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Windows + Office in Mac

D

derbu

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 13, 2014
5
0
I have a Mac Air with OS X. I bought Office for Mac around a year ago.

However, I am still really annoyed by the difference in the shortcuts compared to the Windows I have learnt and used up until now.

What do I have to do in order to have office with the Windows shortcuts? Buy Bootcamp and Office for Windows? What happens to the Office for Mac I already bought?

Any cheaper solutions?
 
You don't "buy Bootcamp", it is already included with every Mac and just provides a facility for installing Windows. You would need to buy a copy of the Windows operating system (like Windows 7 or Windows 8) and install that however, then of course you would have to buy a copy of Office as well.

Before I retired, I ran the Windows version of Office on my MBP because my employer didn't support Macs and at that time I needed some scheduling features not available in the Mac version. My employer already had a site license for Office, so I didn't need to purchase that.

Now with Bootcamp you choose whether you want to boot into EITHER Windows OR MacOSX at startup. After making that choice your MBA will either be a Windows-only or Mac-only machine until you reboot. If you want to run Windows at the same time as MacOSX, you will also need to buy some kind of virtualization software like Parallels.

As far as the shortcuts, I don't enjoy working in Office and tend to avoid it these days. ;) But surely there's a way to define your own shortcuts, isn't there?
 
So you would rather create a whole other solution than learn a new shortcut combination?
 
What shortcuts specifically, control-c, control-v works within the apps, they function like cmd-c, and cmd-v
 
I built a Windows 7 VM and use that for my the windows-specific stuff I need to do for work.

Personally I use VMware Fusion, but VirtualBox would have been sufficient.

Yes - M$ Office for Mac functions a bit differently than Office for Windows, but the basic capability is there and I find it quite usable.

I recently took a new job, and luckily I can bring my own device to work, so I created a VM of my new work-provided Windows 7 laptop and gave it 4 gig or memory. Works like a charm and so far no dirty looks from management. :)
 
Thank you for your replies.

So, yes the answer is that I use many shortcuts that I have learnt from Windows (I am not talking about the simple ones ctrl+c / ctrl+v) and they are all different in Mac Office.

Which one is the cheapest option? VM ware?
 
I'd say the cheapest option is to not buy windows at all, and use Wineskin. Check out this link for info on how to package windows apps as OS X apps. You would of course need an office license though, so if you're getting that, try this method before buying windows and you'll save a few bucks (on both windows license and vm license). Note that it _might_ cause some bugs (wine is still not perfect), but it's well worth a shot before going the VM route :)
 
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I did this last week on my MacBook Air. I recommend using Boot Camp over Parallels for three reasons: The MacBook Air reboots really quickly - it's not a big deal to reboot into Windows or back into OS X. Parallels costs a lot of money and contains advertisements that you cannot turn off, and finally Boot Camp is the fastest way to run Windows on your Mac.

You can find cheap yet legal copies of Office 2013 and Windows 8 online. You shouldn't need to spend more than $180 (Office Home & Student can be found for around $100 and Windows 8 OEM is around $80) total if that is within your price range.

You might also want to check out LibreOffice. I believe that a lot of the key combinations are the same or can be made the same as Microsoft Office for Windows.
 
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