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

[Obrecht, Jerry A]

>>>
> But many people have told him that Microsoft Office (specifically
> Word) documents are not compatible between PC and Mac.  Since these
> are the documents that are the mainstay of his work (as a
> consultant) he is now worried about switching.

Do you have Office? I assume he does.

Simply have him send you an Office document and have you mark it up (make
changes) to his specifications. Then send it back to him so he can open it
on his PC. That will show him the compatibility.
<<<<<<------------------------

Wow.  Chalk one up for Shawn!  Good idea. And in reply to Trevor, MS Office on the Mac, from Office '97 and on, is absolutely compatible between Mac and PC.  I have used both Office '97 and Office X, and have never encountered a compatibility problem in either direction.  What your switcher-friend may have heard about was a minor issue with Appleworks, in which Appleworks would append the wrong file extension to a document saved as a Word file.  It was saving Word files with the Applework's ".cwk" extension rather than the Word ".doc" extension.  This is easy enough to fix by simply renaming the file.  But I only recall that happening with Appleworks...I have never seen any such thing when using Word on a Mac.

So, tell your "almost ready to be a switcher" to go ahead as there is compatibility.  I think someone is feeding him a line of the really runny stuff to keep him in the camp of the "dark side" (ooow, ominous).

Jerry