On the utter weirdness of running windows on my mac
About two years ago, I basically sold my soul to Steve Jobs and moved my life and my work onto a Mac.
On the whole it is utterly lovely - with one problem - I work in a corporate environment, and even though we are a very Mac-friendly business, this is an MSOffice world, and using MacOffice is like wading through treacle..in particular it takes forever to move around a big bit of powerpoint.
And this version of Mac Excel is clearly designed to never actually be used.
Yes, there are Mac alternatives: Number is neat, if a little quirky, and Keynote is lovely, but it’s a nightmare having to export all the time (oh and the lack of an Autosave is, frankly, a sin). And yes, NeoOffice is also pretty good, but
Oh - and there is the teeny inconvenience that pretty much every new video service is mac-unfriendly.
I tried Bootcamp the second it came out - and it was neat, but all that having to reboot never really did it for me. I then tried the early version of Parallels - and that was neat too - but it was too tricky to share files.
The new version, however, is so good it’s downright freaky. The ‘Coherence’ view where the apps just appear like other apps, not in a separate window is pure genius. And performance is remarkably fine.
The fact that you can share files between Mac and Windows OS’s makes it all just that bit more efficient as well.
I have a bit of a problem when connecting my virtual machine to the work network…and I suspect that is never quite going to happen (a bummer for printing) despite valiant efforts from our IT team.
So, it’s still not quite working as I’d like - but on the whole, it’s becoming almost second nature to hop between the two, and it’s been fun getting to grips with Office 2007 (thank you nice people at Microsoft). Two things.
1. It’s just daft that you have to install a plug in to be able to save things as a .pdf…shouldn’t that be core functionality these days?
2. I utterly love OneNote…suits my butterfly brain to a tee. Why is MacOffice 2008 going to be launching without it..?
Paul wrote:
Hi Simon,
PDF was supported natively in the beta but removed from the final version after talks with Adobe broke down:
http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2006/06/02/613702.aspx
Posted on 08-Nov-07 at 10:56 am | Permalink
My Personal Blog » On the utter weirdness of running windows on my mac wrote:
[…] Check it out! While looking through the blogosphere we stumbled on an interesting post today.Here’s a quick excerpt About two years ago, I basically sold my soul to Steve Jobs and moved my life and my work onto a Mac. On the whole it is utterly lovely - with one problem - I work in a corporate environment, and even though we are a very Mac-friendly business, this is an MSOffice world, and using MacOffice is like wading through treacle..in particular it takes forever to move around a big bit of powerpoint. And this version of Mac Excel is clearly designed to never actually be used. Yes, there are Mac alter […]
Posted on 14-Nov-07 at 5:21 am | Permalink
My Personal Blog » On the utter weirdness of running windows on my mac wrote:
[…] Check it out! While looking through the blogosphere we stumbled on an interesting post today.Here’s a quick excerpt About two years ago, I basically sold my soul to Steve Jobs and moved my life and my work onto a Mac. On the whole it is utterly lovely - with one problem - I work in a corporate environment, and even though we are a very Mac-friendly business, this is an MSOffice world, and using MacOffice is like wading through treacle..in particular it takes forever to move around a big bit of powerpoint. And this version of Mac Excel is clearly designed to never actually be used. Yes, there are Mac alter […]
Posted on 14-Nov-07 at 5:22 am | Permalink
karljohn » On the utter weirdness of running windows on my mac wrote:
[…] Check it out! While looking through the blogosphere we stumbled on an interesting post today.Here’s a quick excerpt About two years ago, I basically sold my soul to Steve Jobs and moved my life and my work onto a Mac. On the whole it is utterly lovely - with one problem - I work in a corporate environment, and even though we are a very Mac-friendly business, this is an MSOffice world, and using MacOffice is like wading through treacle..in particular it takes forever to move around a big bit of powerpoint. And this version of Mac Excel is clearly designed to never actually be used. Yes, there are Mac alter […]
Posted on 25-Nov-07 at 3:52 am | Permalink
karljohn » On the utter weirdness of running windows on my mac wrote:
[…] Check it out! While looking through the blogosphere we stumbled on an interesting post today.Here’s a quick excerpt About two years ago, I basically sold my soul to Steve Jobs and moved my life and my work onto a Mac. On the whole it is utterly lovely - with one problem - I work in a corporate environment, and even though we are a very Mac-friendly business, this is an MSOffice world, and using MacOffice is like wading through treacle..in particular it takes forever to move around a big bit of powerpoint. And this version of Mac Excel is clearly designed to never actually be used. Yes, there are Mac alter […]
Posted on 25-Nov-07 at 3:53 am | Permalink