MS Office for MAC or Windows?

Hi,
I have an old MacBook Pro - late 2007
2.16 GHz
3GB 667 MHz RAM
500GB hard drive
Windows XP
Parallels 6.0 - just updated yesterday

I have very old versions of Microsoft Office on both the Mac and Windows and want to upgrade. I am trying to decide which version of office to get. My past experience with Office for MAC was not good, but I have read that the version is much better. On the other hand, if I get Office for windows, I am concerned about performance. So far, the performance of windows apps have not been great.

Any thoughts?

(I would actually like to get a new MBP but really can't justify it for anything else I do)

Dee Dee

 

I have an older MacBook Pro 15' late 2008 with 4 GB RAM and a Windows XP installation. The machine is struggeling when I run WinXP! I have the old Office 2007 for Mac which was severly limited when comparing with Office for Windows.

I am now using a new MacBook Air 13' on which I have both the Office 2011 for Mac and Office 2010 running on WIN7. Both are fine, the new Mac version is considerably better than the previous one, especially Outlook. However, compared to the Windows version some of the more professional tools are missing (e.g. Visio, Project, the Outlook Business Contact Manager).

Considering you might run into performance issues with Parallels and WinXp I would recommend you stay with the Mac Office version if you don't need those additional tools.

 

Do you use Office primarily for personal stuff? Or is it tied into work (ie: use Outlook cal/scheduling w/ other people a lot, etc). If it's mainly for you, go with the Mac version. The file formats are [finally] all fully compatible regardless of platform so any documents you need to exchange with others will be fine. Using Mac software on a Mac platform should result in fewer issues.

However, if you use Office primarily for the calendar / scheduling stuff with lots of people (Exchange servers and such), the overhead of Parallels + XP w/ a Win version of Office may be the way to go.

If you are mainly looking for a good office suite (word processor, spreadsheet, database, etc) that is compatible with Microsoft Office, check out

http://www.libreoffice.org/

Since it's free, give it a shot with any documents you may already have.. see how it works for you.

(I run it both under Mac and Para/Win)