office on bootcamp or office for mac?

hi all,
im about to buy a macbook with leopard and wanted to know whether there are any reasons why i shouldnt just run office for windows that i already have on windows through bootcamp, as opposed to buying mac for office. the reason i dont particularly want mac for office is im a student and alot of my tutorials teach excel, and that is office 2003 for windows, so i may have trouble getting around office for mac? i also already have a copy of windows and office i can install straight away...
thanks for your help in advance,
owen

phillox said:

hi all,
im about to buy a macbook with leopard and wanted to know whether there are any reasons why i shouldnt just run office for windows that i already have on windows through bootcamp, as opposed to buying mac for office. the reason i dont particularly want mac for office is im a student and alot of my tutorials teach excel, and that is office 2003 for windows, so i may have trouble getting around office for mac? i also already have a copy of windows and office i can install straight away...
thanks for your help in advance,
owen

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You can install Office 2003 for Windows on Boot Camp, but keep in mind that each time you want to use Office, you'll need to shut down Mac OS and then boot up Windows.

My advice would be just to install NeoOffice (free), see how you like it and how well its features gel with your lessons. If you find that it doesn't work out, you can always go the Boot Camp route and consider Office 2008 for Mac (which should be released in the next few months).

Yeah, try something besides Office first. It'll be better. If you find you MUST use Office (doubtful), buy Office for Mac. Boot Camp definitely isn't worth it, and productivity suites are used often enough by most people that even virtual machine software (e.g. Fusion, Parallels) is a hassle.

How about another solution: Office on VMWare.

If you are running VM Fusion, you can run your XP-specific apps natively, and even drag-n-drop to the OS-X desktop. Beats having to reboot the machine constantly. ;-)

I must use Windows at times ( couple times a month ) Parallels runs it fine along with MS Office

Reel1 said:

I must use Windows at times ( couple times a month ) Parallels runs it fine along with MS Office

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I tend to agree, if you must use the Windows version of Office, Parallels is probably the best, albeit most expensive, avenue (Fusion works too, but Parallels is a more mature and feature-rich product at the moment).

you're a student, so unless you're in the freak 1% that won the lottery, you're probably short on cash.

you have windows, you have office, bootcamp is free (for now), just use bootcamp. sure, you'll have to reboot yer computer whenever you want to use office, but it's up to you if that's an $80 nuisance. there's no reason to not try it for free before blowing $80+ on another option.

spiccy said:

you're a student, so unless you're in the freak 1% that won the lottery, you're probably short on cash.

you have windows, you have office, bootcamp is free (for now), just use bootcamp. sure, you'll have to reboot yer computer whenever you want to use office, but it's up to you if that's an $80 nuisance. there's no reason to not try it for free before blowing $80+ on another option.

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I agree.

I like having a bootcamp partition. You can run Windows natively if you need to.

And if you decide you want to spend the cash on a VM product, you can access your bootcamp partition with VMWare Fusion, and I believe, Parallels.

Office for Mac usually has more features than its Windows counterpart, however I have found in the past that Office is more stable on Windows (Office X was a pig; it's got a lot better with Office 2004, but we'll just have to wait and see about Office 2008).

NeoOffice/OpenOffice will probably suffice, and are free.

iWork 08 is my personal choice, but as you'll be following tutorials based around MS Office it's probably not ideal in your circumstances.

My advice is to try as many as you can (your Mac should come with MS Office [trial] pre-installed, and will definitely come with iWork [trial] pre-installed. You say you already have Office for Windows, and the others are free so there's no reason not to try them all).

why not try Crossover.... you dont need windows os, dont need bootcamp... dont need vmware ... just need crossover and Office 2003.... runs very smoothly for me.

Office 2003/2007 on windows is MUCH better and much nicer than office 2004 for mac. If you want a word processor for mac I would recommend apples iWork Suit which has "pages", "keynote" and "numbers" the mac equivalent to word, powerpoint and excel. I still dont think they are as good as word 07 but it is nicer than office for mac 04. iWok can also open up microsoft office files

If you are a student and will be learning Excel in class,I would use Office for Windows. If you can do both, why not.