R
rkv
Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Processor: Intel
Sorry for the longish post and a bit of a rant. My questions are numbered toward the end of this post.
I have always had Office installed on my Macs. Since the introduction of Office 2008, I have had the most difficulties ever interoperating with PC/Windows users.
What may turn out to be my final straw is that I am attempting to use Office 2008 12.1.5 on a MacBook Air under OS X 10.5.6. My problem appears to be that .ppt slides produced on a PC which include charts from Excel render Powerpoint on the Mac unusable. It takes over 40 minutes to load the five slides. PP uses 97+% of a single core for this entire period. When their is focus on PP, I simply have the spinning disk cursor. I've left it for hours and PP never seems to stabilize and allow one to manipulate the slides in question. Additionally, the chart axis labels and legends have problems. The fonts are rendered as much larger on the Mac as opposed to the PC. Even though I appear to have the same fonts on my Mac as the PC version says it is using.
I have had colleagues load it on their PC's and it looks just fine. It loads quickly in Keynote but the font problems with axis and legend labels seem worse. The best rendering on the Mac seems to be with NeoOffice. It's fast and the images have none of the clipping problems. If anything NeoOffice uses fonts which are too small. Note that NeoOffice does warn me about objects with transparency when I print. Perhaps that is the source of the problem.
I have to get this done by Monday and it includes people in Asia, Europe, and US. Thus for the moment I will probably use NeoOffice or potentially install Windows Office under Parallels.
This comes after a year of using Office 2008 which has been less than satisfactory. Most of my problems seem to be Excel integration differences between the PC and Mac worlds. Specifically, charts and table from Excel are always causing me formatting difficulties in Mac Powerpoint presentations.
I'm at the point where I believe I should really consider abandoning Office 2008. While I like Keynote, most of the time I am trying to incorporate information which others have produced in Excel and the source Worksheet is too complex to open with Numbers. While I may use NeoOffice for this project, it is graphically pretty ugly. For the moment, I'm thinking I should seriously consider running a Windows variant of office via some virtualization software on my Mac. This seems like it should not be necessary. However, I have lost days of time this past year screwing around with Mac and PC incompatibilities between both Excel and Powerpoint.
Now as to my questions:
(1) Is my experience with Excel charts and tables being the source of compatibility problems typical of Office 2008 or symptomatic of some issues with my configuration?
(2) Are there any guides which provide advice on how to avoid problems with importing charts and tables from Excel into Powerpoint? Specifically, that is charts which have originally been created in the Windows variant of Excel.
(3) Is the object transparency issue which NeoOffice flags a possible cause of the insufferably long screen rendering times for the slides in question?
Thanks.
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Processor: Intel
Sorry for the longish post and a bit of a rant. My questions are numbered toward the end of this post.
I have always had Office installed on my Macs. Since the introduction of Office 2008, I have had the most difficulties ever interoperating with PC/Windows users.
What may turn out to be my final straw is that I am attempting to use Office 2008 12.1.5 on a MacBook Air under OS X 10.5.6. My problem appears to be that .ppt slides produced on a PC which include charts from Excel render Powerpoint on the Mac unusable. It takes over 40 minutes to load the five slides. PP uses 97+% of a single core for this entire period. When their is focus on PP, I simply have the spinning disk cursor. I've left it for hours and PP never seems to stabilize and allow one to manipulate the slides in question. Additionally, the chart axis labels and legends have problems. The fonts are rendered as much larger on the Mac as opposed to the PC. Even though I appear to have the same fonts on my Mac as the PC version says it is using.
I have had colleagues load it on their PC's and it looks just fine. It loads quickly in Keynote but the font problems with axis and legend labels seem worse. The best rendering on the Mac seems to be with NeoOffice. It's fast and the images have none of the clipping problems. If anything NeoOffice uses fonts which are too small. Note that NeoOffice does warn me about objects with transparency when I print. Perhaps that is the source of the problem.
I have to get this done by Monday and it includes people in Asia, Europe, and US. Thus for the moment I will probably use NeoOffice or potentially install Windows Office under Parallels.
This comes after a year of using Office 2008 which has been less than satisfactory. Most of my problems seem to be Excel integration differences between the PC and Mac worlds. Specifically, charts and table from Excel are always causing me formatting difficulties in Mac Powerpoint presentations.
I'm at the point where I believe I should really consider abandoning Office 2008. While I like Keynote, most of the time I am trying to incorporate information which others have produced in Excel and the source Worksheet is too complex to open with Numbers. While I may use NeoOffice for this project, it is graphically pretty ugly. For the moment, I'm thinking I should seriously consider running a Windows variant of office via some virtualization software on my Mac. This seems like it should not be necessary. However, I have lost days of time this past year screwing around with Mac and PC incompatibilities between both Excel and Powerpoint.
Now as to my questions:
(1) Is my experience with Excel charts and tables being the source of compatibility problems typical of Office 2008 or symptomatic of some issues with my configuration?
(2) Are there any guides which provide advice on how to avoid problems with importing charts and tables from Excel into Powerpoint? Specifically, that is charts which have originally been created in the Windows variant of Excel.
(3) Is the object transparency issue which NeoOffice flags a possible cause of the insufferably long screen rendering times for the slides in question?
Thanks.