2004 Microsoft Word for Mac versus 11.03 Word for PC

[Mary]

Does anyone have any experience with 11.03 (at least that is what the
version info says for this file)? I don't have a problem quite yet - I
just want to do a little research before I get involved in this project
and find the problems. I want to create a template and lock certain
pieces in the template. I am using 2004 Word for Mac - if my client is
using 11.03 Word for PC, will there be any discrepencies between the
two and what shows up on their doorstep? Only reason I'm asking is we
went through a HUGE fiasco with different versions of Excel and what
showed up on my computer versus my partner's computer versus the
clients. It was a MALAY.

Anyway, my questions:
1.) Does anyone foresee any possible discrepencies between the two
versions and Locking items around the page (such as logo, etc.)
2.) Which would be better - import jpg art of individual pieces or
whole page, import jpg at 100% or larger and scale down?
3.) I'm assuming importing the art as a .jpg will be much smaller than
a .tif or something similar?

So, any insight on this would be GREAT.

Thanks in advance!
Mary

 

[Steve L]

Hi, I too need to send stuff to clients and others who need to be able
to see exaclty what I have put down in my format. I don't know of any
issues between the two versions, however if there is no requirement for
editing the document at the PC side I tend to turn the document into
PDF format using the "Print --> Save as PDF" function in the print
dialogue window (bottom left buttons)
Hope this helps,

Steve

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi Mary:

There's no such thing as Word 11.03: I think they mean Word 2003.

Which means it's one or two releases ahead of your Word 2004. Going out
that won't be a problem: their Word will display and edit everything your
Word can produce. Coming back, Word 2003 has some abilities you will not be
able to match.

From your description, the only thing that will hit you badly is the Protect
Document mechanism: they have extra levels of protection and the ability to
encrypt with digital signatures. Chances are, they won't be using these
features so you won't have any trouble.

However, as soon as you mention "page" I start to get nervous. There is no
such thing as a "page" in a Word document -- they don't exist. This
unbelievable statement is literally true, and is of critical importance when
working cross-platform.

Word "invents" pages for display or printing. They don't exist in the saved
file. It creates them by interrogating the printer driver and the loaded
fonts to obtain the measurements of a piece of "paper" and the precise sizes
and kerning of the characters.

Stuff will move around on the page as you go from one platform to the other.
By how much, it is impossible to say. If you put the document together
using professional techniques, the movement will be one or two millimetres
over the length or width of an A4 page: not enough to be immediately
visible, but enough to create problems.

If you design the document carefully so that a movement of a millimetre or
two doesn't matter, your customer may never know. Microsoft provides fonts
with Microsoft Office on the Mac that are carefully designed to match the
metrics of the same-named fonts they supply with PC Office. Use the
Microsoft-supplied versions of those fonts exclusively and you will halve
your problems. Note that everything in a Word document is anchored to a
"Paragraph". You need to ensure you know which paragraph each object is
anchored to, and ensure that that paragraph does not move

A PC Word customer would expect artwork on EPS or EMF format. They are
unlikely to welcome or be able to use JPG or TIFF. Word 2004 can't do EMF
and you will live in a world of pain trying to get it to do EPS properly.

Microsoft Word on the Mac matches that on the PC closely enough to enable
usable results on normal office documents. But it's not close enough to
meet the standards of professional page design.

Assuming that this project is worth at least $2,000 to you, I think I would
get on the phone to Dell and order a cheap PC to do it on. You'll get a
good one for $1,000 and save at least twice that amount in lost billable
time in fiddling around trying to make it work between Mac and PC You
only need the box, you already have the screen, mouse and keyboard, printers
and network.

Hope this helps

Does anyone have any experience with 11.03 (at least that is what the
version info says for this file)? I don't have a problem quite yet - I
just want to do a little research before I get involved in this project
and find the problems. I want to create a template and lock certain
pieces in the template. I am using 2004 Word for Mac - if my client is
using 11.03 Word for PC, will there be any discrepencies between the
two and what shows up on their doorstep? Only reason I'm asking is we
went through a HUGE fiasco with different versions of Excel and what
showed up on my computer versus my partner's computer versus the
clients. It was a MALAY.

Anyway, my questions:
1.) Does anyone foresee any possible discrepencies between the two
versions and Locking items around the page (such as logo, etc.)
2.) Which would be better - import jpg art of individual pieces or
whole page, import jpg at 100% or larger and scale down?
3.) I'm assuming importing the art as a .jpg will be much smaller than
a .tif or something similar?

So, any insight on this would be GREAT.

Thanks in advance!
Mary

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Business Analyst, Consultant
Technical Writer.
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[Mary]

John - thank you so much for your detailed description and advice!
This has certainly helped and I learned quite a bit about how Word
handles itself. Your time is much appreciated!!!

One last question - I didn't think there was an 11.03 - but when my Mac
partner touches the file to get the version info, it displays 11.03.
Any idea why?

 

[Mary]

We considered doing this, unfortunately, the client needs access in the
future for editing - we have to lock certain aspects down and leave
others open for possible edits. Thanks for the suggestion though!

Mary

 

[Phillip Jones]

The Confusion comes in that Get info is showing the internal version
number of the Word2004 application package. It indeed is up to 11.3.0.
That just the latest revision to Word 2004.

John - thank you so much for your detailed description and advice!
This has certainly helped and I learned quite a bit about how Word
handles itself. Your time is much appreciated!!!

One last question - I didn't think there was an 11.03 - but when my Mac
partner touches the file to get the version info, it displays 11.03.
Any idea why?

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[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi Mary:

The Marketing Department at Microsoft makes the whole subject of version
numbers as difficult as possible, so they can keep us in confusion.

It is not possible to accurately determine the version of Word that was used
to prepare a Word document. Your Mac Partner is reading the version of your
local copy of the Office Word software. If you were to open the file on
your computer, that's the version it would open with.

Office 2003 is PC Office 11 internally. It appears in Help>About as
Microsoft Word 2003 Build 11.8026.8036 SP 2.

Word 2004 on the Mac appears in Word>About Word as Version 11.3 build
060914.

But both of them produce a file that is labelled as simply "Word Document",
and both files are in the Word.Document.8 structured format.

Sadly, Word format 8 is "extensible". The first one to produce it was Word
97. Word 98, Word 2000, Word X, Word 2002, Word 2003 and Word 2004 all use
it. But Each of them is capable of "adding" features to it. So when you
see "Word.Document.8" format, the only thing you can say for sure is you're
getting a Unicode 16-bit flavour of the text

There's only two learnings you can take from this whole saga (other than the
fact that Microsoft makes professional computing extremely difficult) and
these are:

* Word 2004 on the Mac will open any PC flavour of Word that is still
supported.

* Word 2004 will work cross-platform well enough to support simple office
documents. The more complex the document, the more "gotchas" you will run
into.

* Word 2004 on the Mac is not sufficiently compatible with Word 2003 on the
PC to perform professional graphics design work.

Hope this helps

John - thank you so much for your detailed description and advice!
This has certainly helped and I learned quite a bit about how Word
handles itself. Your time is much appreciated!!!

One last question - I didn't think there was an 11.03 - but when my Mac
partner touches the file to get the version info, it displays 11.03.
Any idea why?

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Business Analyst, Consultant
Technical Writer.
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[Mary]

Wow, you are right, they really could not have made it more difficult,
haha. Thanks so much for your response - again, I have learned quite a
bit. Love that!

Mary