Office work/Excel work on a Mac?

[ZenaidaMacroura]

Does anyone regularly do office work on their mac/use their Mac primarily as a workhorse as opposed to leisure?  Any programs for dual booting they can recommend? 

 

Mainly I'm looking at a mac pro and only want to carry around one such device when I travel. 

[Liberty]

You can easily dual boot into windows with Boot Camp.

 

http://www.apple.com/ca/support/bootcamp/

 

But there's also a Mac version of office:

 

http://www.microsoft.com/MAC

 

Or should be able to use Parallels or VMWare to run the windows version within OS X. Many options.

[ZenaidaMacroura]

You can easily dual boot into windows with Boot Camp.

 

http://www.apple.com/ca/support/bootcamp/

 

But there's also a Mac version of office:

 

http://www.microsoft.com/MAC

 

Or should be able to use Parallels or VMWare to run the windows version within OS X. Many options.

Hmm I see, do you have some firsthand experience or knowledge about the practicality of such - or would it be much better to carry the ole' thinkpad when anticipating work-travel? 

[argonaut]

I use and love the mac book pro retinas...for business daily work the mac for office works great. I do run windows in parallels but only for clients who say my website looks like this in ie...

 

What else?

 

I've used macs for perhaps 8 yrs now...

[gfp]

I assume you are talking about a macbook pro not a mac pro desktop, right?  If its a newer Macbook pro I recommend using parallels to run Windows and the windows version of Microsoft Office.  You should install windows using the Boot Camp method and then set parallels to use the Boot Camp partition so that you can start your computer up as a windows only machine or access the same install of windows through a virtualization window from Mac OS.  Best of all worlds.  You can have 100% Windows, Mac with Windows in a box, or 100% Mac anytime you wish.

[Guest valueInv]

Does anyone regularly do office work on their mac/use their Mac primarily as a workhorse as opposed to leisure?  Any programs for dual booting they can recommend? 

 

Mainly I'm looking at a mac pro and only want to carry around one such device when I travel.

 

Why do you want to dual boot?

[ZenaidaMacroura]

Does anyone regularly do office work on their mac/use their Mac primarily as a workhorse as opposed to leisure?  Any programs for dual booting they can recommend? 

 

Mainly I'm looking at a mac pro and only want to carry around one such device when I travel.

 

Why do you want to dual boot?

Mainly for the ease of using customized shortcuts when working with excel.  It would be my first mac pro laptop device

[Guest valueInv]

Does anyone regularly do office work on their mac/use their Mac primarily as a workhorse as opposed to leisure?  Any programs for dual booting they can recommend? 

 

Mainly I'm looking at a mac pro and only want to carry around one such device when I travel.

 

Why do you want to dual boot?

Mainly for the ease of using customized shortcuts when working with excel.  It would be my first mac pro laptop device

 

Why don't you use the Mac version of Office instead of dual booting?

 

Also note that the Mac Pro is a desktop. The laptop you probably mean the the MacBook Pro.

[Cevian]

I used to have the same concerns 8 years ago. I made the switch and have never look back.

 

My recommendation is the same like a few others: Get Office for Mac. No need to run Windows and switch back and forth.

[boilermaker75]

I have used Macs for over 25 years. Daily I use Word and Excel and have never had an issue, including exchanging files with people who use PCs.

 

The only issue I have ever run into is with Powerpoint. Sometimes when I send someone a PowerPoint somethings don't work quite right on a PC. But it has been so minor I can't even recall the details to tell you.

 

And if you ever need to run software that only works on a PC you can go the parallels route.

 

Once you switch to a Mac you will never go back!

[ZenaidaMacroura]

Thanks for all the feedback, I feel better about the switch now!  ;D

[DCG]

I have MS Office on my Mac and used Word and Excel for years w/out any issues. Over the last couple years I'm mainly switched to using Google docs.

 

 

Pages and Numbers are good as well, and now they're part of iCloud so you can access them through icloud.com if you're away from your computer.

[oddballstocks]

Mac user here as well, I've been a Mac user since 2003 and have used Mac's Word and Excel without any issues.

 

Where you might run into issues is if you use any external libraries.  There is a little stock price update library floating out there that's written for Windows and somehow imported into Excel.  Mac users can't access that without dual-booting or using Parallels.

 

Give Office for Mac a try, if it doesn't fit your needs then you can get Parallels.

[rmitz]

Across many documents, I have run into some rare issues with the Mac version of Office, though the newest version is much better.  Assuming you don't need to use Exchange/Outlook, you'll be fine.  Also, if you actually do need to use windows, I'd recommend VMWare Fusion over Parallels, much better in my experience.

[west]

Some of the more esoteric functions in Excel aren't there in the mac version.  And, Excel is much, much slower with larger sets of data than a Windows computer with similar specs.

 

However, if you're not dealing with large spreadsheets (20mb+) regularly, the Mac version of Office should work fine.

 

[Palantir]

If you are using this as a workhorse and Office/Excel is so important....why not get a Windows device? I used to use office on a Mac Pro....word and ppt are good, Excel is funky.