There's no trick to it, I have a selection of PC-generated Word documents on
this laptop. I am writing this on the train on the way home.
But there are some considerations you may bear in mind:
1) Word 2008 lacks a lot of the functionality of PC Word, particularly
macros. For work-relate documents, you are much safer in Word 2004, which
has most of the functions available to PC Word. Word 2008 does not.
2) If you are using Word 2004 (Office 2004) make sure you download and
install the free converter that enables it to read and write the latest
..docx format files. Do that AFTER you apply all the updates needed to bring
Office 2004 up to its current version.
3) Hard drives do not like travelling, not even "portable" hard drives.
You can get lucky: the hard drive in this MacBook has been around the world
four times, travelling constantly in the past four years, and it's still OK,
but that should be considered an exception
Your mileage will almost certainly vary, but it would not be sensible to
expect to do better than I have.
For portable storage, use USB sticks. They are cheap and readily available.
Just make sure that your wife knows NEVER to edit a file on a USB stick.
Copy the file to the hard drive, edit it there, save and close it, then copy
it back to the USB stick when you have finished.
USB sticks are much more rugged (more than a thousand times more rugged...)
than a hard drive. But Word does not like them, and every now and then it
will irretrievably corrupt a file on a USB stick. You won't be able to
recover any of it. This does not happen if you copy to the local drive and
work there, then copy back.
If you have plenty of money, some portable "hard drives" are now coming out
using Solid State Drives as their storage. They are still expensive: expect
to pay nearly a thousand bucks for an Intel Single-Level-Cell version.
But they are extremely fast, Word is quite happy to save to them, and you
could probably fire them out of a gun and they'll keep going, because they
have no moving parts at all to break.
I am using one as the System Drive on the MacPro: it gives me an
eight-second startup and a wake from sleep in less than two seconds
If you were wanting to equip a Road Warrior for serious work, consider
swapping the spinning platter HDD in the MacBook for an SLC Solid State
Disk. It will just plug in. Try to avoid the ones Apple is selling: they
are cheap but not good.
You will nearly double the battery life, and the machine will withstand even
airport baggage handlers.
Hope this helps
Version: 2008 Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) The OS on our home PC
is Windows Vista. My wife writes documents in Word at home for her work. We
have a MacBook Pro and she would like to be able to write the documents at
home on the PC, and then be able to transfer the documents to our MacBook so
that she can use them traveling to various work sites. I don't want to go out
and purchase Word '08 for Mac and a portable hard drive if this will not work.
If so, which hard drive do I buy and is there a trick to accomplishing this??
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John McGhie, Microsoft MVP (Word, Mac Word), Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. | Ph: +61 (0)4 1209 1410
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:
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