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ceezy3000

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 10, 2009
447
0
The Valley!!
so ive been searching around the web and i cant find a trial for this, i've looked everywhere! i heard this is buggy so i want to try out beforebuying, help me out homeboys
 
I don't think there is a trial for Mac. I know there is a trial for iWork '09. I would much rather suggest buying that because there are no bugs, its cheaper, and its not made by Microsoft. You can also get NeoOffice for free if you want.
 
No trial published that I know of, at least not publicly. After paying 148 for the student edition today, I really regret it. Don't spend the money on it, it's not very glamorous.
 
There used to be a trial for this but they stopped doing it around March 2008. When I went to buy my macbook in March last year, the guy at the apple store told me there was a 30 day trial, when I got home to search for it, it was not there. I called up Apple to ask where I could get it and they told me it was removed only 1 day before I purchased my mac.

I went and bought the full copy for £99 and as someone else posted earlier, really regret it. Go for iWork! It is so much better (and cheaper). iWork '09 is amazing, got it last week, very impressed!

Hope this helps :)
 
Just use iWork 09, Office is still just as buggy as it always was, it just has a new interface now, it's pretty much an equivalent of Vista...
 
There is no trial version, at least not legally.

I have been using Office 2008 very extensively indeed for many months and have not had any problems personally. I'd say it depends if you need it. OpenOffice, iWork and Office all have their varying degrees of suckage and their varying plus points. I need Office (and I tried the competition a lot first) in my particular line of work.

Are you in the UK and in education? If so, software4students.co.uk will probably sell you Office 2008 Mac for something like £36 which softens the blow quite a lot! they're legit - you can find a link to them from microsoft's own promotions site.
 
It's all very well saying don't use Office 2008 and to get iWork instead, but a lot of us (myself included) need Excel for work. When I do eventually get my Mac, I'd love to not buy any Microsoft products, but I'll have no choice.
 
I tried using Iworks, But using excel, iworks does not convert the document exactly as it was in excel. I only use basic spreedsheets, I figure most of the issue was in formatting. but try as I might, i cannot get the documents to look or react the same in "numbers" as it does in excel. The closet was neo office. I would love just to use Iwork, but it just doesnt convert the files properly.
 
I tried using Iworks, But using excel, iworks does not convert the document exactly as it was in excel. I only use basic spreedsheets, I figure most of the issue was in formatting. but try as I might, i cannot get the documents to look or react the same in "numbers" as it does in excel. The closet was neo office. I would love just to use Iwork, but it just doesnt convert the files properly.

That's unfortunate for you. With your loyalty to MS Office it will always remain the "standard". While I agree that some things don't convert "perfectly" it's usually very miniscule. I use iWork 09 when I use Keynote to play PPT files it may have a very slight change but for the most part it's about the same.

Unless you are in a corporate environment where you exchange files back and forth then using the same office suite would make more sense, other than that, slight conversions won't make much difference. At least Apple's office suite CAN read and convert MS Office files.
Sorry, but your loyalty to MS Office will keep MS very wealthy. You have to change at some point.
 
I have the edu discount MS office 2008 but to be honest most of the time I prefer OpenOffice which I got because my wife uses it at work.

I'd never thought to download it before but its not bad. Still has bugs like anything else but it is free.
 
That's unfortunate for you. With your loyalty to MS Office it will always remain the "standard". While I agree that some things don't convert "perfectly" it's usually very miniscule. I use iWork 09 when I use Keynote to play PPT files it may have a very slight change but for the most part it's about the same.

Unless you are in a corporate environment where you exchange files back and forth then using the same office suite would make more sense, other than that, slight conversions won't make much difference. At least Apple's office suite CAN read and convert MS Office files.
Sorry, but your loyalty to MS Office will keep MS very wealthy. You have to change at some point.

Trust me my loyality lies with Apple, The other issue i have is printing. for life of me i canno find an option to fit the spreedsheet to one page. The documents i use are slightly bigger than a printed page. in MS under format palette i simply hit a box to centre, and fit the sheet to one page...i cannot find this option on numbers.
 
While I agree that some things don't convert "perfectly" it's usually very miniscule. I use iWork 09 when I use Keynote to play PPT files it may have a very slight change but for the most part it's about the same.

It's actually not. Complicated cell referencing, formatting, conditional formatting, printing, and all of the various dicking around both iWork and MSO '08 have done with the GUI add up fast.

