[pb_soon]

Hello,

I'm currently a Windows user and about to switch to Mac (just waiting till end of Oct to get a PB15" with Panther). One concern I do have is Office for Mac v.X.

All the sales folks tell me that the Mac version is fully compatible (i.e. file exchanging) with Office XP/2000. But I'll like to hear from the actual people who use both.

At work we use Office XP/2000 and we have Word, Excel and Powerpoint templates. With Word, we have customized styles and use a quite a lot of field properties. With Excel, we have some macros created.

So my real concern is:
1. Will these templates be fully compatible in Office Mac v.X
2. If I create a document in Office Mac, can it be easily viewed and edited in Office XP/2000 and vice versa.
3. Will the document look exactly the same in both versions of Office. E.g. they say Star Office is compatible, but when I open an Office doc in Star Office, some of the formatting is incorrect (spacing, alignment, etc).

Thanks in advance.

[drloomis]

Originally posted by pb_soon:
Hello,

I'm currently a Windows user and about to switch to Mac (just waiting till end of Oct to get a PB15" with Panther). One concern I do have is Office for Mac v.X.

All the sales folks tell me that the Mac version is fully compatible (i.e. file exchanging) with Office XP/2000. But I'll like to hear from the actual people who use both.

At work we use Office XP/2000 and we have Word, Excel and Powerpoint templates. With Word, we have customized styles and use a quite a lot of field properties. With Excel, we have some macros created.

So my real concern is:
1. Will these templates be fully compatible in Office Mac v.X
2. If I create a document in Office Mac, can it be easily viewed and edited in Office XP/2000 and vice versa.
3. Will the document look exactly the same in both versions of Office. E.g. they say Star Office is compatible, but when I open an Office doc in Star Office, some of the formatting is incorrect (spacing, alignment, etc).

Thanks in advance.

From using WORD on both machines, the only difference is the MAC version can read any file no matter what you name it.

In order for the PC to open a WORD document created on a MAC, you must add the extension (.doc) to the end of it or the PC can't open it.

I'm sure that is true for excel, powerpoint as well. Whatever the extension is that the PC automatically creates on them, you must have them on the saved apple document to properly transfer them back and forth.

[Earth Mk. II]

Originally posted by drloomis:
In order for the PC to open a WORD document created on a MAC, you must add the extension (.doc) to the end of it or the PC can't open it

Or you could just tell Word/Excel/PowerPoint for Mac to append the file extension automatically - which I believe it does by default anyway.

I know the docs themselves are fully compatible, I'm not so sure about templates and such.

[Eug Wanker]

Office XP and Office v.X are extremely compatible.

I've noticed some slight oddities running v.X files on Office 97, but then again I get problems running XP files on Office 97 too.

[alien]

Formatting differences may come from slightly different fonts on Windows vs. OS X. MS does include their own standard fonts (Arial, Times New Roman etc) with Office v. X. I haven't used Office much in a couple of years, so I can't say if the font metrics are 100% the same.

I know that one problem has been a certain graphics type (Windows specific I guess) that wouldn't be shown on the Mac. I've seen such reports sometimes at www.macfixit.com

I don't think whatever differences there may be should be enough to cause much concern in general.

[philm]

Some images may not show up on the Mac and you may see the dreaded 'red cross of death' through some images.

I cannot determine exactly when this happens. I have a colleague who generated some charts in Excel XP, copied-and-pasted them into Word XP and then sent me the file. When I opened the file in Word vX on my Mac....just the red crosses of death.

Overall, I suspect you will not have many problems. Things which you might think would not convert (styles, fields) do surprisingly well. It's just the occasional thing which might crop up.

[wallinbl]

Just to add a little flavor to this, we just received Office 2003 at work the other day. I've been using it for a few days. It does have some features that don't work in the older versions, but it does warn you about them when you use them.

[teszeract]

The OLE files can be an issue, as well as documents created with unicode type.

[Mr Ti]

I use heavily everyday office 2000 (desktop PC), and Mac vX (Laptop).I exchange files everyday, all day.

Word, I have never had a problem with any document.

Excel, I use LOTS of macros and sheets, stlyes etc. never a problem.

Powerpoint, no problems.

The only issue is where is ACCESS! some say it's not worth the hassle, but I could use this app on the Mac, never mind, I know it will never happen....

[Cadaver]

I'd say (IMHO), that feature-for-feature, Office v. X is comparable to Office 2000. There are some features in Office XP (mainly PowerPoint effects) that have not yet made their way in to the Mac version. If you make a file on the PC, as long as you don't use any features not available to Office 2000, I don't think you'll have any problems.

Now that Office 2003 is out for the PC, I'd expect an update/new version of Office for the Mac to be well under development (even MS said once they would alternate Mac-PC Office updates).

Files with graphics that give red X's (Mac to PC) are typically Mac-formatted TIFFs and graphics originally saved as a PDF. I've made that mistake a few times, since the Mac version of PowerPoint & Word are perfectly happy with any kind of TIFFs... the PC version seems to be very picky. I personally have not had a graphic error going from PC to Mac.