When attempting to open a PowerPC-based application, this alert appears: "You can't open the application (name of application) because PowerPC applications are no longer supported."

I would pay for the latest MS Office anyway. Using an office from 2004 would expose compatibility problems. The problem is that since PPC based computers are increasingly rare, apple sees no need to eat up disk space supporting its applications.

I wouldn't blame Apple for this. Technology evolves rapidly. MS Office 2004 is 2 generations old and became obsolete 3+ years ago, long before the advent of Lion, much less Mt. Lion. And you need to understand it was written even earlier, in the 2002 time frame. That's really old, technologically speaking. I wouldn't even consider trying to run it on Lion, much less Mt. Lion.

It's time to move on. Get MS Office 2011, it's the current release and frankly is much improved and more secure than Office 2004 ever was.

Or Pages. It's $20 as opposed to the $100 you'll spend on Word.

Matt

Matt Clifton wrote:

Or Pages. It's $20 as opposed to the $100 you'll spend on Word.

Matt

Yes but ..... if you work with MS Office users the export ritual required to actually get a Word .doc out of Pages gets old, real fast. Then Open Office or Libre Office would be far more sensible, and $20 cheaper as a bonus.

dannyfromvilla park wrote:

Guess I will move on then. I was going to get just what would work 2008. But I might as well get 2011 as long as I am updating. I wonder what will happen in the near future now that apple is not going with intel??

Apple is using Intel and has not announced any plans to change that, what makes you think they are not ?

You may have problems with Office 2011 on your older Mac. I run it on a much newer Mac with a ton of RAM, and find it slow, sometimes very slow.

Download Open Office, it's free, and may well do all you need. It will run on any Intel Mac.

If you don't like it you can buy Office 2008 or 2011 to replace your copy of 2004.

PS: You have 8G of Ram and 2T of Storage.

http://www.libreoffice.org/ is a much better alternative to Office as long as you don't depend on Microsoft Exchange based mail servers. Mac OS X Mail supports at least some Exchange servers. Not sure if it does every one that Outlook Mac does.

dannyfromvilla park wrote:

I had heard that intel dropped apple??

As far as I know, apple is looking to create its own processor technology, but everything I have seen ANYWHERE is complete speculation. Never has apple publicly announced that they were droping intel in years to come. If they did, you would loose technologies like Thunderbolt ports, since these ports are intel technology.

Apple already started doing that with the iPad's release nearly 3 years ago. It uses Apple's own processor. The switch from Intel hasn't happened. So don't assume it will.

Exchange 2007 sp1r4 and all higher versions are supported by Mail (and Outlook 2011), anything older is ONLY supported on OSX by MS Entourage.

dannyfromvilla park wrote:

I had heard that intel dropped apple??

Your informant doth speak excrement, don't listen to rumors.