MS to offer new Office for Macs

[258cib]

Microsoft said Tuesday it is taking preorders for its Microsoft Office 2004 suite for Macintosh, which will be released to manufacturers April 14. The software will be available to the public by the third week of May.

The new suite replaces Microsoft Office v. X for Mac, which includes Word, Excel and PowerPoint; the latest version of Entourage, Internet Explorer for Mac; MSN for Mac OS X, MSN Messenger for Mac and Virtual PC for Mac.

[seattle.bizjournals.com...]

Believe it or not, Excel is all I use. The textEdit is fine for me on documents. I have an old Powerpoint on "classic." Still, I'm thinking I need to spend the $300 for this. But, I can't figure out why.

[Macguru]

I can't either figure out why.

[openoffice.org...]

[timster]

The only reason I have to use Office is to open documents people send me, and then convert them to something else. In other words:

"I was only in there to get directions on how to get away from there."
-Seymour Skinner, The Simpsons

Are the file formats going to change again? If so, what's the cheapest way of dealing with the new formats?

[Brad]

>>The only reason I have to use Office is to open documents people send me, and then convert them to something else.

timster, have you looked into AppleWorks - I think it opens most Word docs and may well open other MSOffice files too? OpenOffice should do it too although I have not tried this whole X11 bit yet.

[aaronjf]

Personally I love Entourage. I just wish Apple would have made and integrated PIM out of all the apps they provided: Mail, Calender, etc.

[dragonlady7]

Apple Works has trouble sometimes. I've got a (shhh) pirate copy of Word just to deal with the stuff that the ignorant send to me.

But then, I hated Word even when I used a Windows box, so maybe I'm just exceptionally vehement. ;)

[pleeker]

I have a Word letterhead file with our company's logo (in GIF format) at the top. AppleWorks doesn't read the logo graphic when I try to open the letterhead -- only works in Word.

Likewise, TextEdit isn't quite accurate enough for me in reading all the formatting Word documents often have.

MS is very good at making products that don't play well with others. AppleWorks and TextEdit do pretty well, but sometimes not good enough.

[your_store]

I can't either figure out why.

I use Open Office a ton, but it is definitely not up to par w/ MS Office. The price is nice, but you lose the savings when you take into account how often the spreadsheet program crashes.

Of course, maybe I've just had it misconfigured for the last year.