I just recieved my new PB and was wondering if it was supposed to come with microsoft word, powerpoint, and excel. Bceause i can't find them in the computer. I need atleast word for typing in . Or is there an alternative program used for word processing? Any help is appreciated!
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Microsoft office
- Thread starter JzzTrump22
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Congrats on the new PB!
All PB's come with an Office "Test Drive". You have demo versions (for 30 days) of Word, PPT ad Excel in your Applications folder. The Test Drive will not allow you to print. You may use Text Edit for word processing (also in Applications folder), but it's not that great. I recommend buying Office 2004.
Best wishes,
JOD8FY
All PB's come with an Office "Test Drive". You have demo versions (for 30 days) of Word, PPT ad Excel in your Applications folder. The Test Drive will not allow you to print. You may use Text Edit for word processing (also in Applications folder), but it's not that great. I recommend buying Office 2004.
Best wishes,
JOD8FY
I just posted a big rant in another thread about Microsoft Office. I'll give you the condensed version.
You do not need to automatically buy Microsoft Office. Most people don't use most of the features in Office. Most people buy MS Office and then just create drab letters in Word. Wasted money! There's nothing wrong with a drab letter. Letter's just aren't that interesting by their nature. You certainly don't need to spend $400 on a program to write letters in. The $150 student pricing (they never check your student status--why do you think that is?) is still overkill. TextEdit is a very good word processor. It does it's job and doesn't get in your way with features you don't need. Best of all, it comes with OS X. If you need to do less drab, more cute stuff then AppleWorks will work just fine and it costs a hell of a lot less than MS Office.
Try TextEdit. If you need more than that, examine your options. Do not automatically buy MS Office--there are choices.
However, there should be a MS Office 30 day trial on your PowerBook. Just remember the drug dealer mantra if you're going to use the Office trial: "the first one's free."
You do not need to automatically buy Microsoft Office. Most people don't use most of the features in Office. Most people buy MS Office and then just create drab letters in Word. Wasted money! There's nothing wrong with a drab letter. Letter's just aren't that interesting by their nature. You certainly don't need to spend $400 on a program to write letters in. The $150 student pricing (they never check your student status--why do you think that is?) is still overkill. TextEdit is a very good word processor. It does it's job and doesn't get in your way with features you don't need. Best of all, it comes with OS X. If you need to do less drab, more cute stuff then AppleWorks will work just fine and it costs a hell of a lot less than MS Office.
Try TextEdit. If you need more than that, examine your options. Do not automatically buy MS Office--there are choices.
However, there should be a MS Office 30 day trial on your PowerBook. Just remember the drug dealer mantra if you're going to use the Office trial: "the first one's free."
So textEdit that comes with my laptop is good enough to write essays and do homework in? Because if it is then i won't bother buying anything. As long as i have a program that i can type an essay in for school then i'm happy.
Word Processor
I use NeoOffice/J It is a full featured office suite that handles Microsoft Word docs, Excel Docs, etc. Just make sure you have more than 256 MB of RAM. I use it at work to process my weekly payroll and billing spreadsheet. Oh yeah, and it's free!
I use NeoOffice/J It is a full featured office suite that handles Microsoft Word docs, Excel Docs, etc. Just make sure you have more than 256 MB of RAM. I use it at work to process my weekly payroll and billing spreadsheet. Oh yeah, and it's free!
It depends what you need to do with those essays.JzzTrump22 said:
TextEdit will handle very basic formatting and editing, but it's not really a word processor.
There are several true word processors out there. You can download trials of all of them and see which ones have the features you need.
For me, Word has certain features (live word count and split windows in partic.) which are extremely useful and which I haven't found in any other single program. Therefore, I use Word. I think it works very well.
Steer clear of the "anti-Microsoft at all costs" brigade and decide for yourself.
What's good about Office is that you never really have to upgrade until it stops working with the OS. You can still run Office 97 on Windows 2000 machines. it's awesome. MS does say that it's biggest competition is itself.
Try and see if you can get Office.X a little cheaper than Office 2004.
Try and see if you can get Office.X a little cheaper than Office 2004.
