[Ti] [OT] Microsoft Office : PC versus Mac

[Tarik Bilgin]

On Monday, April 14, 2003, at 10:16  pm, Trevor J. Hutley wrote:
>
> A Switcher !
>
> But many people have told him that Microsft Office (specifically Word) 
> documents are not comaptible between PC and Mac.  Since these are the 
> dociuments that are the mainstay of his work (as a consultant) he is 
> now worried about switching.

that is BS -- your friend need not worry. All Office documents (word + 
excel) that I send to my clients (100 percent PC using) can open them 
fine. Just be sure to save all word documents as .doc and all excel as 
.xls and make sure that your email software retains the extension when 
it attaches the file.

I think Mac OS X Maill.app + Word does this out of the box, so you 
should be ok.
>
> As far as I know, the Office documents since 1997 have been using the 
> same file format, PC or Mac, and so there should be no compatibility 
> issues, these days.

Yep since Office  97, the level of compatability has been high. Just be 
aware that sometimes I have had problems with Macros (pretty 
complicated ones) that I used to write on Excel for a PC and movign it 
across to Excel 2001 for mac led to problems in the macro operation... 
(but nothing a little bug fixing can't fix).

The main issue was getting a PC to recognize a word doc as a word doc 
(Mac used to have meta data in the resource fork) but now that Mac OS X 
uses file extensions like a PC, this is much easier as you don't have 
to add the extension yourself.

I can't give you the chapter and verse on this, but I would look at the 
Microsoft Mactopia website.


--
Tarik Bilgin
Opalblue
tarik at opalblue.com