Apple Mac Users - A question
 

Getting an iMac, I'm fed up with Windoze. Am using Vista Beta 2 and it's poo......

Should I get Mac MS Office or just use Boot camp to run Windows XP and rum my copy of Office from that?

I'm not too keen on accessing Windows on my Mac...

Is there any reason why I would have to use Windows? I don't play games, FlightSim etc.

OneWorld
The choice is yours - If you're happy to open your wallet and spring for Microsoft Office for Mac, you won't regret it - it is a high-quality piece of software, in some ways superior to its Windows counterpart and totally interoperable with it - I know this because i work between both versions every day.

The Open Source Office clones I haven't tried myself, but hear good reports from those that use them on Windows (I don't personally know any Mac users who use them.) I believe the Mac version is a Java app (open to correction on this?!) and I'm not too fond of Java personally, I find it clunky and buggy, especially on the Mac (apart from Azureus, which seems quite stable).

I can't think of any reason (apart from perhaps certain games and perhaps a few specialised finance apps) that you would want or need to boot into Windows on your Mac :ok:

OneWorld,

The best thing to do is to get the iMac and see if NeoOffice does what you need it to, Office-wise. It's free, so you've nothing to lose. It is "aquafied", Aqua being the current look of the Mac OS. It's a more elegant solution to the "raw" porting of OpenOffice which requires you to use X11.

If you don't need a spreadsheet, you could consider Apple's iWork, easier to use than Word and PowerPoint with powerful templates and effects. You can also export the files to Word and Powerpoint.

Rather than use Boot Camp to run your Windows applications, you could get an emulator, such as Parallels and run office in it. The Office applications aren't graphically intensive, so work fine in emulation. This way, you have access to the virus-free Mac OS at the same time.

AppleMacster

Of course if you have a friend with Microshaft Office for Mac you could "trial" it for a few days, weeks, months.......:E


Actually they may even do a trial version somewhere, they do for windoze.

Thanks for the info guys,

That Parallels desktop for Mac looks excellent. I'll give that a shot I think.

I just need Word, Excel, Outlook and PPT opn my home computer, that's all. No other apps or games. I'll also see if I can get Mac Office for a good price anywhere....

Office for mac is about £80 on ebay, compared to £450 in the apple store.... er no guesses why but anyhow its there.

Anither option is to call the apple store and say Dell have offered to include WinXP Office if you buy a lap/desk top from them and could apple match the deal...unsure about switching etc etc.. it might not work but its got to be worth a try.

This neo office looks good.

All I need is to be able to read the odd Word/PPT/Excel doc at home. My PC in work is a Wintel machine so most of my work is done there. It's if I have to use some docs after work or at the weekends...

Can I use the Neo-office word processor to create good quality docs and then have MS Word read them no problem on a Wintel machine?

Can I use the programme on iWork to create a document and then have MS Word read it?

Don't forget that a legitimate Student edition of Office can be had for ca. £100. All you need is a child or student in the house. Or a least one close by.... :)

LA,

How does that work exactly? Do you have to provide the "students" details, school, phone numbers etc in order to activate it?

I'm sure my grandaughter could use Mac Office! ;)

OneWorld,

Do you need Outlook? Every Mac comes with "Mail", Apple's own email application which will even import your old Outlook mailboxes. It will connect to POP, IMAP and Exchange mail servers.

Regarding NeoOffice and iWork compatibility with MS Word, the results should be the same when opened on a Windows machine. When using Apple's "Keynote" for presentations and exporting them as PowerPoint, there are sometimes issues regarding some formatting and effects. Essentially, the effects in Keynote are much better than in PowerPoint and it can't match them in the export. Some amount of editing can be required on the (PC) PowerPoint. It depends how the original Keynote presentation was designed.

You just buy it! I've never had a check on mine, though I am a legitmate user through ongoing study with the OU. It may ask for name/institution when installing - I guess that could be left blank.

I'm sure if pushed, it could be that your grandaughter would be the prime user of your machine. Or you could even enroll in a night class yourself.....

Amazon have it for 95.99 at the mo, don't know about other prices/places.

I also second the use of Mac Mail - it's a good little package when you get used to it. I'd also recommend using iCal and the Address Book, just depends what you want to sync to.

Macster,

I sync my two outlooks, work and home, with Plaxo. So it's very handy as calendar entries and contact info just gets duplicated and I find it handy working with the Skype outlook toolbar as well....

So if I create a document with iWork and save it and then try and open it on a PC in work say, it will open just using Neo-office?? That sounds great.

Well I ordered the iMac this morning, got 2MB or RAM to get me some speed. Nice 20in Screen as well. It's being built in Cork so will be with me soon and free shipping....

