Can i use internet explorer and or microsoft word on a Macbook? ?

Question

I'm getting a new laptop and am deciding between a mac-book or a gateway. I have heard a lot of good comments/reviews about mac books but I have been using both internet explorer and microsoft word since i could type and really like the programs. Is there anyway to get them on a mac-book or if not how hard it is to adjust to firefox and leapord or whatever its called.

thanks!

Answer 1

good question. i was wondering that myself.

Answer 2

yes you can, you can also install a windows partition on ur hard drive and just run windows.

Answer 3

You can't use Internet Explorer on it(IE isn't that great anyway) but you can use Word if you Office for Mac which is like $120 but you also get the whole Office suite.

Answer 4

Leopard is a completely different animal from Windows; adjusting to it will come easy or hard depending on you; some find it easy to make the switch; some don't.

Firefox and I.E. are similar enough that the adjustment should be pretty much a non-issue. Most folks who try Firefox on Windows find they like it better than IE (but not all).

You also have the option of Safari on the Mac, which is Apple's web browser. It's a fine browser, and many users prefer it (even on Windows, for which it's now available). But in my experience, most people prefer Firefox.

Internet Explorer used to be available on Mac (and a very old and broken version might still ship on new Macs - I'm unsure), but modern versions are not natively available for the Mac, although you might could find some work-arounds for using it, such as using it in WINE or via a virtual machine such as Parallels or VirtualBox.

MS-Office is available for Macintosh, but it's different enough from the Windows version that you might find it to be quite an adjustment. Unless you NEED MS-Office specifically, you might find that you like the free OpenOffice.org just as well or even better, or you might like Apple's office suite in the iWork package. I would recommend OpenOffice.org, because it's cross-platform, free, and doesn't tie you into a file format that is proprietary (so you'll ALWAYS be able to get to your data, even if the manufacturer of the office suite were to disappear in twenty years or try to restrict you from using your own documents, which Microsoft can do since they and only they own the file formats used in MS-Office). Since you're going to have a learning curve anyway moving from MS-Office on Windows to any office suite on the Mac, you might as well go for free (as in cost) and Free (as in Freedom) and cross-platform and open.