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.

Just to hijack the thread a bit more, what experiences do people have of the various tools for watching TV through your mac. I'm looking to get something like the eye TV, to record shows at home then watch on my powerbook when sat in the hotel, or to watch the "premium" hotel channels with :E

To "Northeast canuck" If your company's website is only accessible via Explorer, try the newish "Opera" mac browser.
There is an option to emulate/impersonate Explorer on connection to pc systems and it seems to work. Here at the orange ezy airline, all their stuff is pc based and where as Safari/Firefox isn't compatible and won't access everything, Opera is! Give it a go.

That's the kind of thing I want to hear northeast canuck!!

Keep the reports comin'!

OW22,
I've had my MacBook for a month now (after I had to send the first one back and get a replacement :\ ). It's my first experience with Mac too, and I have to say, I'm very impressed.

I have downloaded Parallels, but not installed it yet. I may have to though as the networked Laser Jet printer I normally connect to at work will only work with Windows XP Pro (unbelievable, but that's what our IT people tell me). Our server at work will also not allow me to connect to Mac Mail, but hopefully when the company puts an internet system in our houses (I live and work in Nigeria, so internet is always a problem) it won't have so many sites blocked.

I have a student copy of Office 2004 for Mac (my wife's a registered student, but I wasn't asked to provide any proof) and I find it excellent - better than Office 2003. The only thing I haven't been able to find yet is anything as good as ACDSee for image viewing and editing. I take quite a lot of videos with my digital camera and the nice thing about ACDSee is its ability to rotate a video through 90 degrees if you've filmed it with the camera at a different angle. Maybe there's something I can do with iMovie, but haven't had the time to find out yet.

One of our IT guys at work asked why I had bought a Mac when they were all set up for Windows!! But with more and more of us getting Macs, he's just going to learn how to cope with either system on our intranet.

Soggyboxers,

Glad you got to Nigeria with a working MacBook in the end!

Have you tried to connect to the networked printer anyway? If it's on an ethernet network, it should work fine. You can download HP drivers from HP's website. I've used several HP printers over different networks, without difficulty.

iMovie can do image rotation using a plug-in, available here. There are quite a few plug-ins available for iMovie now, and it's worth checking them out.

I recently purchased a Miglia TVMini which was on sale from Apple for about £70, I think normal price is around £90. It's great - it's very small, but it works as a Freeview box and the software which comes with it is EyeTV so the computer effectively becomes a PVR. It also comes with a free 1 year channel listings service so you can easily program it to record programmes etc. I love the feature where you can pause live TV, rewind & fast-forward etc.

You can't get Sky on it, in order for that you have to pay for the more expensive Elgato systems.

Drawbacks are the tiny antenna that comes with it doesn't work well, unless you have a really strong signal where you are, otherwise you really need to plug it into a rooftop aerial.

Hope this helps!

Lord Fulmer,

I will have a go at Opera, I have an older version but have not yet tried any newer ones. The problem with the one at work I think is that it relies on ActiveX controls which will never work on a Mac. It's becoming more and more of an issue though, as even many of our PC users are using things like Firefox now, which doesn't work.

From what I have heard from crew members who used to work for the "Orange" side, the systems over there are much better than ours over here on the "Blue with Red Squiggle" team. Even using a PC with IE 6.0 doesn't work much of the time!!!

Guys, I'm after downloading this Openoffice program on my work Windows machine.

It's bloody excellent!

Seriously, why would you really need Office anymore? Had a quick play with it and it reads my previous Word docs perfectly it seems.

I'm very impressed. I've already ordered MS Office for Mac though..Looking at Neooffice, maybe I shouldn't have??

Well my iMac was delivered yesterday. I'm blown away by it.

It's ease of use is what's blatant. Pressed the on button and it hooked up my
wireless mouse and keyboard immediately!

It then went onto my wireless network and started downloading critical updates before I could even say wow!

The screen is huge and great quality. I'll be playing with it all weekend to try and get to know it, lots to learn get to grips with.

I love the way it goes to sleep so quickly and wakes up in a blink.

Really very impressed.

OneWorld...

Welcome to MacWorld. Making the switch is a decision you'll never regret.

On my iMac G5 I'm running Office for Mac (heavy Excel user) and Mathematica with a couple add-ons for statistics and finance ( http://www.wolfram.com/ ). This stuff runs faster on my fully loaded Mac than it ever did on a Windows OS.

One complaint:

I bought my iMac with the Bluetooth wireless option. It never worked perfectly. When the mouse batteries would get low, the on-scren dialogue box would pop up, tell me the batteries were low, and then *poof* the batteries were dead.

Put in new batteries. Cursor stuck in upper left corner of screen, device not recognized ~ a problem that cannot be diagnosed without the mouse working or without a wired keyboard. Remove and insert batteries a dozen or more times until it finally works. I eventually gave up Bluetooth and now use both a wired keyboard and mouse.

One compliment:

All ~ repeat ALL ~ my experiences with Apple support have been great. Mostly it's been a matter of calling them up to ask, "How do I do this?" not, "I have a problem." They hire cool people and train them well. And, at least in the States, you don't get connected to India!

You're gonna love it.

