Do I even need bootcamp or Parallels?

Joined
May 29, 2007
Messages
21
Reaction score
0
Points
1
I will be ordering a MacBook Pro after the new specs are announced at WWCD (hopefully). This will be my first Mac after owning several Dell notebooks and an IBM notebook.

I will use this notebook at work where we rely heavily on Excel, Word, Outlook (email), and connecting to our network (shared drives and printers). If I buy Office 2004 for Mac, will I be able to accomplish all of these things without encountering compatibility problems? Or is it better to run Boot Camp or Parallels?

Thanks for helping out a Mac newcomer. Cheers.
 
Joined
Apr 25, 2003
Messages
1,301
Reaction score
62
Points
48
Location
The home of the free and the land that did for Bra
Your Mac's Specs
24"iMac, 15"MB-Pro, MacBook, G4 iMac, PM G5 2x2Ghz, G4 iBook & Some PCs
I will be ordering a MacBook Pro after the new specs are announced at WWCD (hopefully). This will be my first Mac after owning several Dell notebooks and an IBM notebook.

I will use this notebook at work where we rely heavily on Excel, Word, Outlook (email), and connecting to our network (shared drives and printers). If I buy Office 2004 for Mac, will I be able to accomplish all of these things without encountering compatibility problems? Or is it better to run Boot Camp or Parallels?

Thanks for helping out a Mac newcomer. Cheers.

Don't buy anything, download OpenOffice or NeoOffice for free.

Amen-Moses
 
Joined
May 25, 2007
Messages
64
Reaction score
1
Points
8
Location
PA
Your Mac's Specs
17" 2.0GHz C2D iMac, 2.5GB RAM || 2GHz C2D Macbook White, 2GB RAM || PowerMac G4 533MHz, 1GB RAM
You should be just fine with your MBP and OSX. Entourage (included in the 04 Office Suite) is more-or-less Outlook for OSX and from what I've read is compatible with Outlook import/exports. As far as networking, Mac's are real good about picking up other nodes and shared devices, however, I'd double check with the network admin to be sure.

Running Windows definitely isn't required. You should be all set.

Hope you enjoy the MBP when you get it :)
 
OP
M
Joined
May 29, 2007
Messages
21
Reaction score
0
Points
1
Thanks for the replies.

I'm not familiar with OpenOffice or NeoOffice - will this allow me to read/write all word and excel files and send them out in a format where PC users will be able to read/write, etc?

I'm hoping Office 2004 will suffice and that the MBP will play nice with my work network storage and printers...

Cheers.
 
Joined
Dec 3, 2006
Messages
9,383
Reaction score
417
Points
83
Location
Irvine, CA
Your Mac's Specs
Black Macbook C2D 2GHz 3GB RAM 250GB HD iPhone 4 iPad 3G
Your new Macbook Pro will come with a trial version of Office 2004. I would suggest downloading NeoOffice and then comparing the two. I personally don't like NeoOffice, so that's why I have Office 2004. Some people just don't like the "feel" of OpenOffice/NeoOffice
 
Joined
Feb 13, 2005
Messages
1,186
Reaction score
73
Points
48
Location
New Orleans, LA, USA
Your Mac's Specs
13" Macbook Pro 2.26Ghz Unibody 4G RAM 160G HDD Superdrive
I bought Parallels at the same time as my Macbook, and while I have a Windows VM sitting out on the disk, the only time I fire it up is if I need to do remote work for my employer and my job-issue Dell is either not around or broken. Both situations are rare. The last time I fired it up was where I am now, which is an internet café while my wife shops. A couple of weeks ago I think. I only had my Macbook and was working remote, but didn't want to take two laptops. Today, I'm on vacation so I'm only using Mac OS X, which I do the vast majority of the time.

It's nice to have, though. I also use it to show people that it can be done. Really, though, there's very little reason unless there is a particular app that doesn't exist in the Mac world. Come to think of it, I have one such app that doesn't have a very good counterpart: Delorme Street Atlas. Though I'm finding that Google Maps works pretty well so even then...
 
Joined
Dec 8, 2006
Messages
205
Reaction score
8
Points
18
Location
UK
Your Mac's Specs
MacBook 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 1 GB RAM, 80GB Hard Drive, 80GB Video iPod (Black)
I use Office 2004 and it works great. As others have said try the trial version of Office 2004 and chuck loads of stuff at it and see what it can handle. I have found 99% of the time it will cope.

