OK yeah, the whole Macbook ordeal isn’t over yet. I have uncovered a new problem.
iWork 08 vs. Office Mac 2008
My office being a stingy budget-conscious one, we still haven’t moved on to the whole Microsoft Office 2007 frenzy — meaning the files ending with .docx have yet to come up. So that means I can use iWork Pages on my Macbook to work on those document files without a problem.
Now, yesterday I was trying to work on something on Word Mac. Just launching the damn program alone took almost a minute to fully open, and another minute to finally activate the cursor on the page. And that’s not all, even though I rarely use Thai fonts lately, I’d still like to have characters that are readable and not just rows of rectangles.
I think Microsoft purposely tries to torture Mac users as they know that .doc, .xls and .ppt are the world’s standard document format.
So I thought about getting rid of the memory eating Office Mac Suite completely and make my Macbook totally Microsoft-free (well, except for MSN). But I still needed second opinions. I went online to Thai Mac forums and 90% of Thai Mac users are rooting for iWork 08. Why? It can read Thai, it’s fast, it’s a no non-sense application, and best of all, it’s B15,000 less to get a legitimate copy of iWork than a genuine copy of Office.
And then, there’s the whole issue of .doc page breaks that get distorted when viewed with iWork Pages. And then there’s also the issue of unreadable .docx formats, which is not problematic now but it could be later. Some people on the forums even suggested installing Parallel just so that they could switch to Windows when they need to use Microsoft Office! So now, I’m still too scared to uninstall the Office Suite.
Damn. It’s painful to be a switcher in a Microsoft world. Mac geeks I know can’t give me advice as their line of work does not even require them to use document applications.
What’s a Mac girl to do?