NZMac.com - Supporting the New Zealand Mac community

Have you considered CrossOver for Mac, if Office is the only Windows application you will be running.

Philip Roy wrote:
I've never experienced issues between Mac and PC with office...but then again, I use it as little as I have to. At work I've never had to ask for a document to be resent etc or been unable to open it.


Since Office (Windows) is well entrenched in corporations I found you cannot avoid it.

Cannot open encrypted word docs on Mac. (Unless someone can provide me a solution here). This has been greatest curse as not willing to send in the clear.
Pagination varies between the platforms (doc printed from Mac and from PC have different ToC and page numbers). Metafile/images not always displayed across platforms.
Embedded quicktime files not working in Mac but work in Win. Issues with revision marks and comments between platforms.
Tables from one version crashing documents on other platform. Issues with Word Macros.

Also have file format compatibility issues between Windows versions 2007 and 2003.

And all of these programs are from the one company!

Comments above were based upon experiences with Office2003Win and Office2004Mac. As have not upgraded to either 2008 or 2007 I cannot qualify whether these still exist

vista_refugee wrote:
Hmmm... I'm now leaning back towards 2007. My "client" has informed me that she wants the "normal" version, i.e. 2007. I guess if you looking at it from the point of view of "what is the best Office version available" it's probably 2007, unless of course you absolutely hate the new interface. And of course it costs a lot more since I'll be up for Office + VMware/Parallels + Windows.

Just as a matter of interest, has anyone used VMware Fusion? I'm expecting it will be a lot slower than native performance, I was just wondering if was still acceptable. I've got a 2.4Ghz iMac with 4GB RAM so I'm expecting it should be OK.2008 will happily read 2007 because it was designed with that in mind. 2004 does have issues with 2007 because the converters aren't out yet.

Excel is going to be an issue if the spreadsheets are going to be using Macros in which case you're going to have fun paddling up the river with your arms.

VMWare will run fine. It takes a small performance hit in that it is Windows running in a virtualised form but it is still pretty quick. I use Parallels and it screams on my machine with only 2Gb RAM and 1.66GHz Core Duo processor.

MattD wrote:
Have you considered CrossOver for Mac, if Office is the only Windows application you will be running.Doesn't work with Office 2007 due to the stupid Window Genuine disAdvantage junk.

Thanks for your comments everyone... I've downloaded a trial of VMware Fusion and I'm busy setting up a Windoze VM so we'll see how that goes. Will post feedback once done.

Cheers
Dennis

Well, that was quick. Everything installed very sweetly, even Windows XP and Office. The unity feature of Fusion is very nice, it all looks very slick and works well. So (touch wood) I'm all sorted bar buying licences for Fusion and Office.

My daughter briefly expressed some gratitude and then told me to step away from the Mac... so I'm back on Vista now, that's not so pleasant. Better start saving for a Mac of my own...

Cheers
Dennis

Good luck there Dennis, looks like your 'client' is in the driving seat.

FYI http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=931218
Lack of Data Analysis Pack and VisualBasic for Excel 08 on Mac. Forgot that I use this extensively on Excel03