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

[Sherman Gregory]

At 2:30 PM -0700 4/14/03, Daniel Peterson wrote:
>You can always point him to this page:
>
>http://www.microsoft.com/mac/officex/officex_main.asp?EmbFName=of_whatsnew.asp
>
>Which says:
>
>"Office v. X uses the same file format as Office XP,
>Office 2000, and Office 97 on the Windows platform, as
>well as Office 2001 for Mac and Office 98 Macintosh
>Edition, allowing you to share files freely and
>easily."
>

I say they are 95% compatible.  I think that often Microsoft does not 
understand their own file formats completely enough to port them 
seamlessly across platforms.

I work in an environment that is probably 99% Windows. I receive many 
documents created under Windows.  Word documents are mostly OK except 
for drawings embedded in them.  It may be just the drawings that 
start out as Visio things, I don't know, but often the rectangles are 
missing and things like that.

PowerPoint files are probably the most incompatible.  I think that 
Micosoft uses a lot of their own non standard characters in 
powerpoint.  So I see differences here.  On one common template that 
I see a lot, our company logo comes out upside down.  I can flip it 
on the master slide, bet we are still not 100%.

I can't recall seeing any problems with Excel.  Microsoft seems to 
have the format under control enough to be compatible.

      Sherman