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General discussion

New office suite on horizon

May 9, 2007 8:39AM PDT

Questions for whoever wants to answer:

1. As many of you know, I have just made the leap from OS 9.2.2 to 10.4.9 on my G4 desktop. I can get MS Office at a reduced rate through my alma mater, and I think I may even be able to get the Teacher and Student version, which is even less expensive. I'm not sure what the difference is between that version and the Standard one, but I suspect it would be fine for me.

But some of you like NeoOffice and other office suites well. Any feedback from people who have used any of them? It doesn't have to be free (though that would be nice), just good and compatible with MS Office or other things I may encounter. If, on the other hand, buying MS Office will have real advantages, I'll do that. Just about everyone I know has MS Office (PC or Mac), but some have other word processing or suites. such as Word Perfect or AppleWorks, to name just two. Also, Word has quite a few conversion choices, a great advantage that some other suites may not have. Any thoughts on that?

Should I just upgrade MacLinkPlus and not worry about an office suite's conversion capabilities? It has been quite useful, at times. Or does OS X have more extensive conversion properties that I don't know about, making all this moot? (I'm still like Alice in Wonderland where OS X is involved--not having had much time to devote to becoming acquainted with what Tiger can and cannot do.)

2. I have a load of files from my (very recent) OS 9 days, many of them done in MS Word 98. At this point I still have OS 9 on the computer, but I expect I shall get rid of it altogether at some point. It does seem a shame to be clogging up my hard drive with that and Office 98 and all those things I once used regularly but no longer will need, once I've updated them.

I believe that I was told that I wouldn't be able to read or use those files in OS X but could send them to myself as email messages. Is that right? And what do I do with them after that? Just copy them into blank documents in my new version of Word or whatever I get? Same with Excel files? It's a little confusing, but I really don't want just to get rid of them or store them on paper. I've got some documents in other formats as well and don't know how to handle those, either, but the ones in Word and Excel are really most essential.

I know this message has a lot of questions, but I hope that they aren't too many to deal with.

Many thanks, everyone,

Jenny

Discussion is locked

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I'll tackle NeoOffice.
May 9, 2007 9:20AM PDT

"just good and compatible with MS Office"

That describes how it works with Office 2003 (PC) and Office 2004 (Mac). It will take time to see both NeoOffice and Open Office figure out what to do with files that Office 2007 users save in the new format.

As to your Office 98 files, the Word, PowerPoint and Excell sheets should be no problem at all.

However some want no work or worry at all should just pay the toll to MS. I don't consider it work or worry to make sure I save my files in Open Office in Word compatible form.

Bob

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Q2. Answer
May 9, 2007 10:14AM PDT

With Office 2004 (current) or the impending Office 2007(8,9), you will be able to open all of the old Word and Excel documents that you created in Office 98.
Just pick them up from wherever they are on your HD and drop them into your new Documents folder. This is not entirely necessary but it keeps things on track for when you finally get the new machine and the Migration tool moves everything to it.
AppleWorks is no longer shipped with a new machine and the latest version did not have anywhere near the number of converters that the older version, 5 I think, did.

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Office suite
May 10, 2007 5:52AM PDT

Thanks, Bob and Peter. Much obliged!

Jenny