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Word Processor

Cromulent

Cromulent

macrumors 604
Original poster
Oct 2, 2006
6,829
1,132
The Land of Hope and Glory
First a little background, I am about to start a Creative Writing degree in September so as you can probably imagine a word processor is going to be the single most important piece of software on my computer for me.

I have been using Neo Office recently and while I think it is perfectly acceptable for day to day tasks and even some long winded writing it feels clunky and slow. I also had a rather nasty and painful experience when I tried to send a document to someone using its save in word format option. Given all this I have decided to get Microsoft Office as it offers the best in terms of compatibility.

I have a Mac Pro which has boot camp installed and setup but the question is when will the Universal version of Microsoft Office be released for the Mac? Is there any information available?

If it is before September I guess I will be forced to get Office for Windows but hopefully the Mac version will be out before this.

On a related note, are there any problems transferring documents from Word on the Mac to Word on the PC? Does it lose its formatting at all?

Thank you for any help.
 
Cromulent said:
....On a related note, are there any problems transferring documents from Word on the Mac to Word on the PC? Does it lose its formatting at all?
Click to expand...

In general the cross platform thing works fairly well with Word documents, however, you may run into the occassional formatting issue. If the formatting is crucial to you and the other party is only going to read your document, then sending it as a PDF file is a surer way to protect the formatting
 
If you want to just do a ton of writing, TextEdit (which comes on every Mac) does a fine job of being very simple, gives you enough formatting options, and can save files as Word documents. Why download anything else when you already have this? I use it pretty much every day for essays and reports at school. Learn More About TextEdit

Is Word really so important that you'd install Boot Camp just to avoid Rosetta?
 
CEAbiscuit said:
Try Neooffice. Open source, office compatible and works pretty darned well. Also free. The latest patches have reallly made it smooth as well.
Click to expand...

...

Cromulent said:
I have been using Neo Office recently and while I think it is perfectly acceptable for day to day tasks and even some long winded writing it feels clunky and slow. I also had a rather nasty and painful experience when I tried to send a document to someone using its save in word format option. Given all this I have decided to get Microsoft Office as it offers the best in terms of compatibility.
Click to expand...
 
Macky-Mac said:
In general the cross platform thing works fairly well with Word documents, however, you may run into the occassional formatting issue. If the formatting is crucial to you and the other party is only going to read your document, then sending it as a PDF file is a surer way to protect the formatting
Click to expand...

The biggest issue I have found thus far is when I take excel graphs and save them as jpegs then insert them into word, windows users usually say they cannot see them.
 
jessica. said:
The biggest issue I have found thus far is when I take excel graphs and save them as jpegs then insert them into word, windows users usually say they cannot see them.
Click to expand...

Does Word save images within the file or do they have to accompany the file? (I stopped using Word years ago...)
 
After copying from excel you can use paste special in word to just insert the picture and not the whole excel document. Saves tons of space if you have large excel documents.


Nuc
 
Thank you for the help everyone.

I guess I will just have to see if it is released before September or not now. If it is not I guess I will go for the Windows version, might as well get Vista at the same time as well if I go that route.
 
Cromulent said:
I guess I will just have to see if it is released before September or not now. If it is not I guess I will go for the Windows version, might as well get Vista at the same time as well if I go that route.
Click to expand...

So none of our suggestions sufficed? What did you want to hear?
 
dpaanlka said:
So none of our suggestions sufficed? What did you want to hear?
Click to expand...

I wanted to hear that the Mac version of Office was going to be released before September. As far as I know now it is due for release between July - December, this I am taking to mean that it probably will not be released before September.

As I already stated I'm set on Microsoft Office because of painful experiences I have had transfering documents between Neo Office and Word (and yes I did save them in the correct format).
 
Go iWork. Cheaper, better features you'll probably use, better implemented (IMO), and just a great deal.
 
bobert1985 said:
Go iWork. Cheaper, better features you'll probably use, better implemented (IMO), and just a great deal.
Click to expand...

While I really do appreciate your suggestion, I'm getting Word for piece of mind. I really do not want to go through the pain I did when sending my CV out to companies (you would think more people would have heard of PDF by now) caused by Neo Office screwing up the formatting of my documents when it saved it in Word format (they looked fine when saved in native .odt format).

Anyway the student edition is fairly cheap and for me the price is worth the piece of mind. I have been using Office 97 before I switched back to the Mac and 10 years before needing an upgrade seems like a decent work life to me for £200 or so.
 
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