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99MustangGTman

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Dec 3, 2008
489
5
Germantown MD/ Columbus OH
I'm new to the whole Mac thing, so excuse me if my questions may seem a little dumb. Would it be better for me to buy Office 2008 for Mac or just use Bootcamp and install Windows and run Office 2007 that way?

I am a student and need to use Word a lot to write papers.

The reason I ask is from the reviews I have read on Office 2008 for Mac make me want to question whether I should purchase it or not. I won't be doing anything too complicating on it and 90% of the time I will only need to use Word like I said. Also I would like to use Office 2008 if I could so I don't have to use excess hard drive space installing Windows on here. But let me know what you think. Thanks

-Ray
 
office for mac is fine. don't bother with bootcamp, vmware, or parallels.
 
Office 2008 isn't the greatest piece of software, but if you're just going to be doing some work in Word, it'll be fine.
 
I would call Office 2007 for Windows a somewhat better experience than 2008 on the Mac, particularly the UI items such as the ribbon interface and being able to easily access a format toolbar with just a right click.

However, 2008 is really not bad at all and on my systems that have both, I tend to use 2008 a lot.

Based on that I would say go with the Mac version.
 
I'm new to the whole Mac thing, so excuse me if my questions may seem a little dumb. Would it be better for me to buy Office 2008 for Mac or just use Bootcamp and install Windows and run Office 2007 that way?

I am a student and need to use Word a lot to write papers.

The reason I ask is from the reviews I have read on Office 2008 for Mac make me want to question whether I should purchase it or not. I won't be doing anything too complicating on it and 90% of the time I will only need to use Word like I said. Also I would like to use Office 2008 if I could so I don't have to use excess hard drive space installing Windows on here. But let me know what you think. Thanks

-Ray

If you are a college student, check to see if your university offers some programs for free. Most all of them do with agreements with Microsoft. I got Office 2008 for Mac free thru mine via download or it was like $10 bucks for a disk copy. Plus, most everyone uses it so if you need to trade files or group projects - bets are you will be using Office.
 
Do not consider just getting Word. You would pay almost as much for it as for the full MS Office suite.

If you don't need VBA, then MS Office 2008 is fine. If you need VBA, then MS Office 2007 (Win) is necessary.

While I have MS Office 2004 on my eMac I did not upgrade when I moved to the Macbook Pro early this year. I use NeoOffice/OpenOffice for exchanging files with those who use MS Office (Win). No one knows the difference.
 
As someone else mentioned, iWork is a good suite of software. I bought iWork because it was cheaper than MS Office for macs. So far I like it very much. If you go with iWork the only problem you may have is compatibility if you need to share documents with MS office users. I have never tried to open a pages document using Office so I am not sure if it screws up the format or not. But, I converted all my old word documents into pages with out any problems.
 
Don't forget to watch for sales. While Black Friday (in the US) is done, there are still lots of sales to be had, both offline and online. The street price of Office 2008 Home and Student Edition is $150, but I've seen it under $100 recently.

If you're a university student, look in your student bookstore to see how much they're selling it for. Many universities have agreements with us where they can sell our software for very very low prices to students and faculty. It's a great way to get Office for pennies on the dollar.

Regards,
Nadyne.
 
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