Office for Mac

You could buy Microsoft Office for Mac.

 

I swap between PC and Mac fairly often and haven't hit many issues.
The Office for Mac site has loads of info about compatibility.

 

In my experience MS Office 07 runs annoyingly slow on a mac (and I have a macbook with 4GB's of ram). I would not recommend it. If you're serious about using MS Office, dual boot and run it on the Windows partition. Can't say much for spreadsheets as I haven't worked with them yet, but I have heard the whole suite is a bit sluggish. There have also been problems with MS Office upgrades on the mac.

Don't get me wrong, you'll live, I just thought I'd point those two things out, because that's what frustrated me when I used MS Office on my macbook. I now use my PC for all word processing tasks.

EDIT: Having said that, I'm sure there's plenty of users out there who haven't experienced a single issue with Office on a Mac.

 

Office for Mac isn't too bad or expensive, but it does not equal Office for Windows, that's for sure.

I haven't had any problems opening my osx documents on the windows side.

I wouldn't let something like that keep you from getting a mac. Just use Fusion or Parallels and continue to run windows applications when you feel the need. I think you'll find that you'll use it less and less. I've been on a mac for 7 months, after spending a lifetime (seems like) on Windows, and I only bring up Windows to run Quicken.

 

You could buy Parallels or VM Fusion or use Boot Camp to use Windows and then switch back to OS X when you want to relax.

 

Since you've probably already got a PC, I'd just keep that around for Excel stuff, and get Office on the Mac for everything else. In fact, if you can find a copy of Office 2004 for the Mac, that'd probably be the one to get.

Many serious Excel users use macros, and they aren't supported on the current Mac Office (though they'll be back in the next version ).

Edit: Oh, and there's always the Parallels/VMware route as suggested above, though you might find getting a copy of Windows XP/Vista and Office 2007 is all you need.

 

Yes, Excel is infuriatingly slow.

 

You need to know that Macros don't run in Office 2008 for the Mac. So if Macros are important to you (and in a lot of office environments, they are) then Office 2008 is a show stopper. Microsoft are bringing macros back in the next version, but that's years away.

I work in a mixed environment, and I'm on a Mac all day, and I have not run into any problems opening other users Office documents once. A lot of the documents I get are from PC users and I've not had one problem.

Like others have said, don't let Office be a block for your move to a Mac, you can always run Parallels or VMWare.

Good luck.

 

What about Word in particular? Besides the who .docx to .doc issue, are there any compatibility issues going back and forth with Word on PCs?

I will also check out the Mac Office site.

 

I concurr with most of the posters above; don't let Excel alone dictate whether you buy a Mac. For a power Excel user, Office 2008 Excel on the Mac will not be the same as Excel 2007 on Windows, just run it via virtualisation (the free option of VirtualBox works well for me) or Boot Camp.

 

I haven't had any issues moving from a Mac to a PC and back. Everything works well. If you have Office 2003 or older on your PC, be sure to save everything in compatibility mode. However if you have Office 2007, you can't use the XML .docx format. Just a heads up that macros do not work on Mac Office.

 

You should be fine, just try something to Fusion or Parallels Unity/Coherence mode. But if you don't touch macros at all, Office for Mac is all good. An app from Codeweaver, forgot what its called, also does something like Unity/Coherence. CrossOver! That's what its called. It installs Windows programs on Mac. VirtualBox/Q Emulator are free alternatives to Fusion/Parallels both of which cost $50-$80.

 

I've been using NeoOffice is the Mac version of Open Office which is a Free Open Source alternative to MS office. It works well for me (not a heavy exel user though). You can open files from MS Office. It's slow but hey is free.

www.neooffice.org
www.openoffice.org

 

my advice is just buy iWorks

iWorks can edit and use docs, exels, powerpoints.
and they can also export your works into docs, excel or pp if you want

on the other hand regular MS Office 08 for macs doesnt import or export iWork formats

my suggestion is get iWorks the program can go both ways mac and microsoft