iWork, appleworks or Office Mac?

1) Which one is better for a student? Has anyone ever compared them?

2) I heard office slows down mac a bit, in the sense that it takes 20 seconds for it to load, and sometimes you get that circle thingy on and off for 3 seconds because the HD is thinking. True?

3) Will iWork and AppleWorks be able to open microsoft word documents as well?

 

AppleWorks is no longer being made, so you'd want to use iWork. Having said that, you're probably better off with the Mac version of Office.

Yes, it's true Office for Mac can sometimes slow down, because it is not Intel-native yet; the Intel-native Office 2008 for Mac is due later this year. Having said that, it still runs OK. For most things once you are actually typing it works just fine.

-Zadillo

 

If you get a Mac, there are trial versions of both iWork and Office 2004 included, so you can try both out and see what you think.

The current version of "Pages", the word processor part of iWork, is interesting, but not really nearly as robust as Word. It depends on what your needs are though.

Note that iWork doesn't include a spreadsheet, which you might need as a student. Keynote is a very nice app for presentations though, and I would argue that even if you get Office, Keynote is great for making really nice presentations.

Pages can read and write MS Word documents.

 

There's also NeoOffice, an OpenOffice-based set of applications that includes pretty much the same functionality as MS Office. It's free, so download it and try it alongside the trial versions of iWork and MS Office and see what you think.

Personally I don't use office apps enough to care much really, but I have used all three (iWork, MS Office and NeoOffice) and they all have their merits.

Both Pages (iWork) and NeoOffice can read and write Word documents.

 

Go MS Office. It will give you the least amount of headaches if you ever have to collaborate. I know that a lot of the alternatives will read/write in the Office formats but that is always risky. You are best to stay with what has become the standard, MS Office.

 

There's actually one other option worth considering. Namely, getting Parallels, installing Windows and Office 2007, and running it in Parallels' Coherence mode:

http://www.parallels.com/products/coherence/

The Coherence mode makes it sort of like running the app in OS X, but it would give you the full Office 2007 right now (and should perform very well).

 

But doesn't Parallels make it considerably slower? Wouldn't Boot Camp be better?

 

From what I've seen, I wouldn't say "considerably" slower...... you can get a pretty good sense of performance from the video of that Coherence mode in the link above. That is the nice thing about virtualization as opposed to emulation.

Boot Camp would be better, but the benefit of Parallels + Office 2007 for Windows + Coherence mode would be that you essentially can run it just like an OS X app to some degree (runs in its own window, has an icon on the OS X dock, etc.), but it's still the full Office 2007.

I'm not saying this would be the best solution; especially when Office 2008 comes out later this year that should be ideal. But it's at least an option to consider.

 

But the video was for windows XP, no? When I said considerably slower, I meant Parallels running VISTA. Then again, I may be wrong (and I'm guessing when it comes to macs, I usually am).

 

Oh, yes, I couldn't speak for Vista. I don't know as much about that, but I'm not sure that performance should be that much worse (especially since I think the Aero effects wouldn't even be enabled while running under Parallels anyway).

 

BTW, keep in mind that iWorks doesn't have spreadsheets and stuff.
If you're looking for just doing powerpoints and docs, its fine.
Office works fine once you get it open. Occasionally it can slow down. But then again, I do notice odd bugs. Sometimes, if I'm trying to move the start of a paragraph to a new page, either using returns or inserting page breaks, it often creates another blank page. Don't have this problem on Office under XP... It's very odd.

 

Well, not yet at least........ but supposedly Apple's been working on a spreadsheet app for a while now, and is possibly going to be included in iWork 07.

-Zadillo

 

Does anyone know a program that JUST has spreadsheets that is NOT excel? Because I kind of like iWork and KeyNote and I currently have NeoOffice but I have to open up the whole damn thing just to use the spreadsheet. I love how iWork costs $49 for pages and keynote but MS publisher costs $170.

 

Well, there's Mariner Calc I guess:

http://www.marinersoftware.com/sitepage.php?page=14

And Mesa, which was actually originally a NextStep app that has been released for OS X:

http://www.plsys.co.uk/mesa.htm

And it is heavily rumoured that iLife 07 will include a spreadsheet program (supposedly called "Charts") that Apple has been working on for a long time.