Anyone with cross platform document success?

[Sammy]

HI all.
I just downloaded the Office trial for Mac OS X. Has anyone had
successes or problems with reading for example MS Word documents
created on a Mac, and opened on a PC?
Thanks for any info.
Sammy

 

[JE McGimpsey]

I just downloaded the Office trial for Mac OS X. Has anyone had
successes or problems with reading for example MS Word documents
created on a Mac, and opened on a PC?

I do it for a living. I've been using Office04 successfully for over a
year, in beta and in production, and my clients use
Office97/98/00/01/02/03/v.x/04.

The problems I've had:

Fonts have slightly different sizes, so page layout doesn't always look
the same (but then, Word isn't a page layout program). This is minimized
by using Microsoft-supplied fonts (such as Times New Roman or Arial),
but the key is really to design your styles intelligently and
consistently to allow for text to flow automatically.

MacWord is still at VBA5, so VBA6 macros won't work in MacWord.

 

[Benjamin Amsaleg]

I do it for a living. I've been using Office04 successfully for over a
year, in beta and in production, and my clients use
Office97/98/00/01/02/03/v.x/04.

The problems I've had:

Fonts have slightly different sizes, so page layout doesn't always look
the same (but then, Word isn't a page layout program). This is minimized
by using Microsoft-supplied fonts (such as Times New Roman or Arial),
but the key is really to design your styles intelligently and
consistently to allow for text to flow automatically.

MacWord is still at VBA5, so VBA6 macros won't work in MacWord.

Sammy,

Beside the above remarks, I would add that some issues exists in the
following areas :
- Some languages are not yet supported on Office:Mac (Arab and Hebrew)
- In Word:Win, you can embedded and edit directly many more document types
than on Word:Mac (for ex: PPT can be embedded in Win BUT not on Mac)
- You may have some issues in cutting and pasting graphic in pdf (from
Omnigraffle)
- You may have some issues with graphic and embedded Excel files, also
Office:2004 made major progress in this area compare to Office:vX

So:
1) you should try Office:2004 not Office:vX
2) If you are like 95%, people using word for text, than you will have no
real problems


BAM

 

[Jochen Burkhard]

Dear Sammy,
Mac-Office 2004 is great, you should give it a try anyway.
The only thing I have in mind (besides the mentioned opinions obove):
Take care of the fonts:
1. If under Windows other different fonts to you system are used, than you
may run into prblems...
2. Solve it that way: Mac OS-X (as you may know) is able to use
Windows-Fonts as well -> Install them, and your Office-Docs look as expected


Kind regards,
Jochen