I soon mastered Command, Shift, 4 – so on with the blog! PWA, was obviously no issue and felt just like using IE and my PC. No problem – I had a license for Office 365 Home Premium with some spare installs out of the 5, so I could load Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook! Great that you can mix and match the installs of Home Premium across PC and Mac. I also wanted to use Excel on the Mac, and unfortunately the installed trial had expired. I’m making no judgment on either product, and don’t expect a full review – and there are other products too (Oracle’s VirtualBox, is another one), but it didn’t take long to get the trial versions of both these products up and running with Windows 8, Office 2013 and Project Professional 2013 (I could have loaded Project Pro for Office 365 – same thing, virtually.). After a quick search I found Parallels Desktop 8 and VMware Fusion 5. So I knew to be able to run everything I’d either have to load Windows 8 using Boot Camp (which wasn’t the point of the exercise) or find some virtualization software that runs on OS X and allows me to run Windows 8 and the Office 2013 programs. First I’ll set the scene – we support access to Project Web App (PWA) both for Project Server 2013 and Project Online using Safari on the Apple Mac, but we do not have a version of Project Professional 2013, or Project Pro for Office 365 that runs natively on OS X. We have had a quite a few questions on the topic of using a Mac to run Project Online, so I took myself into uncharted territory (for me), acquired a MacBook Pro from our labs, running OS X 10.8.3 and set to work to see what it could do.

First published on TECHNET on May 21, 2013

Microsoft project for mac