Unless you are in a corporate environment where you exchange files back and forth then using the same office suite would make more sense, other than that, slight conversions won't make much difference. At least Apple's office suite CAN read and convert MS Office files.
Sorry, but your loyalty to MS Office will keep MS very wealthy. You have to change at some point.

A corporate environment... you mean that market to which the majority of the MSO licenses are sold to? Everybody knows that MS's cash cow isn't the average home user.
 
That's unfortunate for you. With your loyalty to MS Office it will always remain the "standard". While I agree that some things don't convert "perfectly" it's usually very miniscule. I use iWork 09 when I use Keynote to play PPT files it may have a very slight change but for the most part it's about the same.

What this tells me is that you hardly scratch the surface of what Office apps can do. For you, iWork is sufficient, and so is OpenOffice and all the rest. Which is great. For some of the rest of us, this is not acceptable (and downright insulting for you to imply that that is somehow OUR fault). Various reasons have already been given: iWork and the various free office clones simply don't support a number of advanced features. Yes, many of us don't need them, but there are many that do.

To you, compatibility might not be an issue. But many of us need to share our documents and spreadsheets with the rest of the world, and the rest of the world uses Office. I have a hell of a time working with one friend who insists on importing Word docs into OpenOffice, making his changes, then sending them back to me as converted Word docs. All the layouts are broken and I spend so much time fixing things that I might as well have done the work myself in the first place. I'm looking into Google Documents as a possible middle ground. Also, I'm going to insist that I do all the document formatting myself.

Sorry, but your loyalty to MS Office will keep MS very wealthy. You have to change at some point.

And it's your blind loyalty to Apple that perpetuates the stereotypes that Macs aren't compatible with anything -- because people like you don't WANT it to be compatible.

Look, I don't much like Office 2008 either (I'm VERY tempted to put 2004 back on), but the reality is it works, it works pretty well, and it's what everyone expects you to use. I use Pages whenever I can, and export to PDF all the time, but there is the odd time when Excel or Word or PowerPoint is the only thing you can use.
 
What this tells me is that you hardly scratch the surface of what Office apps can do. For you, iWork is sufficient, and so is OpenOffice and all the rest. Which is great. For some of the rest of us, this is not acceptable (and downright insulting for you to imply that that is somehow OUR fault).
And it's your blind loyalty to Apple that perpetuates the stereotypes that Macs aren't compatible with anything -- because people like you don't WANT it to be compatible.

Watch your tone dude. I don't appreciate the accusation either. Not once did I say it was anyones fault. :p

My point is the reason why people say that Windows has more software (and frankly it does) is because some developers refuse to support the Mac OS. Well if the customers do the same thing like buy only the Windows version of certain software then those customers are being loyal to one platform because they think it's the "standard" thus increasing more reasons for developers to stay away from the Macintosh platform.
 
My point is the reason why people say that Windows has more software (and frankly it does) is because some developers refuse to support the Mac OS. Well if the customers do the same thing like buy only the Windows version of certain software then those customers are being loyal to one platform because they think it's the "standard" thus increasing more reasons for developers to stay away from the Macintosh platform.

Apple really has nobody to blame for this situation besides themselves.

If company A makes it extremely difficult for developers to write software for their operating system, gets into massive financial trouble, and continues to use proprietary hardware and software that is only now starting to open up...

...competes with...

...company B, who fully opens up their operating system to all who want to write software for it, standardizes hardware, and generally makes a developer's life easy in terms of compatibility...

Who do you think the developers are going to flock to?

And the situation now is mainly due to all of those companies that developed for company B whose programs have turned into massive beasts with millions of lines of code. For most of them it's not worth it financially to go through and make it compatible with OS X, and since a main selling point of Apple machines these days seems to be "they can run windows" why on Earth would *anyone* bother?
 
Trust me my loyality lies with Apple, The other issue i have is printing. for life of me i canno find an option to fit the spreedsheet to one page. The documents i use are slightly bigger than a printed page. in MS under format palette i simply hit a box to centre, and fit the sheet to one page...i cannot find this option on numbers.

Numbers Toolbar > View > Show Print View.
Delete all columns and rows not required for the table > use the icons on the bottom of the print view window to change between portrait & landscape view and there is also a slider to change the scale to fit the page.
Drag the table to where You want to put it on the page,
S.
 
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