Using a Mac in an ALL PC office..??

[BG-Mac]

I'm about to buy a new MBP (more than likely waiting for the 17") and work in an all PC office. Which would best suit my needs, Bootcamp or Parallels? Should I run all of my "work" software in Windows? Like MS Office instead of Office for Mac, and PC Quickbooks instead of Quickbooks for Mac? Would the new base 17" run Parallels smoothly enough to be an effective solution? I'd appreciate any info you guys could give me on this subject as I've had a Mac for the last 3 years, but this is the first time I'll be using one for work. Sorry for the rambling questions, just need any advice you may have to give to the sole Mac user in hus office, thanks..

 

[Tallest Skil]

The only argument against Office 2008 for Macs is that it sucks. iWork can read Office files and export to the Office format for compatibility, if you wish.

I assume that QuickBooks, also, is cross-OS compatible. If it were not, I would question which decade we were in.

 

[Jethryn Freyman]

It should work fine, and yes, Parallels (version 4) will run software like this with ease.

 

[Michael CM1]

Get the MBP, buy iWork '09, then buy QuickBooks for Mac. I'm assuming QuickBooks would read the same files that run on a PC. The days of incompatible files are pretty much over since a .doc file is a .doc file, .mp3 is .mp3, etc. etc. The issue back in the day was floppy disk formatting, which is gone with networks.

I'm using the iWork '09 trial and think it's sweet. Pages will read Word documents (.doc) and export to PDF or Word format. I would check with others on here about the interoperability claims, but $79 sure is cheaper than any Office suite.

Parallels and a full copy of Windows XP or Vista will let you run Windows in a virtual machine. It's basically an application running that, when maximized, looks exactly like you're running Windows XP/Vista. I haven't used it, but I saw a demo of it at an Apple Store.

As far as the 17" MBP running all of that stuff, you'll have NO problem at all. There are a lot of horses behind that computer. Plop in 4GB of RAM and you're golden.

 

[darienphoenix]

I'd highly recommend against Parallels for work-related use. It can be slightly quicker and has more features than Fusion 2.0, but it's unstable as hell, and Parallels tech support is abysmal.

I bought Parallels 2.x in 2006 (and then upgraded to 3.0), but have since swapped to VMware Fusion 2.0 and haven't looked back.

Oh, and personally I prefer Office 2007 over iWork or Office for Mac (I run it using Fusion or Bootcamp), but it's largely personal preference. Unless of course you can get Office 2007 free through work, which is probably the case.

 

[hal1984]

Use OpenOffice 3 for Mac. 99% compatibility with MS Office.
And don't use Parallels or VMvare, use VirtualBox, equal performance, less memory usage, free...