Need quick advice re MS Office for Mac

[Cassady]

Hello all,

The wife's laptop etc. was removed out of her car last night, courtesy of some friendly signal-jamming affirmative shoppers.

Going off to buy a Macbook Air 11" 256 this morning.

I haven't looked at this in a while, and figured I'd just pop something up here.

Don't want to fork out R3,4k for the Office for Mac (she needs Outlook).
With it only being 4gb/256 – would prefer to avoid going the Parallels route.

So Office 365 looks like the best best?
I haven't played around with the new Mac Outlook version – anyone who has, have any thoughts? Is it OK?

Many thanks!

 

[bwana]

A friend of mine runs Office 365 via Parallels and he reckons it's fine - though he does regret only getting 8gb of ram.

 

[Cassady]

A friend of mine runs Office 365 via Parallels and he reckons it's fine - though he does regret only getting 8gb of ram.

Thanks. I'm considering not going that route, with only 4GB. So looking at the Office 365, which will see her using the Mac equivalents. Outlook is what has me worried - I found the 2011 version to be a resource hog... Hoping the 'new' version is going better??...

 

[bwana]

Thanks. I'm considering not going that route, with only 4GB. So looking at the Office 365, which will see her using the Mac equivalents. Outlook is what has me worried - I found the 2011 version to be a resource hog... Hoping the 'new' version is going better??...

Ok. Didn't realize there was only 4gb in the model you choose. I'd probably avoid it too.

 

[DA-LION-619]

Office 365 is fine, when the new Office for Mac is released you'll be upgraded to it.

 

[Cassady]

Office 365 is fine, when the new Office for Mac is released you'll be upgraded to it.

Appreciate the reply. I'm thinking this as well - have the feeling the new version might actually be half-decent (on the Mac platform) for a change.

Looks like latter-half of 2015 - so will be super if we can upgrade.

The Coherence mode in Parallels is pretty sweet, but not something that I would even consider on a 4GB MBA. And jumping up to a 8GB MBP is a significant jump in terms of price, as well....

 

[thewusman]

I am running the office 2016 preview on the new retina Macbook.

I have an Office 365 sub and have installed it on my mac (it's currently in free beta form) and have full office 2013 installed in windows, plus have it on my iPhone and iPad - all part of the same licence. Quite a bargain imho.

It's a significant upgrade, so much so that I hardly need to run Office 2013 in a parallels VM. Only missing features are the more advanced power BI, power query and power pivot add ons.

For everything else - it's really awesome and MS have done a sterling job.

8gb of RAM in a mac is more than enough.

 

[$m@Rt@$$]

Mail on Mac is very much sufficient. Why do you need outlook?

 

[Cassady]

Mail on Mac is very much sufficient. Why do you need outlook?

I don't - run Mail.app just fine.

Wife's company is Outlook based. They have signature requirements / images etc., meeting requests etc. that I don't think Mail.app will do too easily. No doubt workarounds are possible - but will cross that bridge later, for now - will be easier getting Outlook running, since she is already familiar with it.

Went for the Office 365 Personal option. Downloaded it yesterday. Comes with Office Mac 2011 (including that version's Outlook), and then downloaded the new Mac Outlook as well. Cannot get it setup as of yet - but hopefully her IT will be able to help. R740 per year. Not too bad, I guess.

 

[LizGroen]

I also have one of those Office 365 subs for 5 users, and I'm using it on my MB Air and desktop PC, amongst others. I even installed the Outlook App on my iPhone and use it for one of my other emails in the interim to test it out. For the first time in the past 5 years am I able to 'send' an email from my phone when not on Wifi. I have not been able to set up the SMTP settings for MTN properly to use with the Mail App - and no one (iStore, MTN) has been able/willing/interested to help me.

I do not use MS Office as much on the MB Air as the PC, but the only issue I have is that I am no longer able to copy, paste from one MS Office program to another, i.e. I cannot select a piece from Paint (don't judge) and paste it into a Word document; I also cannot copy a picture from a file and paste it into Word - I have to use 'insert' from the toolbar. I've tried finding solutions, and it looks like it may be because it is Web based, but I do not really have time and opportunity to search more. I'm sure there are real simply solutions and I'm sure I'll still get to it soon.

Apart from that - I really enjoy Office 365.

 

[Darko]

I use Office 2015 Preview on my Pro just fine. You don't need Parallels. Run the entire suite through 365.

 

[Cassady]

So far, Outlook 2015 seems pretty solid.

She hasn't really played around with Excel and MS Word as of yet – I will warn her to save regularly, never found them to be very stable.

Overall, she's managing just fine – and the transition has been quite seamless.
Happy wife = happy life.