iWork Vs. MS Office

Office 2008 includes Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Entourage, and Messenger. There is no such thing as a "Mactopia Office." Mactopia is simply a web site supporting Microsoft products for the Mac and managed by the Macintosh Business Unit of Microsoft.

Throughout the world Office is a standard; iWork is not.

There is also a free MS compatible office suite from Sun called OpenOffice:

http://www.openoffice.org/

While OpenOffice is fully Mac compatible, there is a port of OpenOffice which makes it feel a bit more Mac-like. This is called NeoOffice:

http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/index.php

NeoOffice generally runs slightly behind OpenOffice. As NeoOffice if built on OpenOffice, they need to update their version after an update is made to OpenOffice. They're both excellent options and as they're free, there's no harm in trying them out to see if they meet your needs.

Unfortunately neither OpenOffice or NeoOffice are fully compatible with the current versions of Office on either the Mac or Windows platform. That may or may not be important depending upon what missing features you may need. In particular there's a lack of full compatibility with Excel, for example, although Calc does support the old macros. Also, there's no email application though that may not be a great loss.

I have both Office 2008 and iWork 2009. I didn't even install Office when I did a fresh install of Snow Leopard. Unless you really need the functionality of Word/Excel because you either use Office at work and want access to those files at home, or just want some advanced features, I would go with iWork.

Pages can do most of what Word does, Numbers is getting better each release and for my money Keynote blows PowerPoint out of the water. For school I did a Mac slideshow for my class (undergrad) and the things I was able to do with Keynote..... PowerPoint couldn't handle the multimedia as easily. And iWork can take advantage very easily of all your media (iTunes, iPhoto).

The iWork apps can read and export to Word/Excel/PowerPoint, but you may lose some features in the translation.

For the money/features, iWork wins hands down. I'd probably pay $150 for iWork (Apple please ignore that).

Bryan

Since I have only been an apple user for the last year I felt that I had to have office. I purchased office 2008 for Mac and also have Iwork 2009 on my system. Frankly the more I use them the more I am using the Iwork over the office. Shocked me! I agree that the Keynote is hands down way above the power point program. Also the pages is easier to use than the word application and has some really neat features that word does not have. You can also export a pages doc for word use and also do the same for the numbers to an excel format. Now to be completely honest I still feel more comfortable having them both but I am now using the office program very little. One thing I do need to say is that the MS office program for mac seems to have a lot of bugs and issues. It seems to corrupt itself on a regular basis. Three times now I have had to work with MS techs to try to get it to do what is is supposed to do and finally they always come back to the same answer, "uninstall and reinstall!" That has happened twice when they have come out with updates that would not install properly as well. So at this point spending hours on the phone or email with them seems to be useless as you will come to the same conclusion and uninstall it and reinstall it. Never had a problem with the pages, numbers or keynote program at all. I did try the open office program but had a lot of issues with it formating my old word documents properly so I gave up on it. So if you have used MS office a lot then maybe purchasing the student edition which has word, excel and ent. and powerpoint is not a bad idea but just know you will have issues with it and probably will more and more use the Iwork program once you get used to it.

I use MS Office at work, and iWork on my personal computer (which also gets used for work frequently).

For the price, iWork is a much better suite than MS Office .... for the price. Which is why I bought iWork in the first place, because MS was charging four times as much for the essentially the same functionality.

I love Keynote... and it does blow Powerpoint out of the water. Pages and Numbers work fine, but they are different than their MS equivalents. If you are used to MS, you might be frustrated with iWork at first, but I have found how to do everything in iWork that I did in MS.

However.... if you are needing full compatibility between your office and home computers, research iWork carefully before purchasing and make sure it isn't going to cause you problems. For example, converting a gorgeous Keynote presentation to MS does not work well because MS cannot handle some of the cool things that Keynote does. I have had to export my Keynote presentations as Quicktime, instead of a straight Keynote-to-Powerpoint export, to get them to play on PCs the way I laid them out on the Mac.

If I could only have one, I'd choose iWork. It's inexpensive and it does what it says..... work, and very well at that.

I did have a choice and I chose office. Most of the working world uses office and it makes it simple bringing stuff home to work on. Word Perfect was a better word processing program then all of them IMHO, but most of the world I work in uses Word. Excel however, is really top notch and PowerPoint,is simple enough for the standard office application.

Barry- I'll agree to the fact that most use Office and it's a standard, and that Excel is superior to Numbers. After that, iWork wins for me. It's one of those things where you grow up with something, know it inside and out, and now have to switch to something new.

I probably would have installed it with Snow Leopard... until it told me I need Rosetta. Then I thought about it and decided against it. I often used Word to make forms for one of my clients. I've done some recently in Pages, exporting to Word with no issues.

Not to go off, but I recently uninstalled Photoshop Elements 6. I just bought it several months ago, now Adobe skips 7 and goes to 8 and then wants me to buy again (if I want new features). I really hate Adobe never updating their software and just releasing new versions. So I'm back to Pixelmator. I had issues with Pixelmator in the past, but the new 1.5 version solves a lot and adds some new stuff. I think if Pixelmator hangs around for another couple years, this could really take over Elements easily. It's not bloated like Elements and the interface is nicer IMO.

Bryan

Paul- You can download a trial of iWork and use it for 30 days. I've used every version since the original (and we didn't get a spreadsheet initially) and I have to say it's come a long way. For things I do, I used to require Word and Excel. Pages and Numbers replaced that need.

http://www.apple.com/iwork/download-trial/

Bryan

Hi i just wanted to ask you something. I am using Microsoft Office for Mac 2008 and i also want to try iWork 09 on my mac , so can i use both in same computer without causing problem ... ??

Pl advise me.

Thanks

Sure you can have both MS Office and iWork installed on the same computer. I have 2 Macs with that set up. I initially got iWork and then some months later got a deal I couldn't pass up on MS Office so I got that too. I started using Office but after some months I tired of it and went back to iWork which I feel overall is much more fun to work with and has all the features I need for home use. There is no doubt the world has standardized on Office however for most day to day uses I think iWork out performs it. I did use Entourage for awhile too primarily because of it's integration to Exchange Server but now that Mail has Exchange Server support I've dropped Entourage, I never really liked it but just needed it. Again I find Mail and iCal much more fun to use.

Regards,

Roger

Thanks a lot for the quick reply.
Great Help Indeed.

Thanks

Your welcome!

Roger

Hi,
I just purchased a MCP 15" and am appreciating all the comments on pros/cons of IWork or Office. The only reason I bought the MS Office 2008 for Mac (not yet loaded so can return it) is so that I can access the documents transferred over from my PC.

Question #1: Is this necessary? Will IWork open these documents? Word documents, adobe files, and .jpg photos are all that I'm moving over.

Question #2: My 13 y/o daughter goes back and forth between her homes with Mom and Dad. Dad has a PC. She uses a flashdrive for schoolwork and then has what she needs regardless of where she is. Would it be easier for her if my Mac had MS Office? She uses Word and Power Point.

Gracias!
Shawn