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Switching to the Mac is taking strange turns lately. At the far end of the spectrum, there are people who buy top-of-the-line Macs to run Windows, like a friend of mine who’s making his Mac-fan wife green with envy over his 24″ iMac wastefully running Windows XP… A more middle of the road category of switchers is that of those who transfer their mandatory Windows environment into their new Mac thanks to Parallels.

Håvard Risvaag, who authorized me to reproduce his post to the Wordfast mailing list, is in that latter category and shared his experience folding that old PC into his new MacBook.

Since I have never used Parallels to transfer a PC to a Mac, but having instead built directly from scratch a virtual machine, I found Håvard’s testimony a very helpful addition to our knowledge base for our friends who still keep a PC side-by-side with their Mac and/or are considering upgrading to one of the new Intel machines to run their legacy PC environment. As you can see below, our Norwegian colleague is rather happy:

“Just an update, now that I’ve left the dark side.

It works like a charm, and the transition from PC to Mac was quite simple. With a new maxed-out MacBook, I bought and installed Parallels build RC3. On my old XP PC I installed a small program from Parallels, a Transport Agent allowing me to migrate the whole XP installation over to Parallels, I hooked the two machines together via Ethernet and after a while, my old PC was up and running inside my Mac. I’m rather amazed.

My relocated PC sensed that there was something new about the hardware environment, so I had to reactivate XP and Office, but otherwise it is
all the same. Only faster.

The coherence mode is great, all windows from both OS-es mixed together in utter bliss, the Windows task bar resting in bottom of the screen. Now, however, I’ve hooked an external display to the Mac, thus running OS X in full screen on the MacBook and XP in full screen on the other screen. One keyboard, one mouse, drag-and-drop between screens.

I’ll tell you if I run into trouble, but so far it’s all fine. Now I’m finally mobile.

And I’m not getting paid or anything for this ad-like post.”

Håvard wrote this piece on February 28th, and the next day, the new version of Parallels, with Coherence mode, was coming out of beta. Time to give it a look if you haven’t yet.

Don’t hesitate to share your experience or ask questions in the Comments section below or on the TransMUG list.

Written by Yves

If you are writing posts for a Mac user group for translators, the latest Macworld is one of the strangest you may have attended in the recent years: a Macworld sans Mac! No hardware announcements, no software announcements, only iPods, old and new (the AppleTV is a sort of screenless iPod with video connectors and Wi-Fi, and the iPhone, an iPod mobile…). As a matter of fact, both new products sync through iTunes… Enough said!

So what left is there when iWork ’07 is not part of the top billing? Office 2008. Yes, 2008. That’s pretty much when you will be using it. Previously named Office 2007 for the Mac, the Microsoft suite is slipping ever more, from the first half (June?) to the second half of 2007, and don’t count on July. But demos were presented at Macworld, on the stage not at the booth’s workstations, and a nice slideshow on the eWeek site offers clearer first looks at the beast than the amateur photos snapped on the Expo floor that have popped up online.

Microsoft’s copy machine has never been running at higher speeds! Take the Aperture loupe, some Adobe layout tools, Pages’ templates, and sprinkle all this on top of Office 2007′s (the Windows one) “ribbon” interface and… voilà: Word 2008 with a Mac-only Publishing Layout. PowerPoint, too, receives a serious dose of “fresh” inspired by Keynote. Now, it would be fun to find the new features of Excel in Apple’s rumored spreadsheet app that would be added to iWork ’07, expected long before the new Office.

The new features and looks should be an improvement, not withstanding speed and stability when, while used on an Intel Mac, the suite doesn’t have to run atop Rosetta. Still, as it was confirmed to me at the booth, Word 2008 will not run legacy VBA macros. Unless there is a way for Yves Champollion to port its great translation memory tool, Wordfast, to AppleScript, we will have to make some hard choices by the end of this year. AppleTrans and OpenOffice never looked so good… A story to be continued.

Written by Yves

Macworld online just published a great opinion piece on the demise of VBA in the next, late, version of Office for the Mac. Poor cousin of Office for Windows, the Mac version will play catch up, months later, leaving Mac users without a converter for the new Office 2007 file format (.docx) for weeks, and eventually coming out without VBA—the support for the good old macros.

Why do we translators care? Because our best TM tool, Wordfast, is a VBA macro. When I briefly talked to Yves Champollion—Wordfast’s creator—at the ATA Conference in New Orleans last month, Yves didn’t look like he was ready to port his program to AppleScript. Because AppleScript and Automator are the consolation prices for us Mac users, making Office for Mac more Mac-like in the future … but still, less compatible with the rest of the world. Rob Griffiths, the author of the Macworld piece even foresees the removal of VBA as the beginning of the end of Office for the Mac.

Griffiths’ article makes a scathing argument against Microsoft’s latest bad move, and some of the comments it generated add very interesting angles to the issue. The subject is definitely striking a chord with Macworld readers as the comments came by the dozen in a matter of hours.

Apparently, users of Intel Macs might have the possiblily some day to run Office 2007 for Windows on their machines WITHOUT Windows (a $300 savings) thanks to a solution that is still in the works, CrossOver Mac. At this time, Office 2000 is the latest version said to work fully with CrossOver Mac. Remains to see if we can graft Wordfast on top of this collage. And will our Mac licenses be valid for a PC download?

In a related note, you can also pretend you don’t have Windows with the brand new “Coherence mode” of Parallels Desktop (see Living in a Parallels Universe) which displays Windows applications’ windows side by side your Mac apps… Michael Verdi’s blog offers a QuickTime demonstration of the feature.

In the meantime, anti-MS, pro-Neo Office people rejoice. After all, if you don’t need VBA macros in your professional life, you will likely have the possibility to open Office 2007 files in Neo Office, and/or use OmegaT, AppleTrans, and other XML-friendly tools to translate them. And if you haven’t tried it yet, Neo Office is a great suite/alternative. Not counting the upcoming release of a native Mac version of the basis for Neo Office, Open Office, and a possibly beefed up iWork suite in January…

Not all is bleak in the future of the office suites for Mac, but MS dropping VBA is certainly a nasty blow. Please share your reactions in the comment section of this blog or start a discussion on the members’ list, or better yet, write to me so I can open a slot for you to post your own article here. Looking forward to reading you.

Written by Yves