Office v.X or Office 2004 for Mac

[Don D]

I just started thinking about installing Office because Appleworks
doesn't always seem to be able to translate certain Office documents. I
have tried Open Office for Mac but I'm not impressed. I would probably
buy a CD on eBay. If all I am expecting to do is use the
wordprocessing and spreadsheet applications is there any real advantage
to choose Office 2004 rather than Office v.X? I have a G4 running
10.2.8 Thanks in advance for any advice you might have.

 

[Allen]

Office 2004 brought a lot of fixes for various problems and many new
features, among them a super outline/Notebook mode in Word that you
might find very useful. Word also has an improved "Track Changes" for
document collaboration, and "smart buttons" that offer you choices when
you make certain changes, e.g., pasting some styled text, the button
gives you the choice of pasting just text, adopting the style of the
destination, or pasting with styles intact. You can get a free 30-day
trial of Office 2004 at www.mactopia.com.

I don't use Excel much so can't comment there, but for Word (and
Entourage), 2004 is much better than X.

 

[CyberTaz]

Hi Don -

I agree with Allen that the more current version is *usually* the better
choice, & the points he made are certainly valid. You may want to consider
an upgrade of your OS, however, as fully updated Office 2004 (11.2.3) may
not provide all features in 10.2.8 - that is the 'bare necessity' OS as per
MS System Requirements:

 

[Paul Berkowitz]

Hi Don -

I agree with Allen that the more current version is *usually* the better
choice, & the points he made are certainly valid. You may want to consider
an upgrade of your OS, however, as fully updated Office 2004 (11.2.3) may
not provide all features in 10.2.8 - that is the 'bare necessity' OS as per
MS System Requirements:

The features which are only available in Tiger are the new Spotlight and
SyncServices features - since these exist only in Tiger. If you're in Jaguar
or Panther you wouldn't be using these features in any applications (since
they don't exist) and presumably won't miss them in Office apps either.
(SyncServices features are just for Entourage, of course; Spotlight for all
Office apps, including Entourage now with Office 11.2.3 update). That still
leaves the other 99.5% features of Office 2004 available to OS 10.2.8 and
higher - rather more than "bare bones"! Office 2004 was developed while OS
10.2.8 was in operation and released at about the same time as Panther OS
10.3 came out, and optimized to work with it. The new Spotlight and
SyncServices Tiger-only features were added in the 11.2 (SR 2) and 11.2.3
updates.

--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

Please "Reply To Newsgroup" to reply to this message. Emails will be
ignored.

PLEASE always state which version of Microsoft Office you are using -
**2004**, X or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions
otherwise.

 

[Mickey Stevens]

Another option is the icWord and icExcel applications from Panergy Software.
<http://www.panergy-software.com/products/>

MacLinkPlus from DataViz also allows for translating from the Office
applications into other formats.
<http://www.dataviz.com/products/maclinkplus/>

 

[CyberTaz]

Thanks for the clarification as to what the features in question are.

Just for the record, though, I didn't say that Office 2004 would be reduced
to "bare *bones*" operation in 10.2.8. What I said was that 10.2.8 is the
"bare *necessity*" (i.e., minimum OS requirement) for running Office 2004.

 

[Paul Berkowitz]

Oh, sorry, I did misread. Yes, OX 10.2.8 is the minimum OS for running
Office 2004.

--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

Please "Reply To Newsgroup" to reply to this message. Emails will be
ignored.

PLEASE always state which version of Microsoft Office you are using -
**2004**, X or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions
otherwise.

 

[Don D]

Thanks VERY much to everyone for their advice on Office and suggestion
of possible alternatives.

Don