Did your PB not come with Appleworks? It has a word processing program, spreadsheet, database, drawing, painting, & a presentation program.
depending on your ethics you can just download office or appleworks just to give them both a proper test and then buy (or keep) whatever app you want.
openoffice is worth a look though x11 annoys me and reminds me to much of windows so i'm waiting for the osx native version.
I personaly use appleworks which i use for all my school work (essays, the odd scientific diagram, mediocer stuff) and it dose the job fine and should do the job fine for you
(what are the usefull features in word i have never really looked?)
openoffice is worth a look though x11 annoys me and reminds me to much of windows so i'm waiting for the osx native version.
I personaly use appleworks which i use for all my school work (essays, the odd scientific diagram, mediocer stuff) and it dose the job fine and should do the job fine for you
(what are the usefull features in word i have never really looked?)
Duff-Man says...Appleworks only comes with the "consumer" hardware like eMac, iMac, iBook...the "pro" hardware like Powermacs and Powerbooks do not come with Appleworks....another nice little program to look at is Tex-Edit Plus ....oh yeah!silentrage said:
Office Applications
NeoOffice/J does not require X11. I have both on my iBook and prefer NeoOffice/J. Apple is engaged with OpenOffice.org in developing the real deal. A professional office suite based on OpenOffice.org (formerly Sun Microsystem's StarOffice). The contract with Microsoft is up on the Mac version of Office. If I were going to lay down my hard earned cash for a commercial Office Suite, I'd wait and see what Apple offers (sometime this year I bet)!
kb
Hector said:
NeoOffice/J does not require X11. I have both on my iBook and prefer NeoOffice/J. Apple is engaged with OpenOffice.org in developing the real deal. A professional office suite based on OpenOffice.org (formerly Sun Microsystem's StarOffice). The contract with Microsoft is up on the Mac version of Office. If I were going to lay down my hard earned cash for a commercial Office Suite, I'd wait and see what Apple offers (sometime this year I bet)!
kb
JzzTrump22: Yes, TextEdit will be fine for writing essays, etc for school. There's nothing fancy or advanced about that. Try it out--you already own it.
redkore: I have to say, you kinda pissed me off. While I have decided not to use Microsoft products on my Macs, I didn't tell this guy not to use them. I told him to use what's right for him. For me being anti-Microsoft is a moral and political issue, but that's me. I assume that saving money and working productively would be an issue for everybody--and for most people, MS Office is overpriced for what it'll get used for. To discount what I say just because I don't like Microsoft would be silly.
7on: Why is it good that the product you're paying a lot of money for will stop working eventually when there's a new OS? When you talk about the same issue in automobiles they call it "planned obsolescence" and it's considered a bad thing. Once in a great while you get a massive structural change with an OS--like the move from OS 9 to OS X--where the new OS is basically a new platform. Those instances aside, there's no reason that old software should stop working with a new OS, especially when the software and the OS came from the same company. You'd think they'd at least have the attitude of "we'lll take care of our old customers" or "we'll support our own products." It isn't as profitable to do that, which is why I consider it a bad thing that they don't.
redkore: I have to say, you kinda pissed me off. While I have decided not to use Microsoft products on my Macs, I didn't tell this guy not to use them. I told him to use what's right for him. For me being anti-Microsoft is a moral and political issue, but that's me. I assume that saving money and working productively would be an issue for everybody--and for most people, MS Office is overpriced for what it'll get used for. To discount what I say just because I don't like Microsoft would be silly.
7on: Why is it good that the product you're paying a lot of money for will stop working eventually when there's a new OS? When you talk about the same issue in automobiles they call it "planned obsolescence" and it's considered a bad thing. Once in a great while you get a massive structural change with an OS--like the move from OS 9 to OS X--where the new OS is basically a new platform. Those instances aside, there's no reason that old software should stop working with a new OS, especially when the software and the OS came from the same company. You'd think they'd at least have the attitude of "we'lll take care of our old customers" or "we'll support our own products." It isn't as profitable to do that, which is why I consider it a bad thing that they don't.
Horrortaxi said:
Well, if you want to interact with the greater world out there you need at the very least to have software that can read and write to .xls, .doc, .ppt files. Now I am not saying that you need Office 2004 for this purpose but in my opinion you do need to consider this when making a decision.
