Software questions for switch

I am seriously looking at switching to mac and just have a few questions regarding the ease of switching the software programs I use.

Word & Excel- Should I get Office for Mac or IWork? I will need to convert documents/spreadsheets often between the two OS, which programs in Mac would make that the easiest?

Turbotax- from what I've read the conversion between versions isn't too difficult for this program

Quicken- This looks like a disaster on Mac, so considering iBank or moneydance. Needed primarily for following inverstment portfolio, not day to day banking needs.

Thanks for your help convincing me switching to a MAc with these software programs will be rather seamless. Thanks

The only one I have experience with in your list is the first - MS Office.
There is a great FREE application for Mac (and one for Windows) called OpenOffice
There is another similar FREE application called NeoOffice and I think the users of these forums are about 50/50 split between who prefers which one. But from what I hear they are comparable and quite adequate for spread sheets, word processing, and "power point" type presentations. Might as well try them out first before buying anything since they are absolutely free.

Also on the Office question: Documents don't necessarily need to be converted to work on them on both Windows and OS X. MS Office documents are the same on both Windows and Mac, and can be opened without any trouble with Office for Mac.

That said, I still recommend iWork, as it is cheaper than Office, and you can export document from it into Word, Excel, & Powerpoint formats. The free options mentioned above are, in my experience, just not very nice to use.

If you're concerned about compatibility, I would stick with MS Office for the Mac. As far as iWork goes, yes it's a bit less expensive than MS Office but not by much considering the Home and Student version of MS Office 2008 can be found for around $100 or so on the web. LINK Open Office is free.

TurboTax - The Mac version works great. No problem there.

Quicken - The Mac version is "so so" compared to the Windows version and most agree that it is inferior. But there are good alternatives. MoneyDance and others...

And if you should find that your favorite Windows program is not available for OS X, you can always run Windows on your Mac.

Regards.

I you are doing documents, spreadsheets, etc., between a Windows platform (at work, say) and your home Mac, I'd go with MS Office for glitch free compatibility. Office for Mac is just enough different in user interface from the Win version to **** you off, but it works well.

Quicken for Mac just sux and isn't worth the dough. I was a loooonnnggg time Quicken Win user and the Mac version is not the same program -- don't ask me why Intuit won't true them up.

Get Office. I have both Office and iWork. Documents originally formatted in .doc file can be open with iWork Page, but I had one with outline format but Pages had a difficult time keeping the format when trying to manipulate changes.

I didn't see any mention of the expected release of Office for Mac 2011 later this year, supposedly in time for Christmas shopping. Just so you know...

toMACsh said:

I didn't see any mention of the expected release of Office for Mac 2011 later this year, supposedly in time for Christmas shopping. Just so you know...

Click to expand...

Wait and get Office 2011 if you can. I have not liked iWork at all. Pages doesn't do what i need it to when it comes to formatting papers. I especially dislike Numbers.

For spreadsheets I have used Neooffice with no problems sharing the files between co-workers. Like Pages, Neooffice doesn't always play nice with word documents. There are formatting issues that both programs don't handle well with word documents.

It comes down to what you are doing with your documents. I would give Neooffice a try since its free.

So far I like Moneywell over Moneydance. I don't need anything as complex as Moneydance as I am more interested in just budgeting. I don't think you could go wrong with Moneydance