Opening Windows Files on a Mac

The Office Suite from Microsoft includes three very popular programs: the word processing application called Word (filename.doc), the spreadsheet application Excel (.xls files), and the presentation application PowerPoint (.ppt files).

The most obvious way to use these files is to purchase Microsoft Office through a single user Office license. The price usually runs several hundred dollars. But, if you are a student or teacher, there is the more affordable “Office Student & Teacher Edition,” which permits you to install Office on up to three individual Mac computers.
www.campustech.com

If you don’t want to purchase Microsoft Office, there several alternatives that allow you to work with files that Word, Excel, and PowerPoint create.

NeoOffice is free open-source software that does a good job of offering most of what Microsoft Office provides. It is available online in a 100+ megabyte download.
www.neooffice.org

OpenOffice.org is another version of a free open-source office suite. While also available as a 100+ megabyte download, you can also purchase a CD-ROM version for a nominal fee from a number of sources.
www.openoffice.org

If you’re primarily concerned with handling Word documents, you can simply use the application TextEdit that came with Mac OS X. TextEdit handles basic text editing and formatting but doesn’t support many of Word’s advanced features.

Apple’s products, Pages and Keynote, (available for purchase from Apple as iWork), fill the roles of Word and PowerPoint respectively.
www.apple.com/iwork


The Preview application that comes with Mac OS X opens Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) files. Although it lacks a few of the advanced PDF files features (such as the ability to fill in forms and save the results), so you may want to install the Acrobat Reader software available as a free download from Adobe.
www.adobe.com


Unfortunately, Microsoft has officially discontinued support for their Windows Media Player for the Mac. They suggest that Mac users download the Flip4Mac WMV component that gives QuickTime the ability to handle .asp and .asx files. While there are still a few web sites that work poorly when streaming to QuickTime/Flip4Mac, most websites function very well.
www.microsoft.com/windowsmedia