Office Mac 2004 Student and Teacher Edition (CD-ROM)

DOES IT WORK? YES! For me, the key question in buying a Mac to accompany my several PCs was "will I be able to swap files?" In particular, I use Word and Outlook constantly, and it was vital I could exchange files between the two systems. Good news: Using Office Mac, everything works perfectly. The Mac version has a few bits and pieces which work better than the PC version, eg in Word there's a neat, transparent formatting palette which appears alongside your document. "Entourage", the Mac version of Outlook, works much the same way but looks and feels better than the "normal" PC version. On the whole, though, everything feels familiar; and files created in either system work on both. I thought it was pretty good value, too - you get 3 installs, so one set will service up to three MacBooks. Conclusion: valuable, decently-priced software if you want to swap Office files between Macs and PCs.

Neo Office Am considering buying Office Mac, at present using NeoOffice (cousin to Open Office). Free from Sun computers. Works well with the exception of Bullit pionts.

Reasonable. Would swap, but a necessary evil Word is reasonable if all you need to do is type up a report - it does what it needs to for me. Excel is annoying and generally hard to just display/store data with, you can really only use it to produce a few graphs. Powerpoint is great though - has many different backgrounds to keep you entertained for a while, and is generally the most easy to use. My only complaint about Powerpoint would be that it doesn't cope well with any presentations created on a PC - or maybe that's just been my bad luck so far! However, if there was another popular option, I would almost certainly buy it. Unfortunately, Microsoft Office is used by everybody, and you're at a serious disadvantage if you don't have it.

Essential Programme for Students With Macs I have never once regretted abandoning Windows PC's for Apple Macs but it has always niggled me that all of the computers at college run windows and that we were expected to present a lot of our work in powerpoint. I had to use my girlfriends laptop for all my work which kind of defeated the point of splashing out the extra money for a Mac. Then I realised that I could buy Microsoft Office for Mac at a reduced price because I am a student. I can't recommend it enough and it looks like Microsoft have really listened to what Mac users want when designing the programme. It features Word, Powerpoint, Excel and the handy Entourage for e-mail. Of course all files produced on a Mac can be opened on PC's and there is a very handy compatibility report which tells the user as they work that a particular font or background may appear slightly differently on Office 2000 or whatever so you don't get a shock when you are delivering that important presentation and the slides look different.

Adequate at best Well, everyone knows office is pretty much the world standard. And, as the only real contender on a mac to office is Pages and Keynote then the market is pretty easy to win over. Unfortunately the software is not that great. While it will do for writing a quick letter it lacks the features for advanced work, it even struggles to design a poster. For email, stick with Macs own application "mail". Not installing Entourage however reduces the features available to the other three applications. Word: Pros: World standard, easy to use with lots of fonts ect. Cons: Poor use of graphics, very annoying toolbars with no helpful images. Excel: Pros: Versatile with equations for most things, conditional formatting is great as well. Cons: None Powerpoint: Pros: Lots of templates and easy to add basic animation. Cons: Harder to use than other alternatives. The office system as a whole is better on windows. The one advantage to having it on Mac is that the icons are nicer. Also, any office application is slow to load and while running slows down OS X by a considerable amount.