Office for MAC 2011

I have a MBP and a PC at work. I think my PC has MS Office 2007. While I have Windows loaded on my MBP, as everyone here knows, MACs don't work well in Windows. The mouse is particularly a problem. So I thought I would break down and get Office for MAC. Does anyone know if I will have trouble going back and forth since the editions are so far apart in terms of year of issue? Thanks.

 

The biggest incompatibilities anyone can have are going back and forth between Word 2003 for Win XP and Word 2010 for Win 7. Those two editions are aggravating as all hell. I think Word 2007 forward is going to work well with each other, regardless of operating system. It's the pre-2007 stuff where you start running into problems on both ends.

 

Are you using all of office or just word, excel? I have MS Office 2007 and the starter which came with my vaio, and they aren't light years different. Excel might be a little different and powerpoint added some features to the default 2007 built.

I think someone on this site mentioned about problems with macros, but I wouldn't know as I don't use them right now.

 

Mostly I use Word and Powerpoint

 

Hi,

I recently made the transition from PC to Mac, but am running the windows version of Office on my MBP. I do a lot of financial modeling, so Excel is what I use most...followed by PowerPoint and Word.

If you want to maintain as much "fidelity" (as Microsoft calls it) between your docs at work and at home, I strongly urge you to stick with Windows Office on your home MBP. First, there are some incompatibilities between the Windows and Mac versions of Office. You may never encounter them...most are related to macros/VBA (Microsoft crippled some VBA commands in the Mac version) and those nifty ActiveX controls like command buttons and sliders that can be added to worksheets without having to know anything about VBA.

For my work, that alone kept me away from Mac Office as a lot of my dashboard spreadsheets just could not run in Mac Office.

The second issue is the learning curve. The Mac Office is slightly different. Some things it does a whole lot better. Bottom line: how much time are you willing to dedicate to run up a learning curve?

Finally, you need to consider what kind of Mac support you may need from your IT folks at work. If you run into a problem working on a work doc on your Mac, do you want to be able to tap out your work's IT support?

As for the mouse problem you mention, I currently have zero problems using either the Apple Magic Mouse (though the form-factor is ergonomically terrible) or a Logitech M510.

Good luck!

Lawrence

 

While Apple's native Windows trackpad drivers aren't very good, you can get around that by running your Windows installation through Parallels or VMWare Fusion. This way you'd be able to get the full Office for Windows experience while maintaining your Mac functionality.

 

I've been back-and-forthing between Office for Mac 2008, Win Office 2003 and 2010 for awhile. As SilverSkysurfer said, some macros don't work on mac, but if you have the compatibility packs installed I find that's taken care of a lot of the issues.

 

Office 2011 also fixed a bunch of macro incompatibilities that Excel and Word had. Of course, that has caused some issues for me but they are being ironed out. For example, there is one Excel macro that I run. It was written for strict compatibility with Excel 2007 and then later Excel 2010. It runs fine in Excel 2011 but, whenever the file is saved and opened in Excel 2010 on Windows, it causes some formatting issues. They aren't bad but the cell spaces tend to be a little wider so that the spreadsheet no longer fits on one page.

The person who wrote the macro is trying to fix it but things basically work in Excel 2011 (with that example) whereas previous version of Excel for Mac would not work with that macro (I don't think they even natively worked with any macros).