# Use MS Office On A Mac? Youre About To Get Screwed



## sirstaunch (Dec 5, 2006)

> As you may or may not know, Microsoft has launched Office 2007. The suite is a vast improvement over previous versions and now uses new file formats for when you save a Word (.docx), Excel (.xlsx), or Powerpoint (.pptx) document. Dubbed Microsoft Office Open XML Formats, these new file types dont seem to be working in Mac OS X. Trying to open a document in Word 2004 for OS X gives you a bunch of random characters and undecipherable garbage like the picture above.
> 
> Those using the previous version of Office on Windows XP can download a converter and compatibility pack as a work around, but Mac users are left in the cold it seems. Apparently, no one can say when an OS X version of the conversion tools will be available either. What gives Microsoft? Either support your OS X users 100% or dont bother at all. We want to be able to collaborate between Office-documents but this new file format is going to kill us!



Thoughts.....?

http://crunchgear.com/2006/12/05/use-ms-office-on-a-mac-you’re-about-to-get-screwed/


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## ora (Dec 5, 2006)

I heard about this and am worried. That said I basically use office via Parallels now, so as long as they don't try and stop me using office 2007 under emulation like they plan to do with most of the versions of Vista, I'll be ok. That or I'll just use the compatibility pack or whatever on my XP Word installation. 

That said I'll be irritated not to be abel to open Word files in TextEdit, its soooo much faster than word and deals with almost all files perfectly.


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## nixgeek (Dec 5, 2006)

Yeah, I saw this on Digg.com today.  Unbelievable.  People say that Microsoft sets standards.....the only standards they set are their own and then because of their monopoly they force people to use their platform.  And of course, they take advantage of the ignorance of people when it comes to office suites.  Soon, you'll find the same people who reject other suites because they believe that they will be "incompatible with the rest of the world if they don't use MS Office" being incompatible themselves unless they upgrade to the Office 2K7.  And those people that have upgraded to Office 2007 will end up making those that haven't upgraded yet to do so.  Microsoft plays off of the laziness of users since users don't want to go through the hassle of saving the document in another format (it's a simple process, but even THAT'S too much for the mass of MS-using drones out there).

Plus, the fact that Novell is backing them up with a fork of the OpenOffice suite isn't helping much (turncoats).  I understand that Novell is a company, but their short-term gain doesn't benefit anyone except Microsoft.  Personally I think this will negatively affect Novell in the long-term.

I've heard people complain here about the interface usability of OpenOffice and even NeoOffice.  Regardless of the interface, these apps are important for all platforms because they adhere to interoperability and open standards, not closed standards like those set by Microsoft.  Plus, the increase in popularity for OpenOffice and NeoOffice only serve to help the other third-party suites from smaller developers that DO have better interfaces.  To complain about interface problems on these open apps does not offer a solution.  If you have a problem, and you are a developer, do something about it.  I'm not a coder so I don't know the level of difficulty this would entail, but I know that complaining about interface problems on the Mac with OpenOffice and NeoOffice doesn't help at all.

I guess that's it for my rant....take it or leave it as you like.


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## fryke (Dec 5, 2006)

Last January, Microsoft said they would do an update to Office 2004 to allow these formats to be opened and saved. No worries. Besides: Worst case scenario you have to educate users to use .doc and .xls instead.


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## Sirtovin (Dec 5, 2006)

fryke said:


> Last January, Microsoft said they would do an update to Office 2004 to allow these formats to be opened and saved. No worries. Besides: Worst case scenario you have to educate users to use .doc and .xls instead.



Agreed... 

As an Old Windows user M$ does try to set the standards to BE THEIRS and only theirs... IE when it first came out tried to take the market away from Netscape... Etc... but Luckily Mozilla beat the hell out of them... Thus FireFox...  

When I listened to the first keynote when Intel chips were introduced to Macs... They said Microsoft Office 2007, will be ported to Mac... So I am guessing that will have the extensions in question... 

If M$ decides to make a Mac opener for those documents than that is a plus... Office 2007 isn't suppose to hit till after January... So they got plenty of time to do it for Mac.


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## nixgeek (Dec 5, 2006)

fryke said:


> Last January, Microsoft said they would do an update to Office 2004 to allow these formats to be opened and saved. No worries. Besides: Worst case scenario you have to educate users to use .doc and .xls instead.



That's a task in and of itself, to be honest, especially in the educational field here in Miami (not sure about anywhere else).  I tried to get a user to use OpenOffice (albeit the 1.x series) way back and they said that it sucked compared to MS Office, and the only reason was because they were used to MS Office's interface and formats as opposed to OpenOffice's interface and format (which on the Windows platform isn't that much different...just a few things in a diferent location). And this was a young teacher, not some old fuddy duddy that's afraid of technology.  This is the kind of stuff that I believe Microsoft plays on....the ignorance of its user base.  And the fact that they're doing this with the file formats is another sign.

