Office PC and Mac compatibility

H

hydroraven

Hello,
I am currently considering buying an iBook for school. Since my school
runs on the PC platform I was wondering if I use Office 2004 on the
iBook if my instructors will be able to open the files on their PCs
using Office 2003 or older versions? Is this something that would
require Virtual PC, with the Office 2003 version installed on it?

Thanks, Jeff
 
J

JE McGimpsey

hydroraven said:
I am currently considering buying an iBook for school. Since my school
runs on the PC platform I was wondering if I use Office 2004 on the
iBook if my instructors will be able to open the files on their PCs
using Office 2003 or older versions? Is this something that would
require Virtual PC, with the Office 2003 version installed on it?

File formats for WinOffice97/00/02/03 and MacOffice98/01/v.X/04 are
identical, so any file you create with Office04 will be readable on your
instructor's PC.

There are a few caveats. Among them: Office's macro language, VBA, is at
version 5 for MacOffice (all versions), which is the same as
WinOffice97, so macros created in later versions of WinOffice may or may
not work in MacOffice.

MacOffice can't interact with the Information Rights Management protocol
that was introduced with WinOffice2003 and Windows2003 Server. If your
school is using that, using VPC and Office 2003 would be required.
 
C

CunShujian

Something more: some MACoffice .ppt files cannot be displayed correctly on
WINoffice, particularly images are used, based on my experience
 
J

Jim Gordon MVP

Hi,

That is true if the PowerPoint was made using PICT format images.
Windows PowerPoint still does not know how to display them despite the
many years of existence of this common file format.

The obvious work-around is to avoid PICT format when inserting pictures
if presentations will be given to Windows users.

-Jim
 

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