September 7, 2012

Office Mac vs. Windows on Retina display

By In Tech & Gadgets

Here is an example on the retina display with Office Mac on the left and Office running in Parallels 8 with the retina display enabled (Windows 8) on the right.

Excel: Definitely can see the fuzziness on the Mac version.  The Office version looks gorgeous.

Outlook:  The Office Mac team actually upgraded it to a Retina app, so there is no fuzziness.  However, the font choices on Windows just look so much crisper than Office Mac’s fonts.  Also, Outlook on the PC is just a lot more mature and feature-rich than the Mac version.

Outlook Calendar:  Retina on both.  Design style differences.

2 Comments
  1. Ken September 7, 2012

    That’s really helpful. I hate to run windows nowadays but Excel looks a million times better and the OSX version has always been functionally quite a bit weaker anyway.

    I’ve dropped Outlook these days in favour of Calendar and Mail on OSX. There are some days I miss the feature mania of Outlook but not too many and in this case I guess I’ll be treated to Retina goodness. It’s funny that you prefer the Windows fonts as I think the Mac fonts look far nicer but different strokes for different folks.

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  2. Fiur September 7, 2012

    It’s great that you have this kind of time, Cobus. I have to agree with Ken Excel for Mac has always been a poor second. One this Outlook on the Mac had been stronger on in previous versions was the notion of project centric information. I have Outlook for Mac but don’t use it either. Like you I run Parallels when I need a Win7 machine. But 98% of my work gets done on company-issued Lenovo. Will you be dual-booting your iphone 5 to android?

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