On the flip side, I introduced another friend of mine who is doing her doctorate in Psychology to use OpenOffice (also at the 1.x series at the time) because her trial run with MS Office expired.  To this day, she still uses it for school and work and has no problems.  She was able to free herself from the lock-in that Microsoft puts in people's minds with their FUD and with their actions.  I've since then upgraded her to the 2.x version of OpenOffice and the experience has been much better.

It's a matter of the user, IMO.  But unfortunately, just like the saying where 20% of the people do 80% of the work, only 20% of the people are daring enough to even bother giving something new a try.  This is something that MS knows and hopes to keep alive.


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## Viro (Dec 5, 2006)

Err... how is this a major issue? Not many people are using Office 2007, which is due to be released for the Mac sometime in 2007. Those who do have Office 2007 will know to save in formats readable in previous versions.

Just wait till Office 2007 is released, or for $YOUR_FAV_OFFICE_SUITE to support the format.


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## Viro (Dec 5, 2006)

nixgeek said:


> Plus, the increase in popularity for OpenOffice and NeoOffice only serve to help the other third-party suites from smaller developers that DO have better interfaces.



That's a rather perverse way of thinking. How does the popularity of Open Office help the developers of applications like Mellel, Nisus Writer Express, Mesa, etc?


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## nixgeek (Dec 5, 2006)

Viro said:


> That's a rather perverse way of thinking. How does the popularity of Open Office help the developers of applications like Mellel, Nisus Writer Express, Mesa, etc?



I imagine that these suites use pretty much open standards and support a lot of other older closed formats, something that OpenOffice and NeoOffice support.  Now that ODF is an ISO standard, I'm sure (if it hasn't been done yet) these suites will also include this support.  The only company that I know that has been difficult to deal with IMO when it comes to standards and interoperability is MS Office.  So the success of O or NeoOffice can only help to benefit those that use these third party apps which might be threatened by MS....this allows for more choice.  As has been mentioned here, O and NeoOffice isn't preferred by everyone which is why they choose whatever they choose as an office suite.  You won't find the OpenOffice/NeoOffice people hindering interoperability with those smaller suites, so their success is a benefit to all except MS.  This means everything (theoreticaly) should work with one another.


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## fryke (Dec 5, 2006)

Don't forget Apple in that list. The .pages format, for example, isn't exactly interoperable. In fact: If you run around with a memory stick full of .pages documents and try to print those, you'll _have_ to find a Mac running iWork. No such thing as a quick download of a converter or something.


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## Viro (Dec 5, 2006)

Hmm .... I've just checked my copy of Mellel and NWE. They do not support exporting to OpenOffice formats. Perhaps I should try to get in touch with the user communities and find out if support for OpenOffice file formats are worth while. However, the fact that an open format isn't supported by these smaller software packages is probably telling of the demand....


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## nixgeek (Dec 5, 2006)

Speaking of Mellel, I noticed this forum thread about Mellel possibly supporting ODF.  It's about a year old but it looks like there might have been a demand for it.  Whether or not the software developer wanted to include it as an option is another story.

EDIT:

Here's another thread (of 3 that I found) regarding NWE.  Some of the users mentioned that they were for ODF support in NWE, and even one person said that they would purchase it without-question if it included that support.  Again, the thread is about a year old but it shows that the demand was there.  There's also a response from one of the devs about why it was/is/going-to-be-or-not included in NWE.


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## MisterMe (Dec 5, 2006)

Viro said:


> Hmm .... I've just checked my copy of Mellel and NWE. They do not support exporting to OpenOffice formats. Perhaps I should try to get in touch with the user communities and find out if support for OpenOffice file formats are worth while. However, the fact that an open format isn't supported by these smaller software packages is probably telling of the demand....


It is not just about native file-compatibility. A large percentage of wordprocessor users don't need *Word*-compatibility. They just need a wordprocessor. They can edit documents in whatever format they want and share them via PDF. You have to first break the mindset that *Word* is all. Once that rampart is breached, then anything is possible. Why do you think Microsoft is doing everything it can to thwart ODF?


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## Viro (Dec 5, 2006)

Except that PDF is not editable by most word processors ... Most people share documents for collaboration, which is why Word is so important and so indispensable. 

People who just want a good word processor, and share finished PDF files with others use Mellel anyway .


