iWork vs MS Office

Hey All,

My uncle came over, and he just go a mac powerbook G4 or something. It does not have any proccesing program, which he needs, since he does a lot of writing. Which is better iWork or MS office? What are the major differences between both? WHat are the pros and cons?

Thx

Hkman

 

neo office.

for just writing its wonderful, AND FREE

 

pages is about equal to word. keynote is better than powerpoint. excel is better than numbers.

its a tie, hate it be on the fence about it. i use both: i have to have excel, but i also love keynote.

 

This is not so easy. I was the 1st to knock MS Office '08 for its Word implememtation (it couldnt get simple things like first letter capitalisation correct) but since the update i'm actually alot happier with it.

Pages is ok but honestly very basic IMHO interface wise and it lacks the brilliant Notebook layout with cronological audio recording of Word. I simply cant recommend Pages over Word (it looks so 90's) and I honestly think its time Apple got their finger out to compete with MS on this one.

Excel is better than Numbers but the current version of Excel has a serious flaw regards expanding is windows, which can cause it to lock your system and you have to do a hard restart.

Not a big powerpoint user so cant really comment on it or Keynote.

I really think it depends on which apps you are gonna use the most. If its for typing and word processing then I reckon MS gets the vote.

But dont forget as Kgeier82 said Neo Office is totally free so try it out first.

 

What is neo office?

I must say I've never heard of it!

 

NeoOffice is the Mac equivalent to OpenOffice, a free open source office suite .

 

Oh god, not another iWork vs MS Office thread.

As with all Apple products, simplicity is big. Most people will never use the advanced features that Microsoft offers in Word, so if all you do is "regular" essay typing and stuff like that iWork is perfect. Also I tend to think that iWork is more like Publisher + Word than just Word.

As for Keynote, there's just no competition. Keynote is wayyy superior than Powerpoint. You gotta use it. You'll fall in love with it.

Oh yea, and also you gotta remember that iWork is like mad cheap compared to Office.

 

Thanks everyone, Ill tel him to get iwork...

 

I do not believe that Pages is anywhere near as powerful as Word. Certainly, one can create very fancy looking documents with Pages, but that's about it. Pages feels more like a publishing application than a modern day word processor, and it lacks important features such as being able to handle equations and 3rd party objects.

Of course, if all you plan to do with your word processor is write simple letters and view documents, Pages is fine. If you want to do something more complicated, such as write a project report or thesis, I would strongly recommend Microsoft Word if you are not comfortable with LaTeX.

 

Here is an article which compares word with pages. I have iWork 08 and Neooffice and I find I can get along with MS office.

 

is neooffice 100% compatible with ms office for PC's?

 

NeoOffice is made by a third party and might therefore have compatibility issues with Microsoft Office if you export your document in the .doc format. The incompatibilities are usually style related, either with fonts, paragraphs, or with page settings. Other issues that might occur are broken cross references, index tables, and 3rd party objects.

 

I use office, I have tried Neooffice and I found that I do not like it.

 

Why don't you tell him to try out iWork before buying it. The full version is pre-installed on all macs with a 30 day limit which can be unlocked, once you purchase it, with a key.

I've used Office all my life on PC and still use 2007. But after trying out iWork, for my everyday use I prefer it to Office in that, as already mentioned, it's so simple and the menus and options are quite intuitive. I wouldn't have even considered it had I not tried it.

But it's certainly not for everyone. Office 2007 (PC) has some advantages over iWork 08. It just depends on the persons use and needs.

Is there a trial of Office 08 so you can compare both side by side? Maybe someone can chime in on this.

 

I haven't found a trial of MS '08, but it's pretty easy to find the '04 version, also a 30 days trial.

I'm very surprised to read that some people qualify it as very pricey, of course it isn't free, but if you don't need all the apps, try going for a student version. I got mine for 90$ in October and the amount of time I spent on it really makes it worth the money.

 

As Budding says, iWork is nowhere near as powerful (or to me, as useable) as Word. It also has poor Office file conversion compared to Openoffice.org (or presumably NeoOffice).

I would have him try a DEMO of iWork before purchasing it.

Personally I'd recommend either getting a copy of MS Office 2008, or trying out OpenOffice.org or Neooffice.

OpenOffice.org is as mentioned the big open source office suite application. Personally I don't like it as well as Microsoft's Office, but considering it's free it's phenomenal. I find it more powerful and usable than any other recent program I've used aside from MS Office (ie I think it's much better than iWork).

This is probably irrelevant to this thread, but personally the idea of NeoOffice bothers me. Right now OpenOffice.org uses x11 rather than the native Mac interface, so it works slightly different from a normal Mac application (mainly the file menu is on the application itself like in Windows). Rather than help contribute to the OpenOffice for Mac project, the people of NeoOffice take the OpenOffice code and (if I'm remembering correctly) basically use Java to get it running on OS X with a more Mac-like interface.
Personally I feel that effort should have been contributed instead towards helping build the true-native interface for OpenOffice on the Mac.

Buuuut anyway, either just get MS Office 2008, or have him try OpenOffice.org, (and/or NeoOffice) and the demo for iWork before buying iWork. I was very unimpressed with iWork, and I consider my Word needs very modest, and the interface a step back from Word.

 

Well, for people like me, I need more than NeoOffice but I am far from needing the underlying power of Word and Excel, so iWork is great for me. But yeah, each to his own .

 

From what I saw, iWork is considerably more primitive than Openoffice.org, although I haven't tried NeoOffice (they might have stripped out features?)

Honestly if I had to pay full price for it (I qualify for a discount), I would probably just stick with OpenOffice as close enough.

 

No, iWork is much better than OO/NeoOffice (especially for Keynote). The layout tools in Pages and stuff are great!

 

Yeah, I was just looking at the spreadsheet and word processor portion, not the presentation functionality (which I don't think I've used in a decade ). iWork wouldn't cut it for me for what I need from a word processor, though if I did a lot of presentations...

 

I think the key here is to try out as many office and office-like applications as possible before selecting the one you like.

I find it funny when people say one program is better than another. What they're really saying is that one program is better than the other for their own needs.

I was on the beta program for Office 2007 (for PC) and I like it a lot and have 10 licences of Office 2007 Ultimate through MSDN. So why am I using iWork? Because for my needs I found it more intuitive to use, faster/snappier than Office and perfectly suitable so far. It took me a while to get used to its interface but now I feel just as comfortable with it as I am with Word.

So go try them all if you can and give it more than a day's worth of use and see what works for you. No one can give you that information.