Software advice

[gundam]

I’m thinking of getting my first Mac after Panther is released. I spent much of my waking life working on MS Office documents – will things like formatting be 100% intact when shared between Office X and windows users? Is it possible to get by with Appleworks, Open Office or some other package instead?

What changes will I experience between using my Palm & Outlook vs. Palm & Entourage?

Presently I use Namo Webeditor from time to time and really like it, but unfortunately there’s no Mac version.
What would you recommend in its place?

Also, I’m really dependent on some free programs & utilities on my PC. Are there any equivalents for the Mac?

ePrompter – small taskbar program that checks multiple email accounts and notifies you when there’s new mail. Let’s you read/reply/delete from the server.

Webmon – similar utility that alerts when specified web pages are updated. You can specify the
start and end-points of the html to avoid things like date/time scripts.

Wordweb – free dictionary/thesaurus that integrates well with Word.

 

[yoda13]

your formatting will be intact. I would get office for ensured compatibility, though. As far as all those apps you are speaking of, check the downloads section of Apple's web site for OSX

 

[mrjamin]

Originally posted by yoda13
your formatting will be intact.

Not entirely true - i've created several documents on my winblows computer and opened them in word:mac (office x) and some of the formatting has been screwed completely, namely when using bulletted lists and tables. That said, its easily fixable and doesn't happen that often - they problems seem to occur pretty randomly.

You will find a lot of problems with OpenOffice.org, again especially with bullets and tables (they won't work properly 90% of the time). The reason behind this problem (believe it or not) is not the fault of the mac! It's MS's use of nonstandard formatting markup in their office apps. MS seems to favour nonstandards. Take for example IE (some compliant javascript doesn't work, but windows 'made up' javascript does and only in IE, valid HTML4/XHTML1 docs not displaying properly, lack of PNG24 support) and Samba filesharing in winblows is completely made-up!

If you're currently using Outlook - watch out if you chose to switch to Mail/Entourage! MS made it as difficult to export from outlook to entourage/mail! Yes, even to their mac version of outlook! There are a few apps that'll do it but they're not 100% reliable. I'd suggest sticking with mail.app as entourage is too damn slow and quite frankly not nearly as powerful as the current mail.app, let alone the new panther version! Speaking of which - anyone know if that'll be available outside panther? I.e. for us jag users?

 

[russgra]

MS Outlook to Mail (or Entourage)

To convert from Microsoft Outlook (Windows) to Mail or Entourage on a Mac use Outlook2Mac (US$10 from littlemachines.com). It perfectly converts all emails, contacts and calendars. I only wish I had found it before spending hours trying other ways (IMAP, mbox programs etc.) It's well worth the money.

 

[xjohn]

If you decide not to use Entourage, Palm Desktop is a decent alternative for all of its functions except for actual email, which Apple's Mail handles quite well.