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## jhawk28 (Dec 5, 2006)

This is just a lot of FUD. Converters are coming to the Mac Office, read: http://blogs.msdn.com/macmojo/archive/2006/12/05/converters-coming-free-and-fairly-fast.aspx

Joshua


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## sirstaunch (Dec 5, 2006)

Well it seems things will happen really quickly such as convertors and such and Mac version of Office 2007 coming. But guess a lot of people will probably be left blind as when they start receiving the new format and it doesn't work for them, and I'm meaning people who still use windows 98 too, not everyone will know of the convertors, unless it will be in the Check For Updates.

I guess not to panic to much as not everyone will be upgrading to 2007 immediately and businesses especially would want to make sure their customers can read their documents and such. Just from reading and posting that article made me think and you guys came in with a lot of responses which cleared the head a bit so I won't panic anymore 

Cheers


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## Bio-Gene (Dec 5, 2006)

Either I am very tired and have not gotten the full message or I do not see the big threat here! I mean obviously yes we all know M$ wants to make new formats for their Office for Mac 2K7! But obviously they will still support saving in other older formats as they do with the Windows versions! So I am sure they will have an option where you choose to save either in ex. .doc or .docx! If not then M$ trying to rip out Mac from market which I doubt it will ever do! 

Oh and the .docx looks cool as a name lol!


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## eric2006 (Dec 5, 2006)

They have packages out for older Office packs to support the new formats, I believe. The packages for Mac are behind.



> Those using the previous version of Office on Windows XP can download a converter and compatibility pack as a work around, but Mac users are left in the cold it seems. Apparently, no one can say when an OS X version of the conversion tools will be available either. What gives Microsoft? Either support your OS X users 100% or don&#8217;t bother at all. We want to be able to collaborate between Office-documents but this new file format is going to kill us!


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## sirstaunch (Dec 6, 2006)

Bio-Gene said:


> Oh and the .docx looks cool as a name lol!



That's another thing, isn't Windogs extensions limited to 3 characters? Or is that changed in VISTA?


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## sirstaunch (Dec 6, 2006)

Here's probably a solution whether it's true or not

http://www.eightysevenfour.com/?p=14


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## MisterMe (Dec 6, 2006)

sirstaunch said:


> That's another thing, isn't Windogs extensions limited to 3 characters? Or is that changed in VISTA?


As *Office 2007* will run on Windows XP, the three-character limit on file extensions does not apply to XP. IIRC, the technical restriction was removed with NT. It is embedded so deeply in the Win/DOS infrastructure, however, it continued as though it were a technical limitation.


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## fryke (Dec 6, 2006)

Microsoft started telling developers to use 4 instead of 3 letter extensions with Microsoft XP. See ".indd" files (InDesign).


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## Captain Code (Dec 6, 2006)

I'm fairly certain Office 2007 is only released for corporate users just as Vista is so what's the big deal?  Corporations aren't going to adopt it right away and when it's released to consumers in Jan 2007 we'll have a convertor and hopefully a new version of Office Mac soon after.


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## macbri (Dec 7, 2006)

Courtesy of internetnews.com:  http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3647521


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## andyhargreaves (Dec 7, 2006)

fryke said:


> Microsoft started telling developers to use 4 instead of 3 letter extensions with Microsoft XP. See ".indd" files (InDesign).



And, we've had .html for quite a while now too...


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## Mario8672 (Dec 7, 2006)

microsoft is satan's company, mac is god's company


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## Ferdinand (Dec 8, 2006)

andyhargreaves said:


> And, we've had .html for quite a while now too...



I think that comes from .htm which is still used on many websites and apps.


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## Viro (Dec 8, 2006)

True, but it just shows that Windows has had support for 4 letter extensions for some time now. It's not something new.


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## nixgeek (Dec 8, 2006)

Actually, I've always known it to be .html and only when MS decided to jump on the WWW bandwagon did we start seeing .htm, probably because of the limitations of DOS in Windows 3.x and Windows 9x.  Of course, since DOS has essentially been eliminated from Windows with NT and its successors it's not necessary, but many have still used it for backwards compatibility.....which I find weird because Navigator used to load up pages that ended with .html just fine on older Windows operating systems.  Another MS "standard" that they attempted to push, I guess?


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## Natobasso (Dec 8, 2006)

ora said:


> That said I'll be irritated not to be abel to open Word files in TextEdit, its soooo much faster than word and deals with almost all files perfectly.



ora, I couldn't agree with you more on this one! I hate waiting 2-4 minutes for word to load (loading font list, zzzzzzzzzzzzzz!) just to read a .doc.


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## Natobasso (Dec 8, 2006)

andyhargreaves said:


> And, we've had .html for quite a while now too...



They were probably running out of unique 3 digit extensions.


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