me1405 Posted October 11, 2008 Share Posted October 11, 2008 I recently bought a Mac (for the first time, I am new to the whole Mac experience!) and bought iWork, thinking it would be fine for all my needs. I am a final year student currently trying to write my dissertation which includes creating charts/graphs with huge (1000 cells+) datasets. Having tried this in numbers and getting nowhere, I am now considering buying Office 2008 for the Mac so that I can use Excel. I have however read some bad reviews about Excel 08 also being slow. But will it be a lot faster than Numbers? Numbers is taking absolutely ages to produce a graph of a few 1000 cells when on my HP laptop on Windows using Excel 03 it only takes a few seconds!! Do I buy office (excel) 2008 for my Mac?! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fatshitcat Posted October 11, 2008 Share Posted October 11, 2008 If you really have to use it, go buy it. I'd suggest you try to find a way to make your excel stuff on windows, then import it. Office for Mac 2008 is a piece of {censored}. Not because it's by Microsoft, because it simply sucks. When I started using OS X I thought MSOffice would be more familiar than iWork, and I used Office for Windows a lot before. It's nothing like Office for Windows. It's totally different. As overhyped as it may seem, it was crappy. Slow, unresponsive sometimes, crashing(excel especially, word is somewhat better at stability), and even though it's Universal, performance stinks. Office 07's (on Vista)speed compared with with this is blazing. Really. Also, using it is a mess as well. Preferences are hard to find, and it looks like a mess. I personally hated the fact that you had to use inspectors all the time. I would never ever recommend you Office:mac 08, it's crappy, slow and unstable. Better off OpenOffice.org. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FrankOS_Scripting Posted October 11, 2008 Share Posted October 11, 2008 Or simply build a VM and install XP onto and after, install Office 07 or 03. Worth simple and better stability in general Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
syn909 Posted October 11, 2008 Share Posted October 11, 2008 Open Office 3.0 runs native now on intel mac's its great and free open source software! OpenOffice.org 3.0 support the OpenDocument Format 1.2 standard, and be able to open files created by MS Office 2007 and Office 2008 for Mac OS X [url="ftp://openoffice.cs.utah.edu/pub/openoffice/stable/3.0.0//[/url] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
johnniecarcinogen Posted October 12, 2008 Share Posted October 12, 2008 I haven't used openoffice 3 yet, but for compatibility add windows fonts to OS X or your linux distro. EDIT, I bet openoffice can be optimized... or at least strip the ppc part out. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
squigglethecow Posted October 14, 2008 Share Posted October 14, 2008 I would suggest getting open office, you can save things in the same file formats as microsoft word uses, making it a great alternative. and, its FREE! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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