Viewing 16 posts - 1 through 16 (of 16 total)
  • Office interoperability PC/Mac
  • molgrips
    Free Member

    I have the opportunity to get a MacBook for work. Not sure on the spec, but considering it is a bit lighter than my Thinkpad and probably has a much better screen.

    Question is – if I am editing Office documents, will I run into problems between Mac and PC? I had some strange things happen with formatting and not being able to get text where I wanted it the other day, and it occurred to me that the document was proably created on a Mac.

    Aside from not being able to use Visio (which I currently don’t, but I intend to start) what else do I have to be aware of? Mac is fully supported by work.

    Kryton57
    Full Member

    No

    I’m sitting here responding on a new shiny MacBook Pro accessing all my MS office documents via Onedrive as created over the last 7 years at work using a Windows PC.

    I find the MacBook slicker to operate, and has nicer visual but otherwise compatible. Its lighter than my prior Dell 6800 series, the battery lasts longer than the new extended battery I had in the Dell.

    Above all, its a beautiful thing having my phone, iPad and laptop synching together…. Space grey btw by the way 🙂

    Gary_M
    Free Member

    I use a windows laptop in work and a mac at home and never had an issue. Similarly my son has a macbook and sends me document which I open on my laptop with no issues.

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    plyphon
    Free Member

    We all use MookBookPro’s in my dept and the rest of the business uses horrible toughbook things.

    MS Office all runs fine, not compatibility issues.

    Any issues you have will be around how well clued up your IT/ IS guys are. Sometimes they shit kittens at the mention of an Apple Mac on their networks.

    molgrips
    Free Member

    The MBP is lighter than my Thinkpad, but it’s probably got a much better screen because whilst Lenovo are available with nice screens, the base models as of a few years ago don’t have them; whereas you can’t get Macs with crap screens. And now I’m used to the gorgeous one on the Surface I might appreciate it.

    Boss said I could keep the TP though so I might as well give it a whirl.

    fifeandy
    Free Member

    Sometimes they shit kittens at the mention of an Apple Mac on their networks.

    Not even cute furry kittens either.
    Hissing, scratching little monsters.

    gonefishin
    Free Member

    Aren’t there issues with Excel, specifically Macros, not working on the Mac version of office?

    molgrips
    Free Member

    Will I have issues if my phone is Android? I can’t think of any reason it would be a problem but I occasionally do stuff like transfer images from the phone via bluetooth or cable etc.

    fanatic278
    Free Member

    My really complex macro spreadsheets don’t seem to work on my Mac. Saying that, I had to spend hours fixing those spreadsheets to work on different versions of the Windows Excel.

    Other than that, the software is almost indistinguishable between Mac and PC.

    surfer
    Free Member

    I have a work Mac which I chose when a previous employee left rather than buy a new laptop. We are implementing O365 for around 4000 users at the moment along with OneDrive and Sharepoint.

    The Mac does not work as well with O365 (unsurprisingly) it does work but there are enough “differences” to make it inconvenient. I could do almost all of the things I wanted to but the whole experience was not as slick as on a PC. Not a criticism of Apple per se but if you have over 4000 users, making changes just to accommodate a small number of Mac users would be a pain.
    My Mac boots into Windows now.

    bigjim
    Full Member

    A friend with a mbp says there are problems using excel between the two, the mac version is problematic. The last conference I was at the MacBook users had real problems connecting to the projector too, which I found highly amusing at the time, but have since bought an mbp so shouldn’t laugh.

    footflaps
    Full Member

    Mac Office has no VBA support, so any Office app using that for Macros etc won’t port across (or rather the VBA bit won’t). They have talked about re-introducing it, but no signs of it happening.

    A workaround is just to run Windows as a VM on the Mac and then you can always use that if need be. I’d avoid Parallels though, used to crash my MBP all the time.

    Three_Fish
    Free Member

    I’d avoid Parallels though, used to crash my MBP all the time.

    I’ve used Parallels on my MBP for the last three years running Word/Excel, AutoCAD and Inventor with zero issues (other than having to tolerate Windows 😉 )

    Kryton57
    Full Member

    While the attention is here- anyone know how to share a ’17 MBP on a 27″ iMac at full size? ~I’m using screens share but only get a 13.5″ window – I want to use the whole thing

    jambalaya
    Free Member

    Mac Office has no VBA support, so any Office app using that for Macros etc won’t port across (or rather the VBA bit won’t

    This. So if you are a “power user” or someone has shared with you a complex spreadsheet/document with vba it won’t work

    mrblobby
    Free Member

    While the attention is here- anyone know how to share a ’17 MBP on a 27″ iMac at full size? ~I’m using screens share but only get a 13.5″ window – I want to use the whole thing

    You need to match the resolution of your MBP to the iMac screen. I’m sure you use to be able to do this via the preferences, but I don’t think there’s an easy way to do this now outside of downloading an app. Display Menu is a popular one but annoyingly you need to pay a couple of quid for the “pro” one that does the retina resolutions. You might find something free if you google a bit.

    This. So if you are a “power user” or someone has shared with you a complex spreadsheet/document with vba it won’t work

    Yes, this. I use 365 and various office apps all the time and usually seamlessly switch between Mac and Windows, share with other Windows users, and get very little bother. But then I’m not doing anything particularly complicated.

    I did go the VMWare route a few years back for some Windows stuff but never use it now. Use Omnigraffle for Visio stuff, which seems to produce files that Visio is happy enough with. Use MySQL and its Workbench for quick DB stuff where I might previously have considered Access.

Viewing 16 posts - 1 through 16 (of 16 total)

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