[Macworld]

Post your comments for The killer Windows app here

[BradPDX]

Sigh. How sad that we actually are discussing (with a straight face) the "need" to run two operating systems (each paid for) and two installations of a large expensive application suite (MS Office) in order to do what are now considered common tasks in the business world.
This is entirely an artificial problem, of course. Microsoft is the largest, wealthiest software company in the world, and if they felt it was valuable they could create a Mac version of Office that was truly 100% equivalent with the Windows version. There is simply no reasonable argument against that assessment.
But they don't, and they don't do it for purely business reasons. It helps to maintain the Windows ecosystem monopoly (again, artificial due the absence of real competition) and forces poor suckers like us to pony up license fees for Windows/Office/Office Mac. It is a trifecta of income and dependency.
Sorry, but the first thought I had upon reading this article was "Stockholm Syndrome".

[RobK]

I ran VPC back in the day for Access access (lol). It stunk but I needed it and there was no way around it short of have a second machine for ONE program.

[slaurel]

I don't normally comment about things like this but this one just eats me up. I recently moved my small office of users to MACs. I now run an office of 5 MACs and 2 Vista PCs. This is the type of article that makes me wonder why I should have all these MACs. Don't get me wrong here, I love my MAC and there is no one that could pry it out of my hands but when you start to add up costs in the office and to find out the the PC version of office is better, then really what is the point. See - I could count for about 90% of tools an office worker uses to be in MS Office and email. Most of the others are web based. If running a MAC means working inside Paralells or VMWare 90% of the time then why have a MAC. I guess I am just frustrated that MS can control some much of the world.

[Martian]

What are the chances that NeoOffice, OpenOffice or even a program supported by Apple can substantially fill the feature vacuum to obviate the need for MS Office on the Mac?

The big issue is technical, not legal. I think MS’s overt removal of VBA around the same time they also changed file formats on Office for Windows makes it that much harder for the MS monopoly to successfully throw legal roadblocks to someone else developing a fully compatible office suite.

[zimzima69]

This article reads like a marketing Brochure from M$ for us to run Windows. M$ should get their stuff together and give us Mac user what we want, Like Video on MSN Messenger. Plus there are other reasons to Run XP (or vista) virtually, not just M$ 299$ office package.

[hmurchison]

This is what's disgusting about today's "open" computer market. Every company adds needless complexity to sandbox their products and your data away from competitors. I'm tired of having my information silo'd and locked down in order to extort more money from me. Why doesn't our Govt demand that documents be submitted in 100% open formats? PDF is fine but they have an obligation to people to support something like Open Document format. Computing has grown so dull. You now have large behemoths stifling innovation and carving up areas to plop down on.
Simple things today constitute innovation because consumer expectations of computing are so low.

[manatee87]

I find Office 2007 daunting, compared to the previous version, but I agree that it is far superior to Office 2008 for Mac. I usually get by using 2008 Mac for Word and Excel, but we do a lot of stuff at work that has automation built in and connections to databases. I have to use the Windows versions for that.

I also love Visio and I tolerate Access. I've purchased Omni Graffle Pro and Filemaker Pro, and tried to love them, but it's just too much effort to put into different ways of thinking when most people I work with are using the MS products. I'd pay good money for native OS X versions of those MS apps.

[rgetter]

I help run a college computer lab (mostly PCs -- for now) and last fall we had to switch over to Office 2007. "Killer" is right. I've had a couple of decades of experience various versions of MS Office on both platforms and suddenly poof! it's worthless. Virtually every function in every application has moved to a completely different place based on some form human interface design that defies all logic. It's like coming home one evening and discovering that every one of your possessions has been moved to a virtually random location (and when you do find what you're looking for, you discover it doesn't work anything like the way it used to). Okay. I get paid to deal with this kind of stuff. But what about the frustrated nursing student who can't find the Print command that's hiding under the stupid round button at the corner of the screen?

I agree that Visio is totally cool and that Intuit has been really slacking up on its Mac products (although the upcoming Mac-only "Financial Life" previewed at Macworld looked pretty promising), but unless I was totally dependent on staying macro-compatible, the last reason I'd opt for Boot Camp or virtualization is Office 2007.

Office 2008 for the Mac my not have feature-for-feature parity with 2007, but it still has a whole host of enhancements that Windows users can only dream about. What's even better is that any Office user can just sit down and start working.

