iWork vs Office.

Hi there guys!

I was wondering... My new Mac will arrive tomorrow, and need to decide whether I am going to buy iWork '09 or Office for Mac '08. iWork is compatible with Office and is developed by Apple for Mac systems, whereas Office is developed by Microsoft and ported over to Mac, and I expect has lost a lot of features on the way... I wanted your opinion on what to get... So... iWork or Office?

Thanks!

 

iWork '09 until Office 2011 arrives.

 

depends on what all you will be doing with it as well.

 

I will mainly be writing documents... However, I may do some presentations and some spreadsheet work too...

 

How about reading reviews and come to an informed conclusion instead of this baseless conjecture of lost features.

Basically, it's pretty pointless to compare iWork to Office. Sure they're supposed to do the same thing but even Open Office's Writer is on par with Word and Pages ... Point is productivity suites have come so far that there's just minor differences between them now.

The exception though is spreadsheets ... And Excel is just in a league of it's own. Anyone who tells you Numbers is just as good as Excel is either deluded, or a college student who hasn't had to use a spreadsheet application for anything more than budgeting rent and bills.

I cannot offer any insight with regards to Keynote vs Powerpoint, I don't use either very much.


The only thing lost from Word '07 to '08 was VBA support in Excel. I will admit that '08 doesn't run as smoothly as '07 but I assure you it is a far superior program than Pages.

The word processors do the same thing really, it boils down to your preference of user interface. If you expect to be sent .doc files from previous versions of Word, I would just advise you to go with Office. I haven't run into any serious compatibility problems but that's how software is ... It works until it doesn't.

 

hold on there, chief. depending on how serious your work with these applications are, the abilities of Word and Excel FAR exceed anything iWork or Open Office can handle. And that's not even considering proper compatibility between the 3 suites, depending on what you're doing. And then there are those advanced Excel formulas...

Point is, just because you can save a file in iWork or Open Office to a format compatible with Word doesn't mean it'll look like it did when you saved it or work the same way in Word.

I still think iWork '09 is the best option currently (maybe NeoOffice?) for now if you don't need a lot of advanced features...but I can't imagine too many people NOT migrating to Office 2011 when it comes out. the beta is fast, stable, feature rich, and most importantly: 100% Office. in the business world, no substitutes are acceptable when you need guaranteed crossover.

$0.02.

 

I think i'll stick with iWork for now, and use my PC for office.

Thanks!

 

I mainly was an openoffice user for many years... but I tried out Pages, and Keynote and I have to say... they are really awesome, and are my main two office apps now.

 

I wish Microsoft would make a version of OneNote for Mac.

 

Yes I agree. I work with Excel everyday and Numbers doesn't even come close to what Excel can do at it's best.

For the people who don't use Excel at work though, their priority would be an easy to use user interface. Numbers does a good job (I still prefer Excel though) and I think that's what attracts the newcomers.

As for Pages and Word ... I have had to write technical documents in Word (captioning figures, equations, inserting Visio drawings and other MS documents as objects/links) ... While I defaulted to Word to write said documents I cannot imagine that Pages is far behind.

 

That's just the truth. There have been plenty of worthy office suites for Windows over the years. Ironically, that probably intensified the demand for a standard, and MS Office is undoubtedly that standard. I swore by Lotus even after the writing was on the wall - but I gave in eventually. Just like almost everyone else in my position.

Do you need office apps for personal use? I recommend iWork without hesitation. It's a great package. Do you need to use full-featured office apps in a business environment? Save the headaches and just use Office.

I do <3 Keynote, though.

 

Keynote is spectacular, IMO.

transitions are just beautiful. Fortunately for the Windows crowd, Microsoft is putting GPU acceleration in their Office 2010 PowerPoint software. it has better transitions, though I still feel it lags well behind Keynote in aesthetics.

 

Office 2011 is very nice way better than Office 2008, I currently used to use iWorks since integration with Mac OSX was more normal, but with the way Microsoft changed Office 2011 it seems like office will be better. I think when Office 2011 comes out you should get that and see how you like that.

 

Evernote. As good or better funtionality and almost totally platform independent: Web - Mac - Windows -Android - Nnokia - iphone or whatever. If you really need to record things, the accessibility is even more valuable. And OneNote is really one-note in that regard, as you have found out.

 

I just purchased a refurb MBP. It should arrive Monday. I was at an Apple store today, and they are having a sale for iWork. $30 off with a computer purchase. I told them I just purchased one, got online and showed them my receipt, and they gave me the sale price. Came to $49 compared to $149 for Mac Office.

HTH,
Trvlngnrs

 

I always liked Numbers when comparing it to Excel..

 

The compatibility issues stink because I like iWork so much better than Office. I really thought we might see a new version of iWork and iLife by now.

 

OP, that's one of my biggest complaints about using Snow Leopard. I'm a Windows guy -- I enjoy Win 7 -- but I've been using SL since last summer, around when it came out. Wanted to give it a try, haven't gone back yet (but might with the HP Envy 14).

I am not a "heavy" Office suite user, but Office 2008 is a piece of sh*t. I love Office 2007 (I'm a ribbons sympathizer and think it was a terrific design idea), but Office '08... sluggish program startup, slow PPT file handling, crashes in Word on larger documents, that stupid floating gallery menu for something as simple as centering text, etc. I understand that Office 2011 should make good on much of this, going by the screenshots and things I've seen posted about the leaked betas that some people have been testing.

Short version: if you don't absolutely need the advanced functionality that only MS Office provides, and it wouldn't be a problem if a highly-formatted .doc renders a little differently in Pages as compared to Word (an issue I have seen, much to my chagrin), then go with iWork. But do keep in mind that as of now, there is no built-in way to automatically save files as .doc / .xls / .ppt -- you can only save copies of your iWork-formatted stuff in Microsoft formats. Simple enough to just manually move files as you create/save them, but it's a needless hassle.

 

Office 2011 is coming out soon and it solves alot of problems that Office 2008 had, you can try out the beta versions of office 2011 if you guys are curious about its performance.

 

Is there an exact release date for office 2011?

 

Yeah for some business, your going to need office 07 in windows. My company uses outlook to synchronize everything, and I require features in Office 07 thats not available in office 08 or iWork. So I have to work in windows, theres no OS X solution that matches office 07.

Basically in OS X, just get free software like open office, which has almost all the features you need. iWork is supposed to be real fast, so that may be worth it to you. IMO Office 08 has a terrible UI, but others like it. If you do want to spend money just get which ever one's UI you like better.

Really tho, to save money, just get open office or other free solutions like Google docs. Unless you like how fast iWork is or feel comfortable with Office 08.

 

Not yet -- just closer to the end of the year.

 

32bit only! MS always has to leave something out.