>So my questions relate to what is the real-world experience of Mac users in >what is still a predominantly PC-world. I cannot afford an expensive >experiment of buying my first Mac and finding out that, while I may love >what I can do with it at home, it causes me grief when trying to be fully >and transparently compatible with work.
The devil is in the details so a precise answer is tough to provide, but such details are not just a problem for interoperating Macs and PCs. Different versions of MS products running on Windows also have interoperability problems. It all depends on exactly what you are tring to do. >Main applications that need to be >seamlessly integrated are all of the MS office suite (esp. Outlook, Word, >Excel and PowerPoint). Are the Mac versions of these REALLY interchangeable >with the PC versions? The Office apps: Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint are probably the most interchangeable. They can open each other's files and transfer content back and forth with few problems. But when you get beyond the content the answer becomes murkier. For example, slide transitions differ among the Mac and Windows versions and even among different versions on the same platform. When MS introduced Office 2007 (Windows), users of the previous versions of Office (both Mac and PC) could not open those files. After a long delay MS finally gave us a filter to open these files. After an even longer delay MS delivered a Mac version of the filter. But MS is pissed at users who don't regularly upgrade so these filters only work with the most recent versions of Office. We also found that Office 2007 had been crippled so that it would not open files from earlier versions of Office and other programs, like Word Perfect. MS said it was for "security reasons." To get those files into Office 2007 involved jumping through some serious hoops. It is actually easier to interoperate with these old Windows formats when using the Mac version of Office. Scripting languages are another problem area. In the past both Mac and Win versions of Office worked with VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). Then MS dropped support for VBA with Office 2008 (Mac). So if your Office apps rely on scripting the latest Mac version no longer interoperates. There are lots of tiny differences. For example, in MS Word there is a slight difference in the way that one of the search/replace wild card characters work. This is on no consequence unless you are needing this one tiny feature. On the Mac you will need to use a slightly different method to get the same result. Outlook and Exchange are now written by the Exchange Server group so they are closer to each other than they were when both versions were called Outlook. Back then Outlook Mac was written by the Mac Business Unit. But even now, some of the more obscure features of Outlook do not exist in Exchange. So you have to consider what features you need and if you can live with occasional differences in obscure features. There is no IE for Mac and no Active X for Mac either. Some troglodytes insist on coding their Web apps so that they use Active X. They do this even though there are perfectly fine (often better) cross-platform solutions. In some organizations WFBs seem to go out of their way to use Active X gratuitously. Some even test for Macs and block them even when the Mac browser would work perfectly fine with their application. This can cause a lot of friction. So your question is not an easy one. While the Mac is a far better computer and operating system, it is all too easy to create unnecessary incompatabilities either through ignorance or malace. ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