And the switch to Microsoft Open XML? That, I can safely say, is a platform-agnostic nightmare. Even on the Windows side, there are document elements that will either not cross-convert or loose editability if they do.

There are a lot of really great reasons to take advantage of the dual-boot and great virtualization products for Intel Macs. I just can't count Office 2007 as one of them.

[kbickhart]

I really believe that with ActiveSync support on the iPhone, the next revision of iCal and Mail will have some nice integrated Exchange support. I could be wrong, but I really forsee them doing more to bring in the executive clients. They'll grab them with the iPhone and then they'll have to have some reason for them to get a Mac, and proper Exchange support will go a long way, and will be a huge advantage for the Mac users who use VM just for Exchange support.

[laserbrain]

I've worked for many firms, almost 100% windows based. I've never seen any need for any of these features. Most people I know don't use, or know when to use any program at all. People are stupid. They follow the masses. Not because they need to, it's just something they think they need. Just like wearing jeans or breathing. I've had unified messaging in my mail.app with no problems at all. Used an exchange server to access my mail for more than 8 years. Only had one issue. It wasn't work related. If I was forced to use windows only at work, I would miss more features from OS X than Microsoft ever made in all of their programs.

[drbenru]

I agree with you that the article makes it seem as though the windows version of Office is better, but in reality it only has some windows only features of limited use (or just plain useless) depending on your setup. I agree with one thing the article gets right, there are just so many useful things that Outlook can do when you are connected to a corporate MS Exchange server. These options are only useful to corporate setups, so if you are a small outfit and you are not running your own MS Exchange server these options are not available to you even if you run office 2007 in windows. As for the other features mentioned, they seem pointless to me. Why, because I've used office 2007 in windows, and the only reason I kept the damn thing installed is because I was starting to receive word documents in that god awful .docx format so I needed to open them. The first thing that is utterly wrong with office 2007 is just how stupid the interface is. Don't get me wrong, what makes the interface stupid, and in my opinion useless is not the fact that they made a whole new interface and tried to make it more dynamic. The uselessness comes from the total lack of user interface guidelines. Apple has been guilty of this before but not to this extreme. For starters, just to make things look prettier, office 2007 has no menu bar. In windows application windows have their own menu bar, here they make it pop up from a big all button on the left and the menu is vertical not horizontal. This might seem like a petty gripe but its a big deal. The more time it takes to get to know your way around a program the longer you are not productive actually working. The features mentioned in the article, although interesting are less than stellar, and in a mac outfit, even one that collaborates with a PC outfit, are not compelling to run such an awkward application.

I'm sure Rob being a computer guy, has learned his way around the app so much that he neglected to realize just how difficult the average user will find this new interface. Trust me, if your objective is to get your work done, use office 2008. I can understand him falling in love with outlook, after all he works for Macworld, and IDG publication. IDG is a big corporation also owns PC World, ComputerWorld, and many others. You can be almost certain they are running their own MS Exchange servers, and in a big corporation like this, the sheer number of internal e-mails you get every single day, makes outlook reason enough to switch. I used to work in Cox Communications, 60% of my day was spent in outlook, either coordinating meeting or sending and receiving updates and memos galore (I hated it).

In my opinion, OUTLOOK is not just "a" but "The" killer app in Office 2007, but only if you spend significant time in you MS EXCHANGE e-mail every day. I now work on a small company and for our needs Google apps Mail and Calendaring work beautifully, and are truly cross platform, and integrate very well with our macs. We have no PCs. (We run parallels occasionally in case we need to convert some windows only documents).

[griffman]

Whether or not the problem is artificial is irrelevant. The problem exists, and the solution if you need 100% Office for WIndows compatibility (and/or you want all the features) but prefer to use a Mac is to run the software somehow. Older versions of Office can be used with CrossOver, but only the virtualization apps (and Boot Camp, of course) will support Office 2007.


Using NeoOffice, OpenOffice, Pages, or even Word from Office 2008 isn't going to do the trick if you need features that only exist in the PC version, or must work with files that use things like VBA.


Like it or not, the fact that you can do this on a Mac in today's environment means many more people can now actually use a Mac instead of a Windows PC -- and over time, if enough people make that switch, things will begin to change in the world of software support. But it's a tough chicken-and-egg problem.


-rob.

[boknowsit]

BS. VISTA has already been diagnosed as crap. I wouldn't put that on anything I own. I have everything I need in Applications. PC guys trying to breath life into the VISTA/PC.