It doesn't hurt to try OpenOffice or NeoOffice as they are free. Personally, I am happy with Office 2004. Even though I don't like Microsoft they still make good office software, I will give them that.

If you are not happy with the results, then you can use Parallels or Boot Camp, so there is absolutely nothing lost, apart from being unable to completely escape from Windows.
 
OP
M
Joined
May 29, 2007
Messages
21
Reaction score
0
Points
1
Thanks again for the replies.

Looks like, one way or another, I should be able to tackle most work related tasks in OSX...
 
Joined
Jul 23, 2004
Messages
3,169
Reaction score
164
Points
63
Location
North NJ
Your Mac's Specs
i dont have no mac's
the only time you need bootcamp/parallels is if you need to run a windows program, from your description of your computer usage you will not need to use windows ever again....unless at a friends house or at work
-chris
 
Joined
Mar 22, 2007
Messages
101
Reaction score
4
Points
18
Your Mac's Specs
imac G3 450MHZ 512 RAM DVD
I'd say try an office alternative but in my opinon, in a working enviroment, you want to be running the standard no matter if Open Office boasts full compatability (OO isn't a bad piece of software, in all fairness - I like to keep it installed just for backup)
 
Joined
Mar 27, 2007
Messages
57
Reaction score
7
Points
8
Location
Orlando, FL (Altamonte Springs)
Your Mac's Specs
15" MacBook Pro
One thing I'd mention is that Microsoft Office 2004 is a PowerPC application and on an Intel Mac will be running under emulation. From what I've read and observed, running PowerPC apps through Rosetta seems to take a toll on system performance.

One thing you might do is try NeoOffice and maybe it'd hold you over until the new version of Mac Office (which I believe will be Universal) is launched.

NeoOffice doesn't have a mail application to replace Outlook, but I believe the standard OS X Mail application can handle connections to Microsoft Exchange servers, which is one of the limitations that third-party mail apps typically have.

As a side note to Windows users, I keep OpenOffice installed on my machine at work (running XP) simply as a cheap [free] way to create PDF files from Word documents.
 
Joined
Apr 29, 2007
Messages
70
Reaction score
0
Points
6
Your Mac's Specs
MacBook | Black | 2.16gHz | 2gb ram | 160 HDD
if you guys could get microsoft office, neo office, and open office for free, which one would you pick. I personally have never used neo or open office, and i love microsoft office 2008. It just works perfectly. does microsoft office slow down or is sluggish on a mac?


ps. how does adobe run on macs? (ex. adobe acrobat)
 
Joined
Mar 27, 2007
Messages
57
Reaction score
7
Points
8
Location
Orlando, FL (Altamonte Springs)
Your Mac's Specs
15" MacBook Pro
if you guys could get microsoft office, neo office, and open office for free, which one would you pick. I personally have never used neo or open office, and i love microsoft office 2008. It just works perfectly. does microsoft office slow down or is sluggish on a mac?


ps. how does adobe run on macs? (ex. adobe acrobat)

Personally, if I could get any of them for free, I'd probably take Microsoft Office (at least on the Windows platform). They write the document formats and standards and then the open-source players (NeoOffice/OpenOffice) have to play catchup. I'll also admit that I've found a couple of bugs in NeoOffice/OpenOffice, particularly in the way it reformats documents with tables, etc.

Microsoft Office 2004 can be slugish on Intel-based Macs, simply because it was coded for PowerPC processors and OS X has to do some emulation on Intel machines. The next version will be Universal and should run very well on either PowerPC or Intel Macs.

Personally, I think Microsoft Office 2007 is gawdy and busy.
 
OP
M
Joined
May 29, 2007
Messages
21
Reaction score
0
Points
1
Thanks again for the responses.

Like I said earlier, I'm not very familiar with OpenOffice or NeoOffice. Our business relies mainly on excel and word - I'm receiving these through email or off the server and modifying them and sending them out all day long. Can Openoffice and NeoOffice accomplish this with no hiccups? I can't risk compatibility issues.

I experienced what you were saying about Office running slow on the Intels - I was at a Mac store and it took some time for excel or word to open on the 2.33 MBP...but if it worked properly once it got started up, then I could deal with that.

