Do I really need Office X ???? Apple Works okay???

[beef]

Originally posted by Aussie John
send people pdf files
get them to send you pdf
more often than not you dont need to edit the file to get just read it.
At least in OSX is easy to make a pdf file

That way no embarrassing resumes formats

I seriously envy you if you tell people you know to send you .pdf files and they don't go "huh?"

one friend asked me to read his stuff (and we are in university... people are supposed to know some stuffs about computer) and he sends it... I asked him what format it is in and... well... he had no idea what I'm talking about.

If I told him to send a pdf... let's just say I can go to his place, print it, and go home before he gets it done....

[fryke]

If you send a resume to somebody and don't know whether he uses a version of Word (or whatever) that displays your resume (or whatever) exactly the way you want it to be: Use PDF. In Mac OS X you can save as PDF any document you create. Just go to the print dialog and hit 'Preview'. You can then save that preview as a PDF file that shows *the same* wherever you send it to (unless they read it on a Palm or Win CE thingie, but then they know...)

If you need to *receive* Office files, right now your only chance is that it might open fine in AppleWorks. Well, it won't. It will have display problems for certain features and line-/pagebreaks will definitely not look the same as intended.

If you don't care about that, AppleWorks is fine, else right now you need Office.

But SEND your stuff using PDF.

[AdmiralAK]

I;ve seen people who are anal about that though.
If they tell you send an M$ word file and you send something else, even though it might be a PDF they will bitch and complain and lower your grade...

I would not want a prof like that We would have serious probs

[RacerX]

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.

[mindbend]

My bad, I think I goofed on the viewers thing. As a content provider, I'm used to providing free viewers on our CD-ROMs, I forgot that no such thing exists for the Macs AFAIK.

I still stand by my position that life is just easier if you have access to a version of Office.

[RacerX]

Originally posted by AdmiralAK
Any examples ? (I am sure netscape is a culprit too but I seem to see more M$ than netscape)

The ratio in more like 50:1, but yes both have done it. An early example would be MULTICOL and SPACER (which I believe became part of HTML 4) that were not in HTML 3.2 or use by IE in early versions. But IE was worse in the amount they added, but it was the same idea they had with Java. In that case they made a Java clone called Visual J++ that would ONLY run on Windows systems (which defeats the purpose of having Java which was a platform independent application environment). Which all shows that Microsoft has a long history of trying to take over the market in any way possible. In the end the only real solution is to strictly enforce an open standard on Microsoft products so that alternatives can be used or (as sithious said) say as Microsoft-free as possible.

[AdmiralAK]

lol I only have three things M$ on my computer (Not counting my OS facination and VPC of course ;p)
1) Office 2001 ( Provided by employer, seldomly used)
2) MSN messenger (use it once in a blue moon...got it cause friends have it and they are never online... long live yahoo! -- now if they only made a complete mac client!)
3) Internet Exploder (used to beta test my web pages)

This is as M$ free as I can be for now... at least till open standards come in

Admiral

[ae77]

I use Tex-Edit Plus. Fits my need.

$500 for a word processor is a joke.