Section 7.26. Microsoft Office

7.26. Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office is available for the Mac in what some critics have declared to be a more attractive, less frustrating version than the Windows incarnation. At this writing, the current version is called Office 2004 for Macintosh.

As noted elsewhere in this book, the beauty of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents is that their format is the same on Mac and Windows. You can freely exchange files without having to go through any kind of conversion. (The big exception, as noted earlier, is Access; Microsoft doesn't make a database program for the Mac.)

In heavily formatted documents, you may occasionally see some strange differences: Documents containing many numbered paragraphs sometimes become confused when switched across the platform divide, for example. And if the Mac and the originating PC don't have the fonts installed, you'll see different fonts, too. Otherwise, documents look identical despite having been shuttled through the ether to a different kind of computer.