AppleMacster,
Thanks for the info on the image rotation and the HP website. Just getting the downloads now to see if they work.
One other thing you may be able to help with - the keyborad on my MacBook doesn't have the 'hash' symbol that most keyborads and most mobile telephones have. Is there anything like that 'character set' software which windows has, from which I can select the hash symbol?
Other than a few problems getting used to it (I hate the one button mouse on the trackpad with no right click function - though my little wireless Logitech optical mouse works fine except for the lack of a decent scrolling facility when I try to click on the scroll wheel), I'm impressed with the speed and simplicity of the Apple OS.

Soggy,

Hash, with the keyboard set up as a UK layout is alt-3.

If you go to System Preferences>International>Input Menu, you can setup your the keyboard of choice. In fact, on a Mac, it is very easy to mix different character sets, simply by setting the keyboard you require through a menu at the top of the screen. For example, if you wanted, you could have a page of text in Arabic, Chinese and Bog-standard English.

If you need to locate any characters in the particular font you are using, click "Keyboard Viewer" in the above system preferences panel. Make sure you click the "Show Input Menu in Menubar" option at the bottom. Close the panel and look at the right hand side of the menubar. There should be a flag of the keyboard currently in use.

AppleMacster,
Once again, many thanks for the help. I keep coming across helpful Mac users. It seems that most Macsters are so happy with Macs that they're always willing to help out Mac newbies such as myself, and sell the Mac system to those who enquire about it. I must say, I'm delighted with mine and will look at replacing my desktop system with a Mac when I next upgrade.
:ok:

I'm a bit late coming in on this!
 

I have a Mac G3 B&W, and use it for producing artwork for printing as well as home use.
I do have Microsoft Office, but very rarely use it. I find that with Appleworks and Quark I can accomplish all I need. The only time I use Microsoft is when clients send me what they call a word-perfect file, which invariably I have to sort out to make sense of (Microsoft has made everyone a "graphic designer").
I must admit I have always used a Mac and am a die-hard enthusiast.
Never had a PC, never would. Mac has always seemed so much simpler.
But as already said the choice is yours. Microsaft does work on Mac.

Seems a bit illogical to change from Windows "because its poo..." when you are using a pre-release beta test version of the next O/S. What is wrong with the current release of Windows XP SPII?

Well in all fairness, Vista will basically be a copy of OSX Tiger which has been out a while. Meanwhile Apple is moving to Leopard next Spring, about the same time as Vista is released.

that's the bottom line, Apple always seems to be one step ahead.

XP? Had a plethora of viruses. Even with Nortoin and Zone Alarm pro they still got through. No need to buy any anti-virus/anti-spyware software now.

The Mac just works and is super fast, it's a big difference to be honest.

nothing wrong with MS when it works of course.

My buddy OneWorld has hit the nail on the head perfectly......when MS works. I've just recently purchased an iMac as well (love that 20 inch screen) and have been heard to grumble several thousand times why the hell didn't I do this sooner. SPII security suite gave me the !!!!!s......it's fine and good for complete net novices, but gimme a break. The iMac runs smoother, iMovie and iPhoto are an absolute pleasure to use.

I do sense an increase in nasty stuff that will start popping up for Apple now they're using these dual core thingies and the ability to run Windows on them. Just my 2 cents.

Usually the people who bleat on about how they love Macs miss the same old points:

1. Why is Safari completely pants, OK MS decided to invent some html extensions and javascript manages to accommodate the changes required but for some reason Safari failed to keep up? At last there is a (non Mac) solution for Mac users now.

2. Why did you have problems with your Wintel machines before you converted to Mac - was it becuase you were incapable of not fiddling, or becuase you loved the HUGE choice of free Wintel software that you had, so much that you could not resist downloading lots of junk and screwing up your registry? This is a user problem, not an MS problem.

3. MS is a controlling monopoly that restricts choice? oh right just like Apple: When I buy some music to download I have to get their permission to play it on another computer (and a max of 5 computers only) - what kind of company do you think Apple is...if they had the market share of MS they would now be behaving just like MS.

4. Macs are perceived as more reliable, but this is becuase they have less hardware choice so the system has a limited set of drivers with which it interacts, no other significant reason. Install an MS operating system on a PC with MS office, install a firewall and set the MS auto-update active, don't fiddle, and you will be fine. I am writing this on a PC I got and set up in 1998, I have only added more memory since then, and MS auto-update does everythig I need for the OS and office.

5. Sure you have a unix based OS under the hood, and sure this is fundamentally better than MS, but this is not root cause of your issues, it is how you manage your PC that causes your problems, you can screw up any unix based OS if you fiddle, just as you can a MS OS.

Save your money and get off your high horses :}

Sony batteries, eh? :)

SD

It's all got too much for tallsandwich!

As one who "bleats" on about how much I love my Mac (interesting choice of words there TS!) I'll just remind him that most of us have tried the "saving money" route and the Mac route and that's why we're now shouting it from the rooftops.

I suggest you go looking for forums filled with people who have bought a Mac and returned to Windows. Let us know how you get on, won't you? Apart from those whose lives are dedicated to playing games, you might be struggling.

Cheers from atop the high horse!