Office 2004 questions

dfryerdfryer
Posted:
in Mac Software edited January 2014
My father, a long time user of MS Word 5.1, has owned a (slightly haunted) G3 iMac for several years, and recently purchased an eMac. Word 5 is unable to communicate effectively with modern versions of Word (97, XP, 200X) and so he's looking into upgrading.



However, he tried the "trial version" of Word 2004 on the iMac, and found it to be horribly slow. Supposedly this is due to them switching to Apple's new type rendering system, instead of relying on Quickdraw. The 30-day trial period on the eMac ran out before he was even thinking about upgrading, and so he's out of luck w.r.t trying it out on the faster (1ghz g4) machine.



Does anyone here use Word 2004? Is it slow?



One possibility that he brought up was to use an older version of Word/Office (v.X? Or was there another one between X and 2004?) just for speed reasons. Are there any compelling reasons to go 2004, especially with regards to file format compatibility?



Thanks!

Daniel

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 3
    telomartelomar Posts: 1,804member
    Well if your father is anything like me and works in a cross PC mac environment the compatibility reports alone will make it worth while to go for 2004. Can't tell you how many times I've opened up stuff on a PC to see giant red boxed X's.



    As for speed it has been my experience that 2004 is actually faster than X so not sure what happened when he tested it but even on slow hardware I've found it fine.
  • Reply 2 of 3
    progmacprogmac Posts: 1,850member
    i would recommend buying office v.X. it does everything i need it to (i work in a mac / pc environment) and runs nicely. plus, he'll save a couple hundred. it's a word processor for heaven's sake. if it weren't for the necessity of OS X compatibility, i would recommend Office 98.
  • Reply 3 of 3
    b8rtm8nnb8rtm8nn Posts: 55member
    It is slower than Office X, maybe after a service pack will it be faster.
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