Salut

I realize that this debate has probably been discussed before but i have a specific question regarding the cross platformability or Mac Office and Office 2003 Pro...

I am looking to get a laptop for the wife for work... she has winXP and Office XP on her work computer, and we have winXP and Office 2003 Pro at home...

The laptop will most likely be a Powerbook 15" w/superdrive... This laptop will be used by my wife for bringing some of the Word and Excel files from her work computer onto the laptop to work on and edit at meeting et al... and then bring back to work and put edited Word and Excel files back onto the WinXP machine at work...
When at home the same would be true but with office 2003 pro... The laptop would obviously be also used as a web browser and other wonderful utilities in front of the TV etc...

Bear in mind that I have pretty much made up my mind that the purchase will be either the PowerBook, Sony Vaio, or Dell (if good deal)... all the others I am not looking at... The forerunner is the Mac, which is why I'm checking the compatibility here with you experts... especially the SOUP AND RASTRO... (I've been away a while guys)...

I look forward to all of your wonderful insight and advice (especially Soopa and Astroboy - whom I know to be big Mac fans...)

Cheers
ciao

3PUTT

go for it!! take the plunge!!
i purchased th e15" powerbook a year ago and love every minute of it.
i do not have office 2003 but i have worked on MS office documents in both PC and MAC with no problems. one thing you can try is bring a sample doc from MS Office 2003 to an apple store and try it.

i purchased my powerbook from macmall.com. they tend to offer a few things for free (like double your RAM to 1 GB).

good luck!! you will not regret the powerbook!!

Winterwaves

To my knowledge, MS Office files are the exact same format, whether created on Mac Office or Windows Office. The only issue you might have is some possible incompatibilities between Office 2003 and Office XP (2002), but I doubt it would be much. Someone correct me if I'm wrong on that. But I believe the compatibility concern wouldn't be between Mac and PC -- it would be between the different versions of Office.

3PUTT

i strongly agree. i have heard a few stories about Office 2003. My office has not completely migrated to 2003. only some of our analysts have.

astro

both iwork, and office2004 are made for the mac and are fully compatible with PC versions

astro

you don't need to worry, any version of office uses teh same file system, with some minor updates but the compatibility remains teh same. I could sell you my version of officeX if you like, I've upgraded and no longer need the disc.

Wampum

You can always "save as" as an older version on your newer versions of office. For example some VISIO files that are created with 2003 will not open with 2000, but you can take the 2003 version on your Office 2003 machine and "save as" 2000 version. You can do this with the complete office suite if you run into any compatibility issues between versions

Salut

Thanks for the responses gents...

Good idea... I tried that tonight with some files from my wife's work... and they all opened on the powerbook no prob... I made some changes while at the Mac store and brought the flash drive home and opened all of the changed files on my home office 2003 machines...

Will have the wife try and open these same files at her work tomorrow...

Again thanks for the input gents... and astro I will let you know... the purchase might still be a month or so off... but tks for the offer... (btw officeX = ??? - is that office xp...)

Ciao

Salut

BTW thank you so much for that link... great find...

Shhhhhwwwwwwweeeeeeet...

Ciao