Question on MS Office on my Mac ...

Bear with me as I am a long time PC user who switched to mac about a year ago. I have an imac with Office mac/2004 (student & teacher edition) loaded on it. This has worked well for me.

Now tho I have been offered a virtual position where I would need MS Outlook, which is not part of my package. Can MS Outlook for mac be purchased separately or would I need to repurchase the entire MS Office suite?

Many thanks for any responses!
Pam

There is no Mac version of Outlook.

You may have to install Windows on your Mac and run Outlook from there.

PamelaG36 said:

Bear with me as I am a long time PC user who switched to mac about a year ago. I have an imac with Office mac/2004 (student & teacher edition) loaded on it. This has worked well for me.

Now tho I have been offered a virtual position where I would need MS Outlook, which is not part of my package. Can MS Outlook for mac be purchased separately or would I need to repurchase the entire MS Office suite?

Many thanks for any responses!
Pam

Click to expand...

Why dont you use Entourage? That is what we install for our employees who have Macs. It works well with MS Exchange.

I was forced to switch from a nice "open" system that didn't have strict OS/client requirements to exhcange/outlook. I tried to put up with Entourage, but I just couldn't stand it. It's not "outlook for mac." It's more like the red-headed step-child.

It doesn't communicate natively (MAPI) with Exchange; it uses the Outlook Web Access that is part of Exchange, so things are ok with it, but no as good as the MAPI connection from Outlook.

It also doesn't support the GAL in the traditional way. It uses LDAP and I found it to be extremely frustrating. Maybe things weren't set-up right where I work (exchange is relatively new here). Finding names was almost impossible and I found I had to know the smtp address of someone whom I rarely communicated with or I had to create my own contact for that person.

As it is now I run Windows via Parallels in coherence mode and run Outlook in that VM.

You could simply use Outlook Web Access, but without IE it will behave much like Yahoo or any other web-based email; no new message notification and such. You have to consciously check for new mail. Now in IE, OWA looks and behaves very much like the standard Outlook client...I'm actually impressed with it...except you need Windows. Yeah, I'm bitter....forced to run Windows just to have a functional email client when the Sun ONE server/Thunderbird combo worked flawlessly.

Microsoft promises Entourage 2008 will suck dramatically less.

And you know Microsoft...their promises are as good as....






...well, so much for that.

jc1350 said:

I was forced to switch from a nice "open" system that didn't have strict OS/client requirements to exhcange/outlook. I tried to put up with Entourage, but I just couldn't stand it. It's not "outlook for mac." It's more like the red-headed step-child.

It doesn't communicate natively (MAPI) with Exchange; it uses the Outlook Web Access that is part of Exchange, so things are ok with it, but no as good as the MAPI connection from Outlook.

It also doesn't support the GAL in the traditional way. It uses LDAP and I found it to be extremely frustrating. Maybe things weren't set-up right where I work (exchange is relatively new here). Finding names was almost impossible and I found I had to know the smtp address of someone whom I rarely communicated with or I had to create my own contact for that person.

As it is now I run Windows via Parallels in coherence mode and run Outlook in that VM.

Click to expand...

It is true, Outlook is something that is sorely missed when switching to Mac, especially if you use it as a professional. I used Outlook for 8 years on PC, although only for personal emails, so I could make the transition to Entourage. My work uses Lotus Notes, and if you think Entourage is bad, try that for giggles.

Entourage 2008 is supposed to work a LOT better with Exchange and MS networks... note that the Home/Student version does not include Exchange compatibility, which is fair enough.

technologist said:

Microsoft promises Entourage 2008 will suck dramatically less.

And you know Microsoft...their promises are as good as....


...well, so much for that.

Click to expand...

It doesn't appear that will be true...at least not to the end user. The list of what's missing is still quite long (still uses web access, can't schedule resources, no MAPI to name a few).

http://judismith.wordpress.com/2007/09/21/entourage-2008-still-a-second-class-exchange-citizen/

quoted from the article...and exactly what I think:

All of this taken together makes it seem that Entourage will still be a very second class citizen when it comes to Exchange. Perhaps that is Microsoft’s strategy to continue to control the desktop market. If they made a real Exchange client for the Mac, why would we need Windows?

Click to expand...