CodeWeavers Inc. launched CrossOver 7.0 today, after giving it a beta run of just over a month, and the major new feature is support for Microsoft Office 2007, the latest Windows version of the fifty-pound-gorilla in the field of business productivity applications (why one wouldn’t just want to use Microsoft Office for Mac 2008 is beyond me, however).
Furthermore, as Peter Cohen at the mothership so aptly puts it, “Bug fixes have been made to improve online banking support for Quicken 2007 and 2008, improved Outlook behavior especially with Exchange servers, service pack support improvements for several versions of office, improved Internet Explorer support in Windows 2000 and Windows XP “bottles,” synchronization with the WINE 1.0 release and much more.”
Since CrossOver relies on emulation to fool applications into thinking that they’re being run in the familiar ol’ Windows environment, its general compatibility is far less than what products like Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion can boast of. However, if the one Windows application you want to run is compatible with it and works well, this is well worth the money.
Under CrossOver’s new licensing scheme you can either pay $39.95 for the standard version or shell out $69.95 and get both CrossOver and CrossOver Games as part of the Pro package. The latter has a bunch of other features as well such as multi-user support and “level 2” technical support (whatever that means). Grab a free, time limited trial from the company website.
For one MS Office 2008 for Mac sucks. The ribbon interface on the 2007 version should have been implemented in the Mac version as well. And second, there is no MS Access for Mac which is sometimes a problem especially if you move databases around. Nice to know that it works almost like a native app now...:)
"why one wouldn't just want to use Microsoft Office for Mac 2008 is beyond me, however"
Dude, really easy, Office 08 Mac is a piece of crap.
I can boot XP and then Word 07, faster that Word for Mac, and still have time to spare.
I have a friend who works on PCs al day (poor thing) than works on a Mac at night and is always complaining about how slow and buggy the mac version is,
So if I had t use Word al day long, I would 07 for Windows
"CrossOver relies on emulation"...
Actually, Crossover is an implementation of WINE, and
"WINE Is Not an Emulator".
Or you can simply download the WINE source for Mac OS X and build it from scratch on your own (which is as easy as copy-paste a few lines of code) and enjoy the benefits of CrossOver 7 for free. :P
Why not just use Office 2008? Formulas do not work, macros do not work (which kills some commonly used tools in Excel, for example), much does not exist or does not cross over into Win-world properly.
Then there is the always present problem of font substitution.
If you using Word when you be using TextEdit, all is fine. Anything more and you might easily have problems.