While generalizations are usually dangerous, it is probably safe to say that for many of us Microsoft Office is the tool set we use most. So all contemplating saying adieu to Windows for Mac’s OS X needs to find a way to replicate the same in their new environment. Fortunately, for the most part, it is relatively painless and there are several paths to take.
The easiest, but more costly, route is to purchase Microsoft’s Office 2004 for the Mac. With this approach, you get Mac versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and most likely the highest level of compatibility with the Windows equivalents. Instead of Outlook as the e-mail client, you get Entourage (more about that later), and Access is notably absent. There isn’t a Mac version or equivalent offered by Microsoft.
If all you require are basic functions of the main office trio – no Visual Basic for Applications functions or the like – you might find all you need with the “free” NeoOffice/J . This application suite is offered under the GNU public license and is essentially the Apple OS X version of the OpenOffice suite. It implements word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and drawing functions.
NeoOffice/J can open, edit, save and so forth in the native Microsoft file formats, which is convenient for documents that have to move between systems. It even has some handy features missing from Microsoft Office, such as exporting directly to Adobe PDF format.
For those of you wanting to make flashy documents that can leverage the rich set of media in iTunes and iPhoto, you can get Apple’s iWork duo – Pages and Keynote. More like Microsoft Publisher than Word, Pages can function as a simple word processor or help you put together some impressive documents.
To date, for me at least, the only area of frustration has been in trying to find a replacement for the local storage of e-mail that Outlook 2003 gives me. In theory, I shouldn’t have a problem. Entourage, mentioned earlier, is Microsoft’s implementation of the Outlook client for Mac. (There was an earlier Outlook for Mac product that has since been replaced by Entourage.)
In my first few months of living the Mac life, I found Entourage was not up to my requirements and despaired that it would never offer me the level of e-mail that I’d been accustomed to. In fact, I even wondered if this is intentional on the part of Microsoft.
While I never used the previous product, my first and continuing impression of Entourage is that Microsoft deliberately set out to build a product that wouldn’t pass muster as a corporate alternative to the Windows Outlook client.
According to a review of documentation and online postings early in the summer, Entourage has reduced functionality – for example, being able to read public folder items but not create or edit them. For my part, I couldn’t even get my in-box to synchronize (it should have) and ended up using Outlook Web Access or Citrix to access corporate e-mail.
Last month, Microsoft introduced Service Pack 2 for Office 2004. Not only did it provide updated support for public folders (such as allowing read/write), but it solved my in-box synch problem.
With that, my only major productivity hurdle was removed. Now, I have the benefits of Mac while maintaining the basic requirements of the corporate office.
