[KenDallas]

I have been considering the PowerBook G4 as a possible replacement for my Dell laptop. Although I have heard of many success stories regarding PC-to-MAC migration, I have heard just as many horror stories.

Almost 90% of my work involves the Microsoft Office suite of products. I personally am not very fond of Microsoft and their policies, the Office suite of products have become dominant among corporate users. My work involves a great deal of collaboration with these users and the ability to exchange Word, Excel, PowerPoint files between PCs & my PowerBook would be THE paramount factor in my decision.

I was warned a year ago against Office X, citing frequent crashes under Jaguar. As I understand, improved versions of the operating system, and Office (Office 2004) are now being shipped. I suppose you now what my question is. How stable are the Office 2004 applications running under Panther? I also have emails from the past 5 years archived in Outlook (.pst) format. How easy would it be to import these .pst files into Entourage 2004?. I plan to use 1.5mhz G4, with 1.5gb of Ram.

Any and all help greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

[cpac]

I can't speak to the outlook conversion - but if you do a search, I'm sure that's been answered a couple times. (Or somebody will come along and tell you).

As for Office:

(1) - Though people report stability problems, you should remember that for every complaint you see online, there are probably ten people for whom things are working flawlessly. I'm one of those people - never had any trouble with Office v. X, and haven't had any trouble since upgrading to Office 2004. They aren't perfect pieces of Software, but they work quite well overall.


(2) - Converstion with PC users is very easy and works well. I won't say that it's always perfect, because it's not - but then it's not perfect between different PCs either. Office 2004 included a "compatibility report" feature which you can use to make sure there's nothing you're including which other people can't use/see/open.

[CaptainHaddock]

Also, two notes of encouragement:

1. Office 2004 is supposed to be much nicer than any of the Windows versions of Office.

2. If you get a Mac, so many other headaches will be gone, you will find it easy to overlook the odd formatting quirk, should it occur.

[Old Toad]

I can second the positive vote for Office for Mac. I use the educational version and it's terrific. Had tried all of the other solutions, AppleWorks, Thinkfree Office, and more but this version blows them out of the water. If you can qualify as a student or educator it's a great deal.


I know, as a long, long, long time Mac believer that using MS products is like dancing with the devil, but in this case the devil sure do dance good!

[kisol007]

Well, just last week I had a co-worker of mine and a good friend make the big switch. It sounds like you are in the same boat as he was as most of his work centered around M$ Office...

One thing you need to consider is if you are going to be working in workgroups or over a network or if you are just going to be emailing files back and forth. If it is the later then you won't have any problems with Office 2004... but it does not have all the networking features that the windows version does...

Also, if your work requires you to use outlook for more than just getting your email; again, working on a network, you will need to stick to the Windows version.

But, I can say that my friend did not "require" any of these things and he is already in disbelief about how much he likes the MacOS over Windows and even the Mac version of Office over the Windows version (although there is some MAJOR differences that may take a little getting use to...).

Stability? 2004 on Panther is a rock thus far. Not a single problem. Could there be? Yep... but I'll take it thus far...

Now, as far as migrating your Outlook to Entourage be prepared for a MAJOR headache... the best advice I could give is shell out $10 and try a software program called Outlook2Mac (http://www.littlemachines.com/). I didn't try but I wish I would have... the other options are not fun or fast... a real pain...

You'll love your Mac. You won't know how you computed before it, I promise. You will have to make a few sacrifices but in the end you won't even care...

Good Luck.

[midwinter]

Originally posted by KenDallas:
I have been considering the PowerBook G4 as a possible replacement for my Dell laptop. Although I have heard of many success stories regarding PC-to-MAC migration, I have heard just as many horror stories.

The only real problem with the switch is that it's expensive to get all new software.

Almost 90% of my work involves the Microsoft Office suite of products. I personally am not very fond of Microsoft and their policies, the Office suite of products have become dominant among corporate users. My work involves a great deal of collaboration with these users and the ability to exchange Word, Excel, PowerPoint files between PCs & my PowerBook would be THE paramount factor in my decision.

Translation between platforms should be effortless.

I was warned a year ago against Office X, citing frequent crashes under Jaguar. As I understand, improved versions of the operating system, and Office (Office 2004) are now being shipped. I suppose you now what my question is. How stable are the Office 2004 applications running under Panther?

Like a rock.

I also have emails from the past 5 years archived in Outlook (.pst) format. How easy would it be to import these .pst files into Entourage 2004?. I plan to use 1.5mhz G4, with 1.5gb of Ram.

You should be able to convert all of this fairly easily. Additionally, if you have an imap account, you can just upload everything to it.

Cheers