People sometimes stare when Microsoft executive Tim McDonough opens his laptop in meetings. But that’s probably normal when someone uses a Mac PowerBook in the center of the Windows world.
The Mac Lovers of Microsoft
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
– Dreamweaver
– JBuilder X soon, JDeveloper, JEdit, Idea
– Virtual PC
– YellowDog Linux on a second partition.
– Microsoft Office for Mac
– No Virus issues
– Code save and encrypted( everything encrypted ).
– Projects are save from spying eyes,
by OS security and obscurity, with a Good Router and Firewall ( Airport ).
I like GoLive better than Dreamweaver, but back to the related story. I’m finally starting to use MS Word, because it’s on the Macs at school. So I think this year will be first MS purchase, Office 2004.
Safari is much better to use than IE, which isn’t hard. With Text Edit and openoffice.org and MPLayerOSX, there isn’t really much of a need most Microsoft apps anymore.
I will also be purchasing Office for students…I can’t wait actualy.
what is really cool is that on the Mac, Office gives you the ability to create a PDF of your work since the Apple print dialoug allows you to print to PDF.
Office on Windows does not have the feature, so you have to purchase Adobe or some freeware stuff which might not be very good.
actualy, MS Office is needed, but I agree that with mPlayer for OS X, Office is all you need (if you are doing a lot of work with Office formats, otherwise OO.o will be ok once they get a stable native aqua interface)
BTW…NeoOffice now uses Java, I certainly hope that tehy are not goign to take a shorter less optimal rout when getting native OO.o on OS X by just making it a java port.
OpenOffice is not java now.
Do you think they will port it to java?
They have no reason to port OOo to Java. That’d be an immense amount of code to port! In fact, a big goal for 2.0 is to support native toolkits like Qt and GTK+, which is a lot harder to do in Java.
That is funny. Ofcourse they make software for mac to.
My business school is making it mandatory that we make files that are openable with MS office. I will be using RTFs (TextEdit) but I think that most of my classmates will be using MS word… urgh. Good thing the university has lisences for MS office.
It’s a free for non-commercial use MacOS X and Windows Swiss Army Knife of office tools that, from my point of view is alot more efficient than M$ Office, just go search for RagTime on macupdate.com or versiontracker.com
cool thanks for that. I think I will try it out and see if it works well. if it does, I might use it on my 10 page research project for my Education Phycology class.
Does it read MS office files and does it write to MS file format?
I like the fact that they allow usage of the software for free for home users (granted you do not get highend stuff and dictionaries but you can get your work done. Besides there is cocoAspell
)
Now if Adobe could do this with InDesign… (well at least make an inDesign elements sort of application
)
PDF export runs on OpenOffice on Windows and Linux as well as mac…
Is nice and all, but I really like Mellel and Mariner Write more, though they aren’t free (cheap). What I really want is something that can edit pdf files and is a word processor. Acrobat pro is not much of a word processor. And Mellel, Mariner Write, and Ragtime can not edit pdfs.
From what I have seen, Microsoft is all about solving problems. Yes they, in general, try to eat their own dogfood, but it looks like they use the best solution for a problem. Like using Akamai’s Linux cache-ing system, for example. Some of their competitor’s are so wrapped up in politics, or idealogy, that they would never do a similiar thing with their competing operating system, no matter how much an advantage it provided to them. And this is why they will never catch up with Microsoft.
My business school is making it mandatory that we make files that are openable with MS office. I will be using RTFs (TextEdit) but I think that most of my classmates will be using MS word… urgh.
Urgh huh?
Please name one word processor better than MS Word when the criteria is “openable by MS Office”. Not silly stuff like plain text files please.
and? the post was about MS Office and the diffrence between the Mac and Windows version.
umm…test edit saves to RTF.
Please name one word processor better than MS Word when the criteria is “openable by MS Office”. Not silly stuff like plain text files please.
Huh? that makes NO sense.
The goal for me is to
(1) Not have to spend the money for MS word
(2) To write a document and distribute it to MS Office users
(3) Open documents from MS office without the need to have MS office
BTW I forgot to mention, the files I need to open are .doc .xls and .ppt files. I am pretty sure that if I ask people to save in an RTF format for me, or a TXT they will flip
Urgh huh?
Please name one word processor better than MS Word when the criteria is “openable by MS Office”. Not silly stuff like plain text files please.
maybe not better at opening but good enough is Corel Wordperfect, and IMHO the interface is MUCH better.I perfer one window for a program no matter how many docs i have open. OO.o sucks for this. IIRC WP doesn’t work w/ wince and/or crossover for linux. if only it did…
PowerPoint Viewer:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=428d5727-4…
Excel Viewer:
http://office.microsoft.com/officeupdate/category.aspx?CategoryID=C…
Word viewer:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9bbb9e60-e…
(if you have windows)
If you have a mac:
Excel: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=4eb83149-9…
Word: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0e56d944-3…
Powerpoint (only 98): http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e25cb1e5-2…
If you have Linux, tough luck I guess.
