iWork Vs. MS Office

Hi Shawn, welcome to Apple Discussions!

I personally believe you would probably be better off with MS Office. iWork will open up the Office documents (.doc, .xls, .ppt, etc.) and there generally are not any issues at all with compatibility of text documents. However, the Powerpoint files can be difficult. If your daughter were to use Keynote (which can read and save to .ppt (Powerpoint) format, but she