Overall MS Office 2004 for Mac compatibility with PCs

[vrsatile]

Hi, first post here. My wife just got a consulting job in which she'll
be interacting with PC users on a regular basis. Currently she's using
Office 97 for Mac but if she buys a new Mac will upgrade to 2004, which
I use in my business on both my iMac and iBook. She's concerned that
currently her client cannot open her word documents, etc. She's tried
different file formats at save. Any help here would be appreciated.
She's considering buying a PC but since I use Macs it would be nice for
us all to use the same computer system.

 

[Bernard Rey]

There is no good reason for that. The documents should be compatible from
Excel 97 up to the current versions. But one should make sure the name of
the workbook bears the ".xls" - or ".doc" in her case - extension (common
cause of "compatibility" troubles). Even if we don't need extensions on the
Mac side, it's important to know that *they* need it on the Windows side.

How does she send the document to her client? If she sends it as an
attachment in an e-mail, what soft is she using? Outlook Express has a
setting in the "Preferences" to automatically add the extensions to
documents...


vrsatile:

 

[PhilD]

How does she send the document to her client? If she sends it as an
attachment in an e-mail, what soft is she using? Outlook Express has a
setting in the "Preferences" to automatically add the extensions to
documents...

Failing that, I find that saving documents (as opposed to spreadsheets)
in rich text format (rtf) gets round many things.

PhilD