Hi, just some background info: next year I'll be graduating from high school and my dad is gonna buy me a laptop. I, being a mac fan (but none of my friends or my family uses macs) am wanting to by a powerbook. One thing I would like to know though, does Mac OS 10.2 come with a word program such as microsoft office? I've been combing though mac's site and it doesn't seem to mention a word typing program. If it doesn't come with one, do I have to buy another copy of Microsoft office, or can I use my CD for microsoft office 2000 that was made for windows? Any help would be greatly appreciated. I LOVE MACS!

haha nvm I found out you can :)

hack hack, that's expensive for word! any chance the computer comes with a word processor?

If you buy an iBook, it will come with AppleWorks,
which will read most Office documents (especially
Word documents.) PowerBooks come with a
Microsoft Office v.X "test drive," which lets you use Office for 30 days. If you want to buy the educational version of AppleWorks for a PowerBook, it's übercheap, something like thirty or forty dollars. The educational version of Office v.X is $199.99. My personal suggestion is a PowerBook with AppleWorks.

And no, you cannot use a Windows version of Office on a Mac, at least not without Virtual PC.

----paxcirc.a-

Often stores offer deals on Microsoft Office when you
buy a Mac. I've seen it for less than half price.

OpenOffice claims to be "a full-
featured office productivity suite that provides a near
drop-in replacement for Microsoft Office", though I
haven't tried it myself.

So does Apple works function much like Word Xp? I mean does it do the same features that one would need to do a good project (graphs, charts, all that stuff). My mac obsession is driving me crazy. I really want a mac, really really really really really :)

OpenOffice is decent, but it's not quite as polished as Office.

That said, I think Office sucks donkey balls anyway. There's *very* little word processing that can't be done with Apple's TextEdit. Trust me - anything you need for school will work fine in RTF format unless you need to do some fancy-shmancy page layout, in which case Word is the wrong tool for the task anyway.

I haven't used MSOrifice in probably two years, and the only reason I used it at all on OS 9 was because I didn't own a copy of AppleWorks (which, BTW, can translate Office documents and is very handy for spreadsheets).

p

Actually, AppleWorks is going to be more like
Microsoft Works than Microsoft Office. Here's a
rundown of both programs.

Appleworks: It contains a word processor,
a spreadsheet, a database, a drawing program, a
painting program, and a presentation program.
None of the programs have as many features as the Office counterparts, but are quite functional nonetheless. It can open and work with Word and Excel documents without problem. Also, you can import many different types of media files (JPG, MP3, PDF, Photoshop files, HTML, et cetera ...) to work with. You cannot import PowerPoint presentations, though. The spreadsheet program can create graphs and charts.

Microsoft Office v.X: Includes Word, Excel,
PowerPoint, and Entourage. Word, Excel, and
PowerPoint have all the features that their Windows counterparts do, plus they look better thanks to the joy of Aqua. Entourage is Microsoft's Mac email, address book, and calendar program. I use Entourage all the time, but I only use it for mail and, occasionally, the directory services. It has all the features that I use for emailing. The junk mail filter isn't the best though. Entourage imports mail from quite a variety of different Mac mail programs, but getting mail from Outlook (for Windows) to Entourage is notoriuously a bitch. (Personal note: Office v.X is the only Microsoft product I enjoy using. The programmers of it should be designing Windows instead of the goofs who do now.)

I'm going to revise my initial suggestion - I'd get a PowerBook with AppleWorks, but I'd also try out the trial version of v.X. If AppleWorks does it for you, good deal. If you want v.X, get the academic version.

Two notes: rumour has it that Apple will be introducing their own office suite (iOffice?) sometime in the near future. I'm not one for holding off for something that isn't announced though. Also, OpenOffice is an option, but I haven't gotten it to run
on my computer yet.

Hope this helps.

----chri.s-

what's Textedit. my goodness, I'm gonna have much to learn with these macs.

It's a text editor.

p

much like microsoft word?

Nay, like Write.

----paxcirc.a-

MS Word is a word processor. Textedit is a text editor, similar to Windows Write/Wordpad. It supports RTF format, fonts and colours (so it's ahead of Notepad), but not styles, tables, bullet points, tables of contents, indexes, headers, footers or most other features you would expect in a word processor. On the other hand most people don't seem to know what styles are anyway, so for short basic documents Textedit would probably do the job.

For a student - I should know, I was/am one - TextEdit is more than sufficient. I can think of about *two* things I had to do as an undergrad that required something more advanced than TextEdit. Word is serious overkill for most school work.

TextEdit is probably a bit minimalist to suit most people's tastes, but it *works*, it's *free*, and it uses *open standards*, which is more than I can say for anything M$ has ever written.

p

but didn't someone say that appleworks comes with the ibook? or does it come with all apple computers? Does appleworks have to basics, (fonts, spellcheck, etc.) I've always used microsoft word so I guess I'm a little spoiled with it's features :)

It comes with the iBook and iMac and eMac, yes.

It's something like $40 educational with anything else, which is probably $40 you ought to spend for something that can read Office docs and won't uglify your system nearly as much as Office will.

Word, as I've said, is *highly* overrated. Everything that Word can do, WordPerfect 3.5 can do better and WP3.5e is free. OS 9-only, though, so it's sort of out of the picture on a new Mac, but the point is that the basic feature set of word processors (note the difference between a WP and a pure text editor) is common to all that I've ever seen, so yeah, you'll have spell check, fonts, etc.

Actually, even TextEdit has a built-in spell checker (there's systemwide spell checking in OS X, so all programmers have to do is write in the calls to the APIs and poof! instant spell checking in whatever app you want) and can use different fonts, though the RTF standard will discard a fair bit of style information.

FWIW, I use TextEdit for preparing business letters and just about anything else that doesn't require pictures in the document, since it's small, fast, and uncluttered. When I need to put lots of pics in the document, I track down PageMaker, which has far better support for inline charts/graphics/tables/whatever than *any* word processor. I can actually put stuff where I want it in PageMaker and have it stay there, unlike in Word, where M$ is always trying to tell me what's best for my documents. The autocorrection and autoformatting features of Word are quite possibly the *stupidest* so-called "features" I've ever seen on any program.

p

haha, well the autocorrection feature has been much improved in the new office xp. whenever it corrects something, a lightning bolt shows up so you can cancel it and keep it that way. In any case, Thanks so much! I think I will buy a mac :)

O'Reilly have a book about Word 97 Annoyances (and others). Wonder if it mentions custom table layouts and bullet/numbering schemes you can't save for reuse.

There is also the excellent www.annoyances.org website by the same author.

I've used Word XP.

It isn't any better, because it added a whole host of *other* problems, and the damn autocorrect is still on by default. And what the f--- is up with that STUPID f---ING TALKING PAPER CLIP?

Whoever thought adding that to any application was a good idea should be shot.

p

pickle - The guy who created Microsoft Bob had to
have something else to do.