microsoft word for mac or iWork?

im speaking of the latest versions of both.

 

iWork seems pretty nice.

I think what I may do is use neo office [free] until Office 2008 is available. At that point I'll decide if I like it more than iWork.

 

Office. Unfortunately, we live in a windows ecosystem. iWork's keynote is nice though.

 

It depends on what you need an office suite for. If its just for simple essays, then NeoOffice will do fine. If you want a little more advanced features and a little bit of Publisher for laying out pages and creating newsletters, then iWork's Pages will suit you fine. If you need 100% compatibility with Office and all the advanced features of Office, then its Office.

 

How smoothly do OpenOffice, NeoOffice, Pages, and MS Word work on MacOS respectively?

I've read that since NeoOffice is java-based, and because Office still doesn't run natively (?) on Intel Macs, these programs don't work so smoothly after all on a Mac. My criteria for smoothness are file opening speed, and overall snappiness.

One of the things I hate most about my current Windows setup, is that simple operations like opening docs or pdfs take ages. I've long attributed this to the traditional Windows resource hog; and I just hate to think that MacOS may still irritate me in that regard.

 

NeoOffice runs fine. At least, it runs better than Office under Rosetta and OpenOffice for Mac under X11.

OpenOffice is creating a new OpenOffice for Mac though, that will arrive later on that is native, and Office 2008 will be Universal Binary but won't be shipping until 2008. iWork runs the best out of the three.

 

Well for me when you first start up a Office application it's pretty slow from Rosetta, but after the thing is open performance is acceptible. Although I'm fairly used to slower computers so I might not notice as much. I don't really use iWork much but I'm sure it's faster being Universal. But, I've heard that Numbers runs slowly when using large spreadsheets, slower than both Office and AppleWorks, both under Rosetta. So Numbers isn't quite the Excel replacement yet.

 

PDFs open incredibly fast in Preview (make that unbelievably fast), and nearly as fast from Adobe PDF reader. There's also almost no lag at all from browsers opening PDFs in-window (if the browser you're using supports that feature - not all of them do).

Sam already answered the questions above for the most part, so I'll just voice opinions here. NeoOffice, much like OpenOffice in Windows, isn't that great. I'm sure I'll take a lot of flak for saying this, but as an application, it's slow, it's too integrated with itself (it's one giant application - you're not really running Base or Write or whatever separately; they also crash together if one thing crashes). Load-up is pretty slow too, and as you mentioned it's written in Java, which is quirky at best (ugly interface too). In terms of functionality, it's not bad (although it takes some getting used to). It's a good free program for personal use, but, I would definitely not risk or trust using it for my work documents and forms, which are annoying enough to format just in WordPerfect and Word. It also does not fully support 2007 file formats (docx, xlsx, etc.) yet.

The redeeming feature of NeoOffice is that it's free of course, and for basic home use, it's quite adequate. On the other hand, it's definitely a MS Office world for most jobs, and for education, most students can get a version of MS Office enterprise (with every single office app basically) for even cheaper than iWorks.

I've essentially been forced into using Office 2007 via Fusion while waiting for Office 2008 to arrive - and trust me, no matter how slow you guys might complain that Rosetta-based Office 2004 is, launching up an entire virtual OS just to run MS Word takes much much longer

 

Thanks a lot for the detailed replies. Luckily, I can get MS Office for $25 through the university; so I'm looking for a temporary solution until Office 2008 comes out.

My 'profession' consists in reading and writing papers; so reliability and security are quite important as well.

 

I would have to say Office for Mac. It is the standard unfortunately. It runs pretty well under Rosetta unles you start heavily using some of the advanced features a lot, then it can chug. Good news is that Office 2008 is only a few months away.

 

when you write papers in iWork can you read them or edit them in microsoft office?

 

If you export the documents to Word, yes, you can edit and read documents created in Pages. Work on a document in Pages, and under File click Export...to Word. Voila!

 

Can you open and edit iwork documents in ms office?

 

Sorry for double posting. i was having a couple of network slowdowns with my iphone and didnt know if it posted or not.

 

I answered that question in my post above , and yes, iWork documents can be edited in Office if you Export it to Office (which is easy).