Living without Mac Office

I decided to go ahead and update my macbook pro to leopard. I decided I needed to do a clean install as my system had been getting a bit crufty with stuff and I’d heard nightmare stories about the upgrade path. The clean install worked like a charm, and it was amazing how much of my settings came back just thanks to the .Mac keychain and settings sync – for instance, MarsEdit and Transmit seemed to just come up licensed like magic.

But doing a clean install also meant reinstalling my apps, and this time around, I decided not to install the old version of Microsoft Office I’ve been using for years. We don’t have a license for Mac Office 2008 here at Adobe yet, so I’m going to try living with Buzzword for word processing and Keynote/Numbers for presentations and spreadsheets. All three apps can even open OOXML documents, so I rarely get stuck with a document I can’t read. For those cases and to read Adobe email, I use a VMWare image running XP and Office 2007.

My system is a ton faster without any Rosetta-based PowerPC apps running on it, and buzzword is a lot more pleasant to use than Word.  When we do get access to the new version of Mac Office I’m going to have some interesting choices to make.

all-intel processes on my Macbook Pro

~ by Andrew Shebanow on 29Jan08.

Posted in Document Formats, Rich Internet Applications

4 Responses to “Living without Mac Office”

  1. “My system is a ton faster without any Rosetta-based PowerPC apps running on it”

    How is it tons faster? Unless you’re consistently switching between flavors, having an rosetta app run won’t affect performance with your system.

    Rosyna said this on 29Jan08 at 18:13

  2. I don’t know why, honestly. It just feels sooo much faster.

    Andrew Shebanow said this on 29Jan08 at 18:20

  3. Once you’ve tried Keynote you’ll never go back to PowerPoint again. We’ve had clients buying MacBooks Pro’s just so we could create Keynote presentations for their sales-guys. Keynote rocks.

    marco said this on 30Jan08 at 00:32

  4. Yea, I love Keynote. Best presentation package since the late, great Aldus (then Adobe) Persuasion. I like Keynote so much I bought a copy of iWork with my own money. 🙂

    But its PPT conversion isn’t flawless, and there are some pretty nice features in PowerPoint 2007 on the PC as well that I miss when I use Keynote.

    Andrew Shebanow said this on 30Jan08 at 10:25

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