Cheers.
 
Joined
Mar 23, 2007
Messages
93
Reaction score
4
Points
8
Location
Canada
Your Mac's Specs
Black MacBook 2GB RAM, 22" Samsung WS monitor, Apple Bluetooth KB & Mighty Mouse, Airport Extreme BS
Thanks again for the responses.

Like I said earlier, I'm not very familiar with OpenOffice or NeoOffice. Our business relies mainly on excel and word - I'm receiving these through email or off the server and modifying them and sending them out all day long. Can Openoffice and NeoOffice accomplish this with no hiccups? I can't risk compatibility issues.

Caution: Regardless what people say, there could be some major compatibility issues with Word docs in OO and NO. I can't speak for OO, but I installed NeoOffice and in my first test it did not do well. The source was a doc laid out like a newsletter with text boxes, drop shadows, and weird text alignments within the boxes. When opened in NO there were several obvious formatting changes. It took me about a hour of trying this and that (while learning NO) to fix things. In the end there was one thing I gave up trying to fix. It is now 98%, but not a 100% match. There were even slightly different page breaks in NO, which I fixed by adjusting the top and bottom page margins ever so slightly.

The trouble is most Word users are not experts and they don't lay out their docs using the proper tools. They will use anything that they find works and these unorthodox methods can cause compatibility issues.

I opened a simple Excel file I created and it was not exactly the same either.

My advice in your business setting is to forget the 3rd-party freeware and stick to MS Office.
 
Joined
Jan 29, 2007
Messages
199
Reaction score
8
Points
18
Location
Chicago, IL
Your Mac's Specs
MacBook Pro 15" 2.33 GHz 3 GB RAM
martinmartin, I'm running Microsoft Office 2004 on my MacBook Pro, and I don't really experience any performance issues with it. It's a nicely written piece of software, and I think Microsoft did a really good job with it. If you've got the money to spend and your office suite is one of your most important apps (and it sounds like it is), I'd say to spring for Office.

OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice are both nice, and it might be worthwhile to give them a whirl, but they both play catchup to the features offered by MS Office. They are less fully featured, but if all you need is basic functionality, they get the job done. To ensure full, unquestioned compatibility with the PC world, however, go with MS Office if you can.

In answer to your original question, I don't think you need Parallels or BootCamp for the things you've listed, particularly if you've got MS Office. Running Windows on your Mac should really only be done for those apps that have absolutely no Mac native equivalent, in my opinion, and office applications definitely don't fall into that category.
 
Joined
Apr 19, 2007
Messages
780
Reaction score
18
Points
18
Your Mac's Specs
20" iMac Core 2 Duo 2.16Ghz, 500GB HDD, 1GB RAM, 128MB ATI Radeon X1600
Don't buy anything, download OpenOffice or NeoOffice for free.

Amen-Moses

That wasn't helpful.

Yeah, Office for Mac will be just fine, although, it is a PowerPC app, so it might be just a bit slow. Office 2008 is only a few months off though, and that will be Universal.
 
OP
M
Joined
May 29, 2007
Messages
21
Reaction score
0
Points
1
cramar, josh, smurfy - thanks for the responses and advice.

i have no problem spending extra money for MS Office - this is the bread and butter of my business. I just want to make sure that I can do this in the macworld and that everything will play nice when the files are back in the PC world, and it sounds like that shouldnt be a problem...

I havent heard anything about office 2008. I'm planning on ordering a MBP right after they are announced at WWCD. I imagine if I bought Office 2004 at that time, then I could pay something less than the full purchase price to upgrade to 2008 several month down the road?? I'm not very familiar with Macs but does this sound right?

Thanks again.
 
Joined
Dec 15, 2006
Messages
913
Reaction score
59
Points
28
Location
Oak Harbor, WA
Your Mac's Specs
2.33Ghz Core2Duo MacBook Pro /// 2.2Ghz Core2Duo MacBook
For now I would cope with OpenOffice (not at all bad - I use it regularly for personal, my wife uses it for school) until the next version of Office for Mac comes out. At that point I'd probably buy MS Office.
 

Shop Amazon


Shop for your Apple, Mac, iPhone and other computer products on Amazon.
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon and affiliated sites.
Top