Office 2004/2008 for Mac? Or run Fusion with Windows 2003

[peapody]

Hi guys,

I guess this is just a "what is your preference/advice thread", but I was planning on running fusions on my macbook to use word 2003 which I already have for windows. Office 2004 (with $10 upgrade to 2008) is just $149 for me for the student version...so I was just wondering, what do you guys think would be the smart thing to do?

I don't play games, I don't do anything but surf the net, and do school projects with windows, and I infact have another PC I have for school use (they require windows based machines - XP to be exact). What would you guys do?

 

[SpaceJello]

Use iWork or OpenOffice. Unless you really need some hard core MS office usage, I would get the Office 08. 04 is PowerPC based and leaves files everywhere in your computer.

 

[stevel58]

I need to use Windows and Office all the time in my job as all of my clients are Windows and Office based; I have found the best solution is to use Office 2003/2007 within Parallels/Fusion.

I ran Office 2004 on my MBP for a while but found it really second-rate . I now use IWorks 08 whenever I can - it can read in Office 2007 files and export out the other way if necessary.

Hope this helps.

 

[mkrishnan]

I think it depends on a couple of things...

1) What Office apps do you need support for? If your needs go beyond Word/Excel/PPT -- if you need specific features of Outlook, or you need Visio, project management, compatibility with FrontPage, etc, etc, then you should definitely go with Office for Windows.

2) What is your past experience? I don't have formal data on this, but my experience has been that Office 2003 and 2004 are fairly polarizing and very different designs. It seems like what people have used before plays a big role in which they like. I went from Office 2000 to the Mac products, and I consider 2004 to be vastly superior to 2003 (which I find counter-intuitive and kludgey) in terms of interface. I use them both -- 2003 here at the University and 2004 on my own computers. I decidedly prefer 2004. However, lots of people who come from 2003 to 2004 seem to be unhappy about various aspects of 2004, and say basically the same things I say about 2003 about 2004 instead.

3) If you're primarily in need of good design / work tools, and collaboration is not a big part of what you'll do at school, I might well also go with iWork at this point. Keynote seems to generally be much nicer than Powerpoint. Numbers seems like a good way of learning spreadsheet work if you don't already know how to use one. Pages doesn't seem perfectly suited to academic work, but I'm sure it's more than passable.

 

[peapody]

Thanks for the reply guys.

I just wanted to know if Fusion lets me run word as that is the most important piece of software that I need for school. Actually my main concern is compatibility. I need to know for sure that my files can be opened by professors and fellow students and it seems like Fusion and 2003 is the best route for me - as it is doable, and I already will be running fusion for various other programs and needs.- and I do rely HEAVILY on outlook...

 

[robby818]

I'd run a Windows version of Office with Fusion. I routinely exchange files with a coworker who sometimes edits word and excel files on her Mac. Although the content is unaffected, there are subtle styling elements (fonts, notes) that get tweaked because we are moving the files across different platforms. It is usually a Mac-Pc issue not a different version of office issue. i can exchange my offfice xp files with people using newer versions of office and all is good but once we start moving files from mac to pc then things get a little weird.

re: iwork i think it works but can be annoyuing as you have to export your files into a word format not just quick save as a .doc And iwork screws up some formatting. you get the content but you can't be confident that your fonts, layout will look the same on a PC

Moreover, I do not like the toolbar layout on Office 2004 for the Mac, I find it far less efficient than the Windows version. Prettier but less efficient.

With Fusion, I probably will not buy the next version of Office, despite it being intel native, something i was looking forward to before fusion.

 

[nandasunu]

Try NeoOffice. It is free, based on openoffice, and has very good compatability with microsoft formats, more than Pages has.

Word will run fine in vmware, but its a pain to have to load and run a VM just to do something simple like word processing.