Mac mini problems with Word Mac

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My office just switched to Mac minis from PCs. We have the newest Intel versions with Leopard. I'm having a lot of trouble with Microsoft Word which we use for documents This is a business - using other software is not an option.

When I'm typing a document, I can frequently get 12-15 characters ahead of what is displayed on the screen, and I am not a fast typist. This is highly annoying and leads to many errors. Additionally, when I search for a word in a document using command-f, the dialog box appears, but it will not accept typing in a search string. I have to close the document, reopen it, and the hit command-f again. Then it will allow me to enter a search string.

What is going on?
 
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Aluminium Macbook 2.4 Ghz 4GB RAM, SSD 24" Samsung Display, iPhone 4, iPad 2
Are you using Office 2004? That is not optimized to run on intel processors, so it's a bit slow.

The latest version, Office 2008 is a fair bit quicker and less buggy.

This is a business - using other software is not an option.
The company I work for uses iWork '08 exclusively. You can open all current Office formats and we've never really run into compatibility issues.

Obviously depending on the size of the company, changing software packages might not be feasible due to the retraining required, but I'd at least consider it if you haven't already.
 
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Thanks,
Yes, it's Office 2004. I guess I'll have to put up with it until 2008 gets here.
John
 
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Why, being a business.., warrents only using Microsoft products?
 
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Have you updated to the latest version of Office 2004 (Currently 11.3.9, though the individual programs will probably have lower numbers?) Older versions of Office are buggier under Leopard.
 
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Using Microsoft products because we write documents that have to be sent electronically to other businesses that have almost no technical knowledge. The documents must absolutely be compatible with their systems, which are almost exclusively Windows machines. There can be absolutely no problem with the customers being able to click on a document and have it open. Even clicking on the document is a technical issue for many of these people. We can't risk there being an issue.

It's up to us to make things as easy as possible for our clients, and if it means inconvenience for us, so be it. If it were just for me, I'd write everything in EMACS like I did in 1982. Ha.

It is the latest upgrade of Word 04. We have found buried on Microsoft's site a page that seems to discuss this being a somewhat known issue. It looks as though I'll just have to put up with it until the Universal edition of Word ships.
Thanks for your help,
John
 
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The documents must absolutely be compatible with their systems, which are almost exclusively Windows machines. There can be absolutely no problem with the customers being able to click on a document and have it open. Even clicking on the document is a technical issue for many of these people. We can't risk there being an issue.

In that case, Word is the last program you should use. Word is notorious for not working between versions or with different fonts installed.

If you want a document to look the same on any PC, use a PDF.
 

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