10,000 employees? LibreOffice and Pages make the bean counters much happier. Times are changing.
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If that was the case why hasn't LibraOffice caught on? I think MS has a stranglehold on the enterprise. While LibraOffice is free, a 10,000 employee company needs to have MS products, including the OS, Exchange, and other technologies, so Microsoft makes it very easy and relatively inexpensive to include Office as well.
My company has several thousand employees and we use Office, its a no brainer.
I imagine lack of brains.
Maybe we should begin using our brains.
PS if others are interested and doing a search use "LibreOffice"
And maybe you should not judge without knowing the details of the contractual arrangement and/or the needs of an enterprise
I'm sorry, I seem to have offended you potion seller. No judgement has been made at all. You should refrain from making assumptions. I've only requested that minds should not be closed to change. I do not presume to know anyone's business but my own. In my own business I cannot afford no brainer decisions.And maybe you should not judge without knowing the details of the contractual arrangement and/or the needs of an enterprise
I have no idea what that hypothetical scenario has to do with the topic of this thread.
The exact same your response has, sir.
I was responding to a question not attempting to achieve pundit level. To further assist you, the scenario is not hypothetical, it is mine and points out a hopeful future path away from proprietary purchasing. I understand it is not for everyone, or even 10% of everyone.
The original question asked about Office. I responded asking why not try something else, like Pages or OpenOffice, in case the OP had not thought about these; instead of running parallels or some other Frankenstein attempt at getting an Office suite to run.
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