Office for Mac compatibility...

Is office for Mac completely 100% compatible with office for Windows? Like if i email a word doc to a guy at Microsoft will he be able to open it from his Windows PC without any troubles?

 

AFAIK it is. There are, however some other options worth consideration.

Neooffice is free and is very good at Office doc conversion. In fact, once you have downloaded and isntalled neoffice, it will be the default app (assuming you dragged MS Office to the trash). Just download and install. It handles 99% of office documents without any problem whatsoever. Neooffice is my preferred method to deal with doc, xls and ppt files. Total cost $0.

Pages is part of iWork08 and is worth consideration. It does a better job than neooffice at preserving subtle formatting. Numbers is as good as excel and Keynote is much more powerful than Powerpoint. This is the preferred option. Iwork programs are my preferred option when I don't have to share files with Windows users. Total cost, about $79 for the single user version and $99 for the family pack.

The last and least desirable option on my list is to actually grab a copy of M$ office for Mac at about $150 for the student version. It allows you to install on up to 3 machines.

Whichever method you use, be sure to save your file as a ".doc" extension file and your windows users can open them.

 

Yea, it's "supposed" to be 100% compatible.

 

Office for Mac also gives you a compatibility report when you save that should alert you to any cross-platform problems. I don't know how reliable it actually is, but I've never had problems.

 

I e-mail back and forth Mac Office 2008 documents without any trouble. Bear in mind, though, - for example in Word 2008, the default format for a 2008 document is no longer ".doc" - it's now ".docx" - This is the same in Office 2007 for Windows. I set my Word 2008 to save in compatibility mode ".doc" because most people I know can't open .docx files since they either don't have Word 2007 Windows or Word 2008 Mac (or the compatibility patches for previous Office versions).

Other than this (which is the same problem for Windows users), you'll be just fine.

 

No, it is really frustrating. On the mac side there are many pretty fonts, but Windows do not have these fonts. I had to email my doc and it looks very nice on mac, but windows looks GROSS, they replaced the font with the default which is times new roman something like that, and it was hell reformatting all the text back to the right place and substitute with another font.

 

Yeah, Mac has the benefit of true-type fonts Which makes it hell when dealing with multiplatform font work.

 

As far as compatibility, I haven't run into any problems. That being said, mac office is a steaming pile of crap. It takes forever to launch, always prompts you with this retarded menu on which type of document you want to open (in case you were having second thoughts of opening an excel spreadsheet when you launched word). The UI is absolutely horrendous compared to that of the Windows version. It also seems to crash quite frequently.

 

I think the moral of the story is.... just use TextEdit + InDesign for best results

But on a serious note: did they really make the OS X office that bad? I mean... I know MSN is pretty horrible on Mac.... but that's free... you'd think they'd put effort into something they're selling and profiting off Mac users...

 

Well Office 2008 does have the option of preventing Project Centre from starting up on launch now so that is something out of the way. Hopefully, the first patch coming this month will clear up the stability and performance issues.

 

I'm incredibly impressed by Office 2008 on OS X. It's very slick.

They've done some major improvements to the UI. It takes a bit getting used to, but it's a super refreshing change from 2004 and Office XP... And years beyond what Open Office is doing.

It is a bit slow starting up, but still much faster than 2004 running under Rosetta. Never had it crash, however it CANNOT save to a network drive (saving directly to a OS X server). There should be a demo of it.

Try it out :-D

I really love the new list and graphic creation stuff. Lets you separate the content from the display, which is a major bonus to me.