Office for Mac

I knew it, I knew it, I knew it – microsoft does not belong on apple mac computers!

I made the switch from windows to mac for a reason.

And when I switched, I never looked back. I adopted the iWork suite as soon as it came out and resisted purchasing Microsoft Office as well.

I found Apple Pages to be more than adequate for my needs and the while the spreadsheet program was not as robust as I would like, it also accomplished the work I needed to get done.

However, recently, I have been receiving documents from colleagues that are created in Microsoft Office 2007 in Windows and also on other applications. And some of these were not opening correctly for me – particularly some html documents in .doc format. I don’t truly understand how these were created except that they were done in a third party program.

Bottom line – they did not open in Pages but TextEdit did work. Forwarding these on via email, though became complicated.

So, I bit the bullet and bought Microsoft Office for Mac 2008.

I haven’t had the program for more than a day and I am already disappointed.

One thing about Pages that I griped with was the lack of templates. I didn’t want to create fancy templates, like the apple free printable certificates templates that I talked about before. I just wanted to be able to download some that were already made.

The Microsoft Office website has a ton of templates and clipart available to owners of the Office suite. Great – or so I thought.

Upon closer inspection today, those vast templates are available to users of the Windows version of Office only. Boo!

There is some kind of workaround on the website for older templates but it didn’t work for me.

And the clip art. I figured at least I could add some of these images to my documents. So I selected a few images and clicked download. The default option that came up on my apple mac laptop was open with the default app which was listed as Microsoft ClipArt Gallery. OK – sounded reasonable. But didn’t work. So I tried again and saved the clipart to my desktop instead. Then I went into the ClipArt Gallery through Word and tried to import. Again no luck.

And do you know what DID work? I had to rename the clip art file on my desktop to include the .cil extension. Then I was able to do the import through the Clip Art Gallery. (And just an FYI – the image lands in the “favorites” category). All in all, this is easy enough to do. But WHY don’t they put this process in the INSTRUCTIONS???? Come on – make it easy for us. After all we did BUY the program and we are customers.

OK – venting over. I now have Word and Excel so I can open documents made on the windows version easily. Which is what I wanted. Yes I am annoyed that everything winds up in my dock upon install – including Power Point (which I may use), Entourage (which I will never use), Project Gallery, and Microsoft Messenger (again, programs I won’t use).The nerve of Microsoft to assume that I want these programs up front and center – without even asking.

What do you die hard Apple fans use – iWork or Office for Mac? Let me know!