Microsoft Office

[Gocho]

Quick question -

I'm planning on purchasing a Windows operating system sooner or later to run certain games on, either via Bootcamp or Parallels. Given this, I'm curious whether I should choose to buy Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac or 2010 for Windows. I'm looking to run only Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, so I'll be using the student version either way.

Are there any notable issues with either version that might make one superior to the other? Or are they roughly the same? For instance, I'm aware that Office 2007 for Mac did not support macros. I'm looking for information about whether there are similar shortcomings in the 2011 version.

Thanks for the information!

 

[schweb]

Just go with Office 2011 Mac. Less headache and fully compatible.

 

[Gocho]

Thanks, that's certainly one aspect to consider, but I'm looking to find out whether there are any important functionality differences between the two programs (IE, "2010 does x but 2011 simply does not do x").

 

[SammySlim]

I have found very few side-by-side comparisons online, here is one: Office for the Mac: The Same, Only Different

Honestly, the functionality is about the same from my experience but the interface is different, at least on the simple things I use it for day to day. Power users may find bigger differences buried in there...

Another point for you to consider - if you decide to run Windows on your machine, you might consider using a virtual machine installation rather than a Boot Camp installation, particularly if Office is one of your primary uses. And if you run a virtual machine, such as via Sun's VirtualBox (free), you can run Office 2010 on your Mac desktop seamlessly. Same with Fusion or Parallels. No mucking about with rebooting.

If you need full graphics card access, such as for heavy gaming, CAD, etc., then that's different but even then, you can create a virtual machine from your Boot Camp installation and still run the Office suite that way.

That is, if you prefer Office 2010 to the Mac office 2011 version.

Cheers

 

[HelpdeskRules]

It all depends on how compatible you want to be - I guess Microsoft will say their 100% compatible but in my experience there tend to be a few differences.

At work we're mainly a Lenovo house but we do have 3 or 4 Macs dotted around the place which have Office for Mac on them. Every now and again we'll get a support call come in asking for a file to be restored (normally large Excel spreadsheets) as some things have either gone missing or have stopped working - they have lots of formulas and calculations going on and their seems to be some discrepancies when using a Mac and a PC to edit the same files.

Personally I dont do anything fancy in Word or Excel etc. so I have Office for Mac at home and use the PC version at work.

I find Windows to be noisy and OSX to be much quieter so although I have VMWare Fusion with Windows XP installed, I try to use it as little as possible.

 

[iHarrison]

I'm planning on purchasing a Windows operating system sooner or later to run certain games on, either via Bootcamp or Parallels.

If you want Windows for gaming, use BootCamp to do a native install. The kind of virtual machine Parallels & Apps like it create can't access your Mac's GPU fast enough for high-quality graphics.

I'm curious whether I should choose to buy Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac or 2010 for Windows. I'm looking to run only Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, so I'll be using the student version either way.

Are there any notable issues with either version that might make one superior to the other? Or are they roughly the same?

Well, there are literally one or two things that Office 2010 can do that Office:mac 2011 can't, but they're high-end business-class functions that 99.8% of home & student users would never be particularly aware were even there, let alone make use of!

Office:mac will be more than sufficient for anything personal or academic you might want to do. (Well, unless you're at university doing a computer science degree!)

The other thing to take into consideration is convenience. While I would say the interfaces of the PC and Mac versions are pretty-much on an even footing for ease of use, consider this; re-booting your Mac into Windows to do a few hours of PC gaming is fair enough, but do you really want to need to re-boot your computer every time you want to do a bit of word processing (& subsequently re-boot again to get back to OSX)?

Thanks for the information!

You're welcome

 

[Dysfunction]

Well, there are literally one or two things that Office 2010 can do that Office:mac 2011 can't, but they're high-end business-class functions that 99.8% of home & student users would never be particularly aware were even there, let alone make use of!

Just curious, what have you run into?

I know there were significant issues with 2008/2010 (thanks to MS ditching VBA support for 08.) but I wasn't really aware of this issue between the 10/11 delta

 

[iHarrison]

Just curious, what have you run into?

I know there were significant issues with 2008/2010 (thanks to MS ditching VBA support for 08.) but I wasn't really aware of this issue between the 10/11 delta

Taken from a (fairly) reliable source:

"Office for Mac 2011 has a few limitations compared to Office 2010 for Windows. It does not support ActiveX controls, OpenDocument Format, or right-to-left languages such as Arabic, Persian and Hebrew. It also cannot handle attachments in Rich Text Format e-mail messages sent from Outlook for Windows, which are delivered as winmail.dat attachments."

So, as you can see, there's not too much that most users would miss...

ActiveX tends to be more trouble than it's worth, if someone sends you an ODF file the simple option is just to have a copy of OpenOffice tucked-away somewhere for converting to DOC, and I dare say most people on this forum wouldn't need to write right-to-left particularly often (& if you did have OpenOffice installed, I'm pretty sure it can handle RtL text, so you could use that as a fall-back). The only thing that might be an issue would be the no RTF E-mail support, but that could be got-around simply by using your Mac's own Mail App.