| If I'm not mistaken, Office 98 and Office 2001 for Macintosh data file formats are identical. The only difference between the two office suites are features/interface changes. I have both suites and I use Office 2001 very frequently, especially M$ Word and M$ Excel. Being a chemist who must work with reports and data manipulation, I am sort of forced to use M$ products since "the world" uses these products for the most part. Excel provides some quick and dirty data manipulation due to its features, but there are serious limits to the accuracy of Excel. It is forbidden for use by the pharmaceutical industry for any calculations because of its limited computational accuracy. It uses some shortcuts with linear algebra when computing least-squares and a few others that I won't mention. Excel is business software, so, basically the first two decimal places of any number are accurate but anything else after those can be junk, you never know what is accurate and what isn't.
If you don't use M$ Office very often, or just use it for compatibility with the Windoze world, I would recommend not upgrading unless you absolutely MUST upgrade. I don't intend on upgrading unless I'm forced to upgrade. Why give M$ more $$$ for a program you already have. The features certainly aren't going to change appreciably, and .NET is supposed to be around the corner anyway. Big deal if it takes you an extra 2 minutes to load Classic, go get some coffee or a snack and come back to the computer.
chemistry_geek  |