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    OS X/Word question

    Discussion in 'Apple and Mac OS X' started by marblehead, Nov 8, 2007.

  1. marblehead

    marblehead Notebook Enthusiast

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    Pardon the uneducated, stupid, newbie question, but will MS Office docs be useable with the Mac verion of MS Office?
    Thanks
     
    marblehead, Nov 8, 2007
    #1
  2. CitizenPanda

    CitizenPanda Notebook Deity NBR Reviewer

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    Sure, why not?

    I would use NeoOffice (OS X version of OpenOffice.Org). It's um... alot more free than MS Office, but your still working in the same type of interface and .doc format.
     
    CitizenPanda, Nov 8, 2007
    #2
  3. Xander

    Xander Paranoid Android

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    Xander, Nov 8, 2007
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  4. zadillo

    zadillo Notebook Virtuoso

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    Yes. Although not sure about the .docx format (which Office 2008, coming out I think in January, should be able to read, and I believe TextEdit in Leopard can read as well)

    EDIT: NM, Xander covered that.
     
    zadillo, Nov 8, 2007
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  5. Sam

    Sam Notebook Virtuoso

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    Other than the new 2007 format, Office for Windows and Office for Mac is compatible. Don't have to worry about compatibility issues between them.
     
    Sam, Nov 8, 2007
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  6. taelrak

    taelrak Lost

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    One thing to note:

    TextEdit (Leopard) and Neooffice mentioned above do not read .doc and .docx formats perfectly. They'll do basic (very basic) documents just fine, but if you need specific formatting, styles, fields, forms, or anything at all, they won't carry over well. NeoOffice offers you all the tools to accomplish the same results as what you'd get in Word independently, but that doesn't mean it can convert Word documents over and retain those features perfectly.

    The best example of this was when I opened a very specifically-formatted table in all three of the above. TextEdit didn't even draw it properly. NeoOffice *appeared* to have the table format perfect - but this is actually even worse, because a couple of dozen pages in, the chart row and column data were misaligned (with no hint whatsoever!). You can imagine the annoyances of that, especially if it was overlooked because everything *seemed* fine.

    Incidentally, anyone noticed that the new docx and xlsx formats are much more space-efficient than their counterparts? I had a 9MB spreadsheet in Office 2007, and it ended up being like 913kb after I converted it into xlsx....
     
    taelrak, Nov 8, 2007
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  7. saturnotaku

    saturnotaku Notebook Nobel Laureate

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    If you don't want to spend the money on the Mac version of Office you can use your Windows version with CrossOver. Or, if you have a BootCamp partition set up, you could use Parallels or VMWare Fusion to use Windows Office.
     
    saturnotaku, Nov 9, 2007
    #7