iwork Vs. office 2008

As far as I am concerned the big change between Office 2008 and Office 2004 is that they removed support for VBA in the latest version.

Apart from that, I do not really have any opinion. It depends on your individual needs. Do you exchange a lot of documents with Office users, use Office. Do you need any of the features only available in Office, then use Office. Otherwise iWork or perhaps even TextEdit may be good enough.

Info about Office: http://www.microsoft.com/mac/default.mspx

Free trial of iWork: http://www.apple.com/iwork/trial/

Rick I would try out the free trial of iWork first. We did and we'll probably never go back to Office again. iWork may bot be 100% perfect, but it's a much better value, is easier to use (once you learn it) and does everything that we need, all for much, much less than Office. You have nothing to lose, and everything to gain by trying out iWork 🙂

16,000 columns and over 1,000,000 rows in Excel. Word had Page Layout capabilities. You'd better have a fast Intel processor though. Excel in 2008 is much slower than 2004 on PPC machines.

Regards,

Here's one of Word 2008 Page Layout pieces:



Regards,

See here 🙂 Once you learn the program it's very easy to make layouts like that. There are also free templates available online for iWork programs.

In both programs this is pretty simple. On another note, Word still has mail merge from any data source which is very useful (for those that need this capability.)

Regards,

I've converted to iwork. Started with 06 but was completed with 08. My clients are PC MS office users. No problem what so ever.

It is only(?) 50 bucks more?!? Depending on your business iWork'08 is 2-10x cheaper than M$-office. That convinced me.

Leo Laporte, http://www.labwithleo.com , reviewed iWork 08, recently on his television show. He mentioned that it can read and write files for Office 2007 and that Office 2008 for Mac does not support all the new file formats of Office 2007.
His conclusion was that it was a much better bang for the buck that Office, easier to use, better features, supported all the new Office file formats and at $79, Office was never going to touch the price.

sorry I accidentally duplicated message. Please read below

Message was edited by: Maggie_A

I'm a new mac user. I have used pcs for a long time but I've learned a thing or two about the two systems. Are you at all familiar with Adobe Acrobat Professional? Well, their is this feature that lets you reorganize the order of your pages. So say that you are working on a presentation and you think you would like to move page two to page five, you can do that. Just drag the thumbnail of the page and position it were ever you like to. Pages lets you do the same thing. The cool thing about Pages is that it is not a pdf so you can still edit it. In Microsoft word you cant do that. You would have to copy and past. I’ve noticed that mac software uses similar features than that of Adobe’s. For instance you can set guides on you documents. That can be very handy when you are trying to center pictures and stuff. Pages does cooperates a bit easier than Word. There are some cool thing in Word 2008 apart from the mail merge feature. You can now save your files as pdfs. It also lets you set a file of odd sizes such as 8.5x5.5, which is handy when you are trying to create booklets. Your file is at size so you don't have to be fuzzing around with it for printing. This is nice trust me I work at a print shop. Word 08 has tutorials that teaches you how to do stuff. That is very nice and easy to follow. Microsoft word does give you more features than Pages. I would recommend though that you try the trial first. From what I hear from customers it still has a lot of bugs that Microsoft still needs to work out. I hope this helps you out.

As a long-time Office-user (both PC and mac-versions) I switched to iWork 08 and have not yet regretted that decision. Actually I'm very happy. There are many features in Office, that you never use. iWork suits me perfectly and it's so plain simple to use. It's back to basics of word-processing without all the bells and whistles of Office word. It even makes me work more efficiently and faster!