Re: Mac Mini possible convert...

[Don McAllister <donmc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Paul,
See in line for some comments - bottom line is I think you would have
to bite the bullet and go for Office on the mac. See below

On 27 Mar 2005, at 10:23, Paul Gordon wrote:

>
> I'm still giving serious consideration to getting a Mac Mini,
> especially
> now that the current kitchen PC is starting to seriously annoy me with
> its poor performance (mini ITX PC, with a 1GHz processor)
>
Can't recommend the mac mini enough provided you get at least 512MB RAM
>
> Want to know about potential conversion issues with relation to SWMBO
> acceptance of the new interface, and especially in regard to her main
> use of this machine which is for email, and browsing. Currently she
> uses
> (and likes) Outlook 2003, connected to our in-house Exchange 2003
> server
> and IE6 for web.
>
Using the mac interface is a doddle. Doesn't take long to get used to
it. The dock is useful and the screen handling is fine. The menu bar at
the top of the screen rather than at the top of each app window takes a
bit of getting used to but I like it now. It's very consistent.
>
> I know that Office is available for Mac, - however, that's not like to
> be a purchase I'll want to make just for 1 machine, - Office has never
> been particularly cheap to buy...
>
There is a student edition available which is a lot cheaper.
>
> What (if any) mail client is provided out of the box with a mac mini,
-
> and what else is available as either freeware or reasonable cost? - is
> there anything that provides the full PIM features of Outlook? -
> anything that supports a MAPI connection to Exchange? (I don't
> currently
> have either POP or IMAP enabled on my Exchange server).

There is the Apple mail software but this is not MAPI. I've also used
thunderbird and entourage (included in Office). I believe the Entourage
client is the only MAPI enable client but its support for exchange is
limited. You may need to do some research on that.
>
>
> She also uses other Office 2003 apps on this machine, - mainly Excel -
> what are the options for accessing existing XLS files on the mac?
>

The mini comes with Appleworks which will access your xls files. It
looks a bit dated though but seems to work. Again, the best option is
Office for the mac. The version of Office for the mac looks even nicer
than the Windows version!

Just one thought, Apple are releasing the next version of the OS X
software next month (Tiger) - There are lots of updates to the current
OS including better interoperability with Windows - don't know if
they'll include any better support for MAPI but you never know!