Take a look at the requirements. the viewers are only for windows!
I have often heard that WordPerfect is one of the best word processor on the Mac, if not the best (at least for lawyers). But where do you find it? Is there an OS X version? I believe it’s not developed anymore.
http://www.panergy-software.com/index.html
icWord (for Word, Powerpoint, AppleWorks…) and icExcel (for Excel, AppleWorks…), $19,95 each.
Ah, guess I screwed up one (or all) of the links in the Mac section.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/search.aspx?DisplayLang=en&Categ…
I typed “mac downloads” in the search bar, not very hard to find.
Actually, Office isn’t all that good at being compatible with Office. Each new version introduces incompatibility with previous ones.
I’m surprised I haven’t heard AbiWord mentioned. It’s a great word processor for someone who doesn’t want all the [currently] slow and bloated nature of OOo.
http://www.abisource.com/
Multi-platform, .doc compatable, GTK2 interface.
Being a Microsoft employee myself, Apple users are not hard to find at the main campus of Microsoft. From time to time I sport my PowerBook around campus and get into the usual discussion with all the other employees, but that’s what makes the job enjoyable! Rubbing a more redefined operating system than Windows.
Got to love proving to those “there is nothing better than Windows” employees doing all my internal work which should be primarily done on PC, on my PowerBook.
Anyway, Microsoft did cough up some money for Apple back in the day, so I think it’s safe to say Microsoft and Apple may have this cover between each other, but behind closed doors I’m sure they respect one another a great deal.
I might have missed a relevant post, but the included, updated TextEdit in Panther opens and creates Microsoft Word Format files.
Also, text formatting tools are mo bettah and so is font handling in Panther.
“When McDonough visits Apple, for example, many of the initial questions about a product are about the user experience — how it looks and feels, why a certain color was chosen, or how a given button works. At Microsoft, conversations tend to start with the underlying technology, or what kinds of protocols were used.
“You learn how to speak both languages,” he said, “and I think it’s the combination of those two things that really makes strong products.”
That about sums up the different cultures. 🙂
Re: Microsoft website
IF you take a moment to go *beyond* the search, you will see that the viewers are not mac compatible, they are only for windows machines
Re: the paid viewers
Not really looking for a paid solution
I noticed that there was no announcement for MAPI Exchange support in Office 2004 which is very disappointing. That oversight seems as if they have given up on it completely. If they don’t there is no reason that Apple doesn’t release their own Office Suite that is fully compatible with MS Office like Keynote.
Yes! Exactly what I thought. I read most of the article and thought blah blah fluff article.
The single most telling bit was as you pointed out. Microsoft focus first on techie stuff whereas Apple look at the user experience first.
Really the user doesn’t give a monkey’s butt what the tech is so it’s nice to see a company looking at things the right way.
Fast. Beautiful interface.
NOT Aqua native.
Never could get it to print.
I am not a fan of MS but Office is decent and the compatibility is good.
I recently opened up my resume that was in Word format in TextEdit. It opened up with my formatting screwed up and my bullets missing. It opened up fine in Office:Mac 2001. I don’t have time for that nonsense and I definitely do not want to send Office documents to PC users and have them open it up and its screwed.
Apple will have to come up with a better solution than TextEdit. Just because it opens up Word documents doesn’t make it a good substitute for Word.
PLEASE! It’s not even on the same page with Word.
My wife just switched to Macintosh and if Office wasn’t available it would not have happened. I don’t think she is alone. Office for Mac is VERY important to Apple and is a KEY application. If we Mac users want a larger install base, embracing Microsoft applications on our platform is a very good place to start.
Office is one of those programs, like Photoshop, that seems to be an industry-standard tool that’s mostly needed by professionals and students in school to become professionals. I would wager that most copies of Office, like Photoshop, are purchased by businesses so that the expense is not that great in the grand scheme of things. It’s seems so expensive because the general demographic actually can afford it.
However, for home users that don’t have work to take home, the expense just isn’t justified and they would be fine with OpenOffice. I have Office 97 on my PC laptop because I use it for work. But my iBook, which I only use at home, doesn’t have it because it’s not used in a work environment.
MS knows that proper Exchange support is probably the only thing that’s preventing lots of people from switching to the Mac platform completely. I believe the Pre OS X version of Office does have actual MAPI support…but those were also the days when Macs could not be taken seriously for business because of OS 8/9.
The funny thing is that MS can still make lots of money on business-type switchers. Think about it…we *already* have a PC and paid for Windows and Office once. Now, you have to shell out another $500 to Microsoft to get Office Pro with Virtual PC…so now you’ve paid for Windows and Office twice. Ironically, this is probably what my Be, Inc. settlement check is going towards.