20/02/04 Bill McIntyre : >you that I'm using Office 98 on 9.2.2 with no problems. And when my >students send me Word and Powerpoint files from their windows machines, I >have no problems opening them.
You need M$ Office or compatible bloatware to edit the files, but to simply open them there are free M$ viewers for PowerPoint (for mac), Word and Excel (Windows only). Using word viewer in Virtual PC gives you a more accurate representation of what PC users see, which may be ugly but avoids you some questioning when you see something strange and wonder if it's a conversion problem. Finding free stuff at M$ website isn't easy. I have the direct URLs somewhere if you can't find the viewers. For those with tight budget or old macs, it's still possible to read Word 98 files in Word 5 by adding "Word 97-98 import for Word 5", also free from M$ (it has problems with files saved with the "fast save" option from Word's prefs, like many non-M$ apps that try to open M$ files). Making Word 5 usable is even easier than later versions (increase the RAM size a bit, change some keyboard shortcuts in localized versions to comply with mac standards). My Word 5.2a from 1992 is surprisingly snappy compared to Word 2001 on the same mac under 9.2.2, not to mention it runs in 1MB RAM (I gave it 4MB). I think the file format didn't change until XP. My advice to James' daughter would be to of course use a mac, but mostly to try many apps that can output the file formats she needs (Nisus Writer?) and choose the ones that she likes, then spend the money on Virtual PC instead of Office to open *other's* work with the free viewers and use any other program that may be required. What she shouldn't do is to use VPC for web and mail with IE and OE, or else she will break her virtual PC as often as a real one (unless using VPC's "revert disk" feature, which doesn't save changes to the disk image). Reinstalling VPC's image from a backup is much simpler and faster than a real PC though. ---- VRic ___________________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe send a mail message with a SUBJECT line of "unsubscribe" to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> or <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
