Do I need Office for the Mac?
OK, I am a switcher. My iMac is shipped and on the way. Do I need Microsoft Office for the Mac? Or can I get away with Apple Works? I don't really care as I use apps like Office very little at home, but my wife is a college teacher and uses Excel for her grades, Word to read/print student papers, and PowerPoint for presenations that she burns to CD and plays on the PC in her classroom. What is the deal here? I don't want to spend the $150 on it if I don't have to. Less M$ is better IMO. Thanks.
Comments
But as such, you would have to spend the money on M$ Office, or on Apple's Keynote application (which will take care of PowerPoint files).
At that point, it's your money and who you give it to can be philosophical or practical (in terms of the discounts you get from M$ buying educational).
Six of one, half dozen the other.
I was hooked instantly on Keynote, and PowerPoint now lies rotting in a dusty corner of my hard drive. But there's no sense in using Keynote if you need to convert your presentations to PowerPoint to play on a PC. You lose all the "wow" effects that make Keynote so cool. Once she gets hooked on the Mac, and decides to buy an iBook for work, then introduce her to Keynote.
I am working on getting her to accept an iBook for Christmas (man you can get good deals on iBooks on eBay). The new iMac will wet her appitite for an iBook methinks!
The problem is that through her University, they charge $150 for Office Educational Edition, and I found that I can get it cheaper from places on the net. Perhaps she is not asking the right folks though. Or maybe I can do better with an edu discount at the Apple Store.
I wish I had ordered Keynote with my iMac now. I now regret not getting Keynote or Bluetooth, but that'll give me stuff to buy and do for several months to come.
Originally posted by slu
The problem is that through her University, they charge $150 for Office Educational Edition, and I found that I can get it cheaper from places on the net. Perhaps she is not asking the right folks though. Or maybe I can do better with an edu discount at the Apple Store.
You may not be asking for the right thing. Here, we can purchase a license-only (literally just the registration code, purely ephemeral) for about $50 from the Bookstore. But it has to be done through a department, billed to a University budget number. They'll throw in a physical CD for another $15, so you can actually install the thing. We saved a lot of money by buying one CD for the whole lab and as many license codes as we have machines. It may be what we're actually doing is buying additional seats on the University's site license, and your wife's university may not have a similar option - I don't know the details.
The personal academic shrink-wrapped version costs about $150 here, too - but that's something different.
Also, I would request papers from students in rtf format.
For me the hardest Microsoft product to get rid of has been Excel, but for simple functions like calculating grades, AppleWorks should be fine. I think there are also some freeware/shareware grade book programs around.
Originally posted by JBL
What kind of stuff does she do with PowerPoint? If it isn't very fancy, you could just save files to pdf and play them in Acrobat on the PC. ...
Word against Powerpoint is just flogging dead horses
Now, with that said, I own Office 2004, but use Nisus Writer Express for my writing. It's cheap ($59), opens most of the files I throw at it, and doesn't get in the way of my writing like Word does. But I keep Word around mostly for compatibility issues (I'm an academic, too), even though I find I need it less and less.
You might look into MacLink Plus, which will translate just about anything to anything else. Well worth the money, especially if you're wife's Uni, like mine, has standardized on something like WordPerfect.
Originally posted by midwinter
Now, with that said, I own Office 2004, but use Nisus Writer Express for my writing. It's cheap ($59), opens most of the files I throw at it, and doesn't get in the way of my writing like Word does.
midwinter, does Nisus Writer Express now do format tags like WordPerfect used to? Can you choose to see them embedded in the text as you write?
Originally posted by Towel
midwinter, does Nisus Writer Express now do format tags like WordPerfect used to? Can you choose to see them embedded in the text as you write?
I don't believe so.
Originally posted by JBL
Also, I would request papers from students in rtf format.
I don't think that rtf preserves footnotes (which a lot of disciplines still use).
Originally posted by dylanw23
I don't think that rtf preserves footnotes (which a lot of disciplines still use).
It doesn't.
Originally posted by dylanw23
I don't think that rtf preserves footnotes (which a lot of disciplines still use).
TextEdit doesn't read footnotes but if you save a word document with footnotes as rtf Nisus Writer Express will correctly import the footnotes and if you create a Nisus Writer Express document (default format is rtf) with footnotes and open it in Word, Word will correctly read the footnotes. I understand that rtf is a little loose as a specification, but it seems to me that, in practice, rtf perserves footnotes well enough for the proposed use.
Originally posted by JBL
TextEdit doesn't read footnotes but if you save a word document with footnotes as rtf Nisus Writer Express will correctly import the footnotes and if you create a Nisus Writer Express document (default format is rtf) with footnotes and open it in Word, Word will correctly read the footnotes. I understand that rtf is a little loose as a specification, but it seems to me that, in practice, rtf perserves footnotes well enough for the proposed use.
I believe that's only in Word's special version of RTF.
Originally posted by midwinter
I believe that's only in Word's special version of RTF.
Well, you can save files with footnotes as rtf in Nisus Writer Express, Word, and Mellel. Any of those three applications can open any of those rtf files and see those footnotes. It looks to me like if it is "Word's special version of RTF" it is used by a lot more than just Word.
Originally posted by JBL
Well, you can save files with footnotes as rtf in Nisus Writer Express, Word, and Mellel. Any of those three applications can open any of those rtf files and see those footnotes. It looks to me like if it is "Word's special version of RTF" it is used by a lot more than just Word.
OK. I was wrong.
$40 for the suite.
I think the url is openoffice.org
I'm hoping to buy myself a laptop around Christmas, and when I do, I'll be picking up a copy of Office Student/Teacher Edition at the same time.
Originally posted by Chagi
I'm not a huge Microsoft fan, but for business use, I think that MS Office is pretty much a mandatory purchase. I'm a University student doing my B.Comm, and Excel in particular is used a great deal.
I'll agree that, for many purposes including mine, there is no real alternative to Excel that has an Aqua interface (gnumeric and OpenOffice probably work but I haven't dealt with them extensively). However, for grades Excel is really overkill. Any of the half dozen alternative spreadsheets will do.
I meant to point you to http://openosx.com
Their office suite is Aquafied, and they have other neato tools as well.
check under the products link.
HTH
Originally posted by jccbin
Their office suite is Aquafied, and they have other neato tools as well.
I am not sure what it means to be "Aquafied" but looking at the screen shots, all of these applications are running under X11. You will notice, for example, that the menus for gnumeric and abiword are attacted to the windows, not to the top of the screen as they would be under a true Aqua application. It is not immediately obvious to me what the OpenOSX people are adding over and above what you can get for free from fink.