We had visitors from Zeus Scientific today at work and the lead guy wanted to give a presentation which highlighted their instrument. The instrument runs serological assays using the Luminex system. Basically, it allows you to test 1 serum sample for up to 100 different antibodies simultaneously. So you could test for dozens of diseases in 1 - 20 ul sample. Pretty cool, but that's NOT what the post is about.

The guy didn't bring a computer and the Branch Laptop was locked up an another office. So I volunteered my MacBook.. he said the presentation was in Powerpoint and I have Office 2004 so I thought NO problem! Well..... we plug in his jump drive and the presentation was in Powerpoint 2007.. not 2003. NO where in CDC do we have Office 2007 ! .. we're still using 2003. I had Office for Mac 2008 but I didn't like it and never installed it on my Laptop...
SO in desperation, we tried to open it anyway and low and behold it opened !! So he gave his show and all was cool. Played movies, and finally he had a spreadsheet of data he wanted to show us and low and behold his Excel 2007 file opened too !!

Then he went looking for the Excel Tabs at the bottom of the window and they weren't there, but there was a list of spreadsheets on the left pane. WHOA !! ... this isn't in Excel - this is Numbers ! WAIT a minute... the Presentation wasn't in PowerPoint- KeyNote Opened it up !!

WOW! Kewl ! Way to go iWork'09 !!!
Needless to say, they WERE impressed.

By the way, Office 2004 will open Office 2007/2008 documents if they're not in the "x" format, and will open the "x" format if you have the xml converter.

That's awesome, David. One convert at a time, step by accidental step.

Verrrrry !

These were all in the "X" format.. and I don't mean OS X !

LOL - Thats great I run into similar problems from PC to PC all the time . I ounce held a safety orientation for about 50 people and the safety officer flew in with her Dell , projector and a power point CD .

Anyway
After about 20 minutes of trouble shooting her Dell laptop we could not make it work - Then we decided to use my Dell laptop and by a fluke the Power Point show worked , turns out that I rebooted my laptop with the projector turned on <-- Go figure

Turns out that XP "Start Menu" -- > go to devices ,, is screwed up

Opening office docs in iWork is easy/great. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said when going the other direction. Trying to run a Keynote presentation with the cool effects after exporting to PowerPoint is disappointing to say the least.

Correct

IMO
I think most of the problems is with MS deciding way way back then to invent their own fonts - Instead of going with the then "True Type Fonts"

Hence the constant of formating issues and font substitutions that look like crap

Yes and the other direction as well . So if you used a 3D Wood Pie chart in Keynote , ya not gonna get that from Power Point

I've never had the font issues, but the animation stuff is just a deal breaker.

Yeah ... I understand...

that's like going from a 64-bit OS back to an 8-bit one !!

(or as we'll soon see, Snow Leopard to Windows '98)

and it's not just the fonts... any text layering, animations, SF/X are all lost in PP.