Finally, I got around to installing Mac Office 2008. Being an 'Office' application running in Mac. I thought I should have this easy since I had imported the Outlook 'Contacts' and 'Calendar' into the Mac already, via 'Address Book' and 'iCal' respectively. But I was wrong.
1. I found out that there is no Outlook in Mac Office 2008, it has Entourage. After a bit of googling, I found out that Entourage does not share a code base with Outlook but is rather an offshoot of Outlook Express 5 or something along that line. It does not use the PST file format but .mbox.
2. It does not make use of iCal or Address Book at all. After googling a bit, I found that you can purchase plug-ins for iSync which will allow you to sync across the Mac Apps and Entourage but after having so much already, I was not in the mood to pay extra. One thing I found out along the way, there are not as much freeware for the Mac as there are for Windows. Most Mac utilities I found are shareware, you have to shell out cash to use them.
3. I imported some of the Excel spreadsheets from Windows and found that there are compatibility issues between the 2 platforms, most of it has to do with the way dates are managed across the 2 platforms, which is fine. But it is still annoying. I also find Mac Excel to hang very often. I did an auto-update but it did not help at all. All I can do is just keep rebooting.
4. This brings me to another point, Excel hangs the entire Mac. Something which I had not experienced in Windows since Windows 2000. It actually hangs the entire machine and the only way out is to turn the machine off and on again. This is just unforgivable in this day and age. I am not sure what those Mac zealots mean when they say this is the most stable platform, much more so than Windows. I just don't see evidence of that.
I'll see how Excel performs over the next few days. If it keeps hanging, I might have no choice but to shell out for iWorks 08 and see if a native Apple application will do better. As they say, 'Sucked in.'
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