Quote:
Originally posted by mindbend
Someone complained about an "Acrobat" approach to the Office suite. There are in fact "viewers" for virtually all Office products . These are free and downloadable from Microsoft. Problem solved. |
Hold on one moment please. I do believe we are on a Mac forum, and the only time a "Problem" is "solved" is when there is a Mac solution. I don't want to use Office, so I can have free viewers if I move to Windows? Where is the solution in that? I work with publications firms that live buy QuarkXPress (which is too expensive to begin with), and need to (from time to time) open Word formated docs. If there is a way I can get them a viewer for free, I would surely like to here about it. The only alternative you have proposed is either get Office (at about $500) or a PC for one of the free readers (at least $500, and not counting getting it to talk with an all Mac network).
Office offers NO features that can not be found in QuarkXPress, and Office can't do what QuarkXPress does, so it is an expensive item to have taking up disk space and collecting dust in a closet. At least I'm not forced to use a different platform in order to read pdf files. I can read them on almost every OS I can think of. I can't see the same about Word (even with Star Office and Abi Word being out there). The overall problem again becomes using a format owned by Microsoft.
If you can find viewer for Word and Excel for Mac on Microsoft's site, I would love to know where they are.