Converting

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makingtheswitch

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Hey!,
I currently own a PC and am buying a new laptop soon. After looking into it I would like to swich to a Mac. However there may be a few problems. On my PC I have Microsoft Office with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, & OneNote. The two I am worrying about is Word and Excel. I have many of these files on my PC that I will need to have on my Mac. Is there a file the can convert it to the Mac verison or will there not be a problem. Plus I e-mail a lot of these files to people with PC's will they be able to open them? I don't want to be alone in "Mac World!" Also in your option, I am very use to Word 2003, will I have a problem swiching to the Mac? I am getting tired of the problems my PC gives me and all my Mac friends tell me they don't have these problems. I would like to make the swich, but have I already commited my life to PC's? Thanks, ~Jay.
 
Microsoft Office (with Word, PowerPoint and Excel) is available for Mac OS X.

http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/office2004/office2004.aspx?pid=office2004

It can pretty much seamlessly read and write Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents that are cross-platform, so your PC buddies can read and write them, and you'll be able to pretty much open any Office document created on a PC on your Mac.

Outlook is a different story -- Entourage, Microsoft's Mac email client, has Exchange connectivity for email, but it doesn't have 100% of the features of Outlook.
 
My experience with Word and Excel, particularly with Word, on the Mac is that they are more compatible with any two versions of the Windows applications than the Windows applications are with each other. PowerPoint presentations may require some formatting tweaks, chiefly because the Mac and Windows versions use different dingbat font maps. These give you the bullet symbols. As for Entourage, let us hope that you don't need Exchange compatibility. If this is the case, then switch to Mail/Address Book/iCal. If you need Exchange compatibility, try the Mail/Address Book/iCal suite first. If it does not work, then and only then should you go with Entourage. If you do a search of this forum for Entourage, you will find nearly a new thread per day. Entourage just plain sucks.
 
a word document is a word document, whether you are on a mac or a pc. it's like an mp3. as long as you don't do something blatantly mac-only on it (i'm not sure what that would be) then there is no reason it won't work. Get Office 2004, which i believe is on offer at the moment if you buy a new mac from apple.com/uk
 
Another, or rather a _free_, option would be NeoOffice, which is a "Macified" version of OpenOffice.org. But I guess if you get a good deal for the MacBook Pro or iBook with MS Office 2004 for the Mac, that'd be a better solution.
 
fryke said:
Another, or rather a _free_, option would be NeoOffice, which is a "Macified" version of OpenOffice.org. But I guess if you get a good deal for the MacBook Pro or iBook with MS Office 2004 for the Mac, that'd be a better solution.
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As much as I abhor the horrible Microsoft Word (and it's senseless formatting techniques), NeoOffice can hardly be called "Macified"; maybe OS 9-ified, but it doesn't look at all like any current good OS X app.

If I was going to look at a free Cocoa word-processor for OS X, I'd look at AbiWord.
 
thank you mr penguin! i have been forced to use open office since march. at first i was amazed at it's free-ness, now i hate it's clunky slowness, and refusal to work like a mac app. it has also caused me to hate X11 and also Java.
 
:p

Yeah, it's the only application that I have to treat with care. Works great for documents and the like, but general usage is blegh. :rolleyes:
 
I have been sending Excel and Word docs to and fro between home (Mac) and office (W2000) for years. Never had a problem.

In fact, while my home set up was more modern that the office one, I often forwarded MS Office attachments received from clients to my home so that I could save them as an older version of MSOffice. Then sent them back to work where I could now open them.

Oh yes! I'm still running the MS Office for OSX, not upgraded to MSO 2004 yet - still no probs with Excel and Word from anywhere!!
 
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