Parallels Office 2013 a viable solution?

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Logsi

Logsi

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We've been having a few problems with Mac Office 2011 and I've just been wondering today whether loading the macs with Parallels and using Excel 2013 in coherence mode would do a better job.

2011 crashes, hangs lots and is generally very slow and not very nice to use so just wondering whether parallels would be a viable solution?

Anyone do this for work?
 
Looks like Outlook 2014 for OS X has just been released so I can't imagine the rest of the Office suite will be far behind, so might be worth holding out for that?
 
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The latest roadmap for Office for Mac, which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote includes a public beta launching in the first half of 2015 and a final release coming in the second half of the year.
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I have a client who uses parallels for Sage, but also need office 2013 for the email and excel part of sage.

We've set up bootcamp with windows 7 and use that as the hard drive for parallels, which works quite well since you can boot into windows without os x if you need to.

It does take a bit of strain on the whole system though, running both windows and os x can leave the processor idle with a fair bit of usage. It ran ok with some of the i5 macs, but the Core2Duo one struggles quite a lot.

Also, a lot of the time they forget to shutdown the windows side before turning off the mac, so often it comes to the windows shutdown incorrectly screen and they get all confused. No real harm has been done so far though.

You may have to figure out how much CPU and Ram should be given to the windows side, as well as hard drive size for the OSTs.
 
HecFam said:
I have a client who uses parallels for Sage, but also need office 2013 for the email and excel part of sage.

We've set up bootcamp with windows 7 and use that as the hard drive for parallels, which works quite well since you can boot into windows without os x if you need to.

It does take a bit of strain on the whole system though, running both windows and os x can leave the processor idle with a fair bit of usage. It ran ok with some of the i5 macs, but the Core2Duo one struggles quite a lot.

Also, a lot of the time they forget to shutdown the windows side before turning off the mac, so often it comes to the windows shutdown incorrectly screen and they get all confused. No real harm has been done so far though.

You may have to figure out how much CPU and Ram should be given to the windows side, as well as hard drive size for the OSTs.
Click to expand...

Our accountant uses sage under parallels without issue as far as i'm aware and she doesn't seem to have any problems. We are currently running 27" i5 iMacs with at least 8GB RAM and 16GB RAM on Parallels iMacs.

I like the sound of a separate partition and parallels. That sounds good! Is licensing fine with that as it's technically the same computer?

I have found that it is pretty RAM intensive though running a VM and other stuff. The boss is nearly maxing his 32GB RAM which is quite impressive.
 
I think the licensing is all fine, It gives you the option when configuring parallels to either use a virtual hard drive or the bootcamp partition, there still is only 1 install of windows, so i can't see it being an issue.

I think all the Macs we're running only have 8GB,so 16GB should work nicely. It takes a short while to boot up, but apart from that, there hasn't been an issue so far.
 
I wouldn't Boot Camp Windows on the Macs unless you have a need to run Windows as the native OS. You can't suspend the Boot Camp installations by default, and changing this is a bad idea (http://download.parallels.com/desktop/v4/docs/en/Parallels_Desktop_Users_Guide/28157.htm). This said, after finding this out, this is exactly what I've done (as I'm careful). Not something I'd want to risk on a work system.

Also, Fusion Drive doesn't support Windows (you'll be stuck using the mechanical drive).

It'd also be far easier to restore the virtual machine in the event of a disaster - you could maintain a base VM and simply copy the file over as required.

In terms of performance, I certainly don't have any problems using Fusion 10 and Office on my machines, though of course if you're running other stuff concurrently then you may have different experiences there. Virtualising won't be that intensive to be honest, and you shouldn't need to reserve much RAM just for Office (2GB will be more than enough the majority of the time).
 
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