Macworld: MS Office on Intel iMac ...

Ralph_Thornton

522 posts since
Mar 13, 2002

4. Apr 30, 2006 8:19 AM

in response to: dougster

Re: MS Office on Intel iMac

I bought this machine for a friend and set it up for her last week. I was very impressed with the iMac. While Office is runnig under Rosetta it is still plenty zippy. So far there have been no problems. She is not pushing Office to anywhere near it's limits though. The only annoying thing was that MS has released a 58 MB update to Office (11.2.3) and my friend could not download that via her dial-up connection. So I had to do it at home and send it to her. Kind of a pain but then I guess this is a pretty common problem.

dougster

4,209 posts since
Feb 25, 2001

5. Apr 30, 2006 9:48 AM

in response to: Ralph_Thornton

Re: MS Office on Intel iMac

-Hi,
Thanks for the reply. Nice to hear Office is zippy even though its not pushed to it's limits. Yes, 'dial-up' is a huge issue when it comes to upgrades/downloads. Often times with the OS updates the Apple Store, or a local Mac dealer will burn the upgrades for folks if they bring in a blank CD.
Thanks again..

-doug

Nobody

58,347 posts since
Oct 18, 2007

7. May 1, 2006 9:09 AM

in response to: Ralph_Thornton

Re: MS Office on Intel iMac

Make friends with City folks from NY who like to pretend to be cowboys on weekend... a tip or two on life in Big sky, such a hint or spot for fly fishing, a moose steak (most would have never had one), spots to locate mountain goats with young babies in spring etc... Any of it will impress them to no ends and they all have sattelites and would be happy to burn the disks for you... you may not even have to provide a blank disk.

mchamberlain

181 posts since
Mar 20, 2006

8. May 11, 2006 2:08 PM

in response to: Ralph_Thornton

Re: MS Office on Intel iMac

I bought MS Office 2004 for the Mac about 2 weeks ago, and haven't had any problems. I use mostly Entourage, Word and Excel, rarely Powerpoint.

I can see that the programs are not quite as zippy as they would be on a PC or a PowerPC Mac, but they are still very useable, no doubt. I have a 20", 2GHz iMac with 2 GB memory, and I can say that you need a bit of memory for all of this, because it seems that MS Office is pretty memory hungry on the Mac platform.

If you CAN hold out until the universal binary version is available, that would be better, but if you have to use it now, my only advice would be to load your machine with memory.

Oh, and one more bit of advice - make sure you uninstall the trial version of Office from your iMac before you install the real version!

My only real complaint is that it's not easy to convert your Outlook (PC) data file from to the Entourage (Mac) version, it's a pain in the a$$, frankly. The only part of that that was easy to convert was the contacts.

borealis60

2 posts since
Apr 28, 2008

9. Apr 28, 2008 11:35 AM

in response to: Ralph_Thornton

Re: MS Office on Intel iMac

I have two Intel based macbooks duo core 1.83 and 2.16, both with 2GB memory. Running MS Office 2004. MS Office 2004 was running great on previous PowerPC laptops. I maxed out the memory on these two laptops as PPT and Excel were running extremely slow. PPT would take up to 8 minutes to save a 13 mg file, and Excel was taking abnormally long to load. I maxed out both laptops with memory in hopes that it would resolve this issue. I checked the startup folder and there are no third party applications in the folder. I've repaired permissions. Looking online hasn't been very helpful. I've come across posts with similar issues, but no resolutions.

Supposedly, Rosetta should handle the conversion on Intel based machines, but I am not totally convinced. I did purchase MS Office 2008 which is universal (Intel and PowerPC), but I am a little leery of installing it as from what I've read, is lacking on some of the functionality of MS Office 2004.

If there is anyone out there that can set me straight on this issue, I would greatly appreciate any insight you have to offer. Thanks in advanced.

smax013

1,520 posts since
Jul 6, 2007

10. Apr 28, 2008 1:44 PM

in response to: borealis60

Re: MS Office on Intel iMac

borealis60 wrote:I have two Intel based macbooks duo core 1.83 and 2.16, both with 2GB memory. Running MS Office 2004. MS Office 2004 was running great on previous PowerPC laptops. I maxed out the memory on these two laptops as PPT and Excel were running extremely slow. PPT would take up to 8 minutes to save a 13 mg file, and Excel was taking abnormally long to load. I maxed out both laptops with memory in hopes that it would resolve this issue. I checked the startup folder and there are no third party applications in the folder. I've repaired permissions. Looking online hasn't been very helpful. I've come across posts with similar issues, but no resolutions.

Supposedly, Rosetta should handle the conversion on Intel based machines, but I am not totally convinced. I did purchase MS Office 2008 which is universal (Intel and PowerPC), but I am a little leery of installing it as from what I've read, is lacking on some of the functionality of MS Office 2004.

If there is anyone out there that can set me straight on this issue, I would greatly appreciate any insight you have to offer. Thanks in advanced.

The main thing that Office 2008 does NOT have is VBA/Visual Basic macros. Micro$oft dropped that from the Mac version (still there in Office 2007 for Windoze). Supposedly they could not get it to work in the Intel naitive world, which I don't quite buy. I will note that the supposed speed benefit of going Intel naitive also does not seem to be present. From my experience (rather limited), Office 2008 seems just as slow, if not slower, then Office 2004.

Member of the "Crazy Mac Users who run Anti-virus on their Macs" club - come join us and you too can be snickered at!

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Apr 23, 2006 8:15 AM

MS Office on Intel iMac

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