For my sins I bought Office 2004 and am very happy with the software. I happen to think its pretty cool and fits very nicely into the Mac ethos. The fact that I can also take it into my work environment, connect to the pc centric network and read/write documents, spreadsheets, presentations etc. is a very powerful bonus. As a switcher its also of course very handy to have the software act roughly the same as its windows equivalent; that comfort factor is important.
So no you don't need office, but you do need to consider others you will be distributing your files to.
Vanilla
JzzTrump22 said:
What are your school's guidelines for essays? TextEdit will do both justified text AND double spacing (which seem to be popular criteria for essays). It won't be able to do footnotes, however, something that Appleworks CAN (though it misses a spellcheck) .
IF you can afford it (and the non-2004 version will now be cheaper) Office for Mac is SUPERB, though.
Vanilla said:
Appleworks will save things as a .doc, etc. pretty well. With text edit you can save things as a word format (I dont' know what that really means?) and as an RTF document? Can word users work with either of those? Unfortuantely you can't save from text edit into a PDF format so at least a word user could view your documents.
I like Appleworks and does everything I ever need in a word processor and it reads most basic word docs you might receive. If you often receive tons of spread sheets or very detailed docs that have tons of tables, columns, etc you might run into issues without buying a separate reader program which they sell for macs called maclink plus.
Horrortaxi said:
I think 7on was saying it's good that nothing less than OS structural changes make you upgrade. I have to chime in on that -- I have Office 97 on my PCs and feel little need to upgrade. Same with .X on my Mac. The only thing with both of them that makes me want to replace them is the lack of good foreign language support, which came in Office 2k on the PC and 2004 on the Mac.
But really, as much as I'm *not* an MS fan, its saying something that their 7-year-old software basically does everything I need better than any office package short of a newer version of their own, and that even the latter has few things I need/want. Office 97 worked on everything from Win 95 to at least 2k (don't know about XP)? which isn't such a bad run, IMHO.
OTOH, the free stuff is picking up nicely. All depends on how graphically / formatting-wise demanding you are on Office. The funny thing about an Office "power user" is that most of them don't need the advanced features of newer versions of Office (well, maybe in Access, unless you do XML/web integration in the other packages), but I still think that the other apps out there continue not to handle power-user type Office work that well.
That is, I still find that a fair number of my documents do *not* open correctly in OpenOffice, or StarOffice....
Yes, you absolutely have to consider who will have to work with your files and how they will do it. If you just have to print them and no other computer has to see them, then it's not an issue at all. If people need to read them on their computers, you can save as pdf from any OS X app. The problem comes when people will need to open your files and edit them. Chances are you'll be dealing with Windows and Office in that case. .txt and .rtf will work in any word processing app, but if it's a file with lots of bells and whistles (tables, images, special formatting) you'll have problems with compatibility. I've found that going between AppleWorks and Word in these cases things get screwed up--even when saving as .doc. That's a case where you're better off using Word, but it's a rare instance.
TextEdit, by the way, will save as .txt, .doc, .rtf, and .pdf. To save as pdf go to the print menu. It'll be there as an option.
As an aside, does anybody still use footnotes? It was mentioned in another post. I've been writing for college classes since 1990 and have only been asked for APA style, which doesn't use footnotes. Well, it does actually but only in rare occasions and not for references--they're all embedded. Just curious.
TextEdit, by the way, will save as .txt, .doc, .rtf, and .pdf. To save as pdf go to the print menu. It'll be there as an option.
As an aside, does anybody still use footnotes? It was mentioned in another post. I've been writing for college classes since 1990 and have only been asked for APA style, which doesn't use footnotes. Well, it does actually but only in rare occasions and not for references--they're all embedded. Just curious.
Horrortaxi said:
Medical journals still use footnotes, at least the ones that adhere to AMA.
I vastly prefer APA/MLA type styles with encapsulated cites, but...gotta publish in the right places! kb@MacRumors said:
Thanks -- I try Office.X -- works *very* nicely for me. So I'm interested conceptually in NO/J but I don't see using it.