Can't wait to be honest, I know I'm going to love it and be amazed at the dofference.

OW22, I deliberately stayed away from addressing your initial post because I knew the experts would have more useful responses to address your main concern. The only reason I bought Office for Mac was because my wife refused to consider learning anything new, and she has kept the PC. Had it just been me, I'm sure iWork would have amply covered my requirements, and the other substitutes mentioned even more so. My local Apple outlet is so embarrassed about the ludicrous off-the-shelf price being asked for the full version of Office they just sell the academic version for a quarter of the price without even asking for ID.

I wish you well with your Mac experience. I'm not going to pretend it's been a 100% favourable one, but there's no way I'm going back. FWIW, as one of the major contributors suggested above, the biggest thing for me to get my head around in the Apple experience is the overwhelming "just leave it alone" feeling you get. You can't access way into the deep innards like you are used to? That's how it's supposed to be I think.

"You don't need to worry about that sort of **** anymore son, just leave it to us, OK?" Everything works, so leave it alone, like a paternalistic government, except that unlike governments, everything does work!

Good luck, let us know how you get on. And if you have any queries, forget the apple forums, this is the place to have your questions answered. (Not by me, I hasten to add!)

Bino's cheers for the message, you, Macster and everyone have been most helpful here!

Yeah, I'm fairly used to working deep within the bowels of Windows! usually to search and destroy Trojans in the System32 folder and then correct the registry etc etc

That's why I've had it with Windows, I've been hit by this bloody Spyfalcon virus 4 times and each time involved downloading all kinds of programs, booting into safe mode, and manually deleting and altering the registry.....

The amount of man hours I've spent over the years trying to get the machine to just work properly is crazy. Plus my PC before this just died on me one day, hard drive went kaput and I lost everything...I'm running Vista Beta2 at the moment and that made up my mind. I have a 3.0GHZ, 2MB Ram PIV machine. No slouch, but it's wheezing trying to run Vista. It's a power hungry monster. It can't read my Sound blaster card and I've had to spend days installing new drivers etc just to get it to work. Plus I read that McAfee have slated it over security concerns.

I'm sure it will take a lot of getting used to, I've been a Wintel man for a lot of years now. But it will be great getting to know a new system from scratch.

I need a computer to browse the web, access e-mail and read and send a number of office documents, listen to my music, watch DVD's. I don't play games except for PC Chess so I won’t have programs that will overly tax my system. So it seems like the Mac will be ideal, hope I'm right!

Funny thing is my wife is the same! Insisted the new computer can run MS Office apps…
So I got the Mac Office student edition….

Your wife won't have a thing to complain about. I'm using Entourage but honestly if I had my time over again, I'd just stick with the basic Mail program. I mean, email is email, right?

What REALLY sold me on the Mac was when I bought a MacBook a couple of months ago, plugged it in, opened the lid and it looked around and said aha! I sense a wireless network! I clicked on Safari and bugger me if it wasn't connected straight to the internet!

I'm still a novice myself, so any problems you post will probably be of interest to me and other neophytes. Don't hesitate. JB may not be what it used to be but this place is a hidden gem!

I hope this isn't considered a hi-jack, but I am curious as to the capabilities and upgradability of an iMac, if it is necessary.
Is there more to upgrade than just memory and hard drives? Do you need to try and find better graphics cards? what other options do you need to actually make the machine worth having? or is it just the basic machine can run everything great? Like the good old days of the Amiga, all you needed was either the memory upgrade or an accelerator and that was it, everything ran beautifully and fast.

Jimmy,

You only need to consider upgrading the memory or graphics card if you intend to do things which are more processor or graphics-intensive than the average home user needs. The iMac will happily make movies with iMovie and music with GarageBand. However, if you intend to use Final Cut Pro or Logic, then upgrades would be prudent to speed up your workflow. It is possible to have a 256Mb graphics card installed when the iMac is ordered, along with a 500Gb internal disk. RAM, up to 2Gb, can be added at any time.

OK, so you don´t have to get your hands inside. But I just ordered the Apple Intel Mac Mini Duo service manual... :O

I recently upgraded to a new iMac and it's wonderful. I am running Windows on it with Boot Camp - not because I want to but because the only way I can access my company's website/enterprise server is by using Explorer 6.0, which is not available on the Mac and the discontinued 5.0 will not work with their website (neither will Safari or Firefox). This is something you will come across from time to time, poorly written websites. I do not use windows for anything else, I use MS Office on the Mac.

It only uses 5gb of my 250gb hard drive so it is worth it. It is such a nice feeling to be able to boot back out of Windows though, the difference between the two OS's is so glaringly apparent on this machine.