file formats

Hi
Before making the switch to Mac I emailed my 11 year old son's new school to ask about IT compatibility.
The response was:
"" we are completely PC based standardising on Microsoft Office. It is obviously easier for students if they have the same at home because they can easily transfer work to school and access their school network area via the college website. It has been my experience that students with Macs at home have had problems with coursework when they get to GCSE and A-level (obviously a long way off at the moment. Our immediate aims for the future are to make curriculum lesson materials available on the college website, these would of course be Office based and not accessible to Macs.""

So i replied querying whether these perceived issues would be elimnated if the Mac was running Ms Office for Macs?
The reply was:
""The answer to your question is that I don’t know. If the file formats are the same then in theory there should be no problem but I do not have any experience in this area. If the file formats are different then you would also have problems later if you wanted to access curriculum resources via the college website.""

My (basic) understanding was that the file formats were compatible and that an OSX Mac would not have any issues communicating with MS pc's. I'd appreciate some inputs with this
Thanks

Microsoft Office for PC (format wise) = Microsoft Office for Mac OSX (format wise)

You'll be fine

A .doc is a .doc, no matter which OS you are using :mac:

I freely transfer Word documents and Excel spreadsheets between Windows, Mac and Linux (use Abiword and gnumeric as Word, Excel standins there) and it works just fine. Don't worry...

I actually took an online writing course at my college (writing for managers to be exact) and all our work was done in Microsoft Word and emailed to our instructor. I was using a PC at the time while my instructor was using a mac. The cool thing about the mac version of Word is that you can insert internal comments (in our case, for critiquing our papers) into the word document you are looking at. It was a great help for this class.

Rock Hardwell said:

I actually took an online writing course at my college (writing for managers to be exact) and all our work was done in Microsoft Word and emailed to our instructor. I was using a PC at the time while my instructor was using a mac. The cool thing about the mac version of Word is that you can insert internal comments (in our case, for critiquing our papers) into the word document you are looking at. It was a great help for this class.

Click to expand...

You can do the same thing on Windows. Office is Office is Office... makes no difference if its on Windows or Mac. Its the same thing for both.

D3v1L80Y said:

You can do the same thing on Windows. Office is Office is Office... makes no difference if its on Windows or Mac. Its the same thing for both.

Click to expand...

Ahh. I guess I had just never seen the whole comment thing on the PC version of Word.

Yah you can do it on both i had prof. with windows that did it and same for macs... it was really helpful.

Tell them to use .RTF then pretty much anyone with anything can access the file.