Re: [MLUG] MS Office compatibility via Open Office, Mac OS Office, or XP run under VMware or Parallels

[ryan woodsmall <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

Forgot to mention Entourage.  It seems alright, and has been getting much better lately, but it's still not Outlook.  I have had problems where I wouldn't get calendar item reminders and my workgroup's calendar would give me issues.  Not a big fan of Entourage, but I might give it another shoot after Office 2008 is released early next year.

  ryan woodsmall

    EMAIL:PROTECTED

"Be well, do good work, and keep in touch." - Garrison Keillor

On Nov 1, 2007, at 6:56 PM, Hargus, Diana wrote:

Jonathan,

 

Just a quick note that I use the Entourage client from Office 2004 on the Mac at work and it works fine for our use in ITSD.  just my 2 cents.  Having said that, I really wish there were an open source exchange connector...

 

Diana

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From: EMAIL:PROTECTED on behalf of Jonathan King
Sent: Thu 11/1/2007 2:42 PM
To: MLUG Members
Subject: [MLUG] MS Office compatibility via Open Office, Mac OS Office,or XP run under VMware or Parallels

I had a 2001 vintage iBook that is just about to give up the ghost.
It's a 700 MHz G3 (not blazing fast) maxed out at 640 MB, and it has
already had one disk transplant, so I think it might be time to pull
the plug. An additional issue is that I really do need MS Office
compatibility on at least one home machine, which also suggests a
change over. I would like a notebook because this could then travel
with me.

The options I am entertaining are:

1) Buy a used XP Pro notebook and repartition the drive to be mostly
Linux. The downside is needing to boot into XP to do anything with
Office, unless Wine is now working flawlessly with Office (really and
truly). In that case, I might go for (2)

2) Buy a used notebook and go all Linux *IF* Wine and Office 2007 are
rock stable *or* if I could be convinced that the Open Office project
to provide complete Excel macro compatibility is successful *and*
there is a client that really handles (gag) Exchange well.

3) Buy a new MacBook and run either the Mac version of Office (which
doesn't really quite replace Outlook, alas) or install XP Pro under
Parallels or VMware and run MS Office 2007 directly. The only downside
I see here is expense; I'd have to buy an OEM copy of XP for about
$150 and probably beef up the 1 GB of RAM to make this work perfectly
in addition to paying a slight premium for the hardware. Upside is I
really do like Mac OS X, and the apparently seemless sharing of stuff
between the dark side (XP) and the light side is very attractive.

Does anybody out there have any experiences with any of these
solutions that are worth mentioning? Outlook compatibility, alas, is a
big factor as is supporting Excel spreadsheets with all sorts of
arcane macros. I can get a "work at home" version of Office 2007 for
$20 in all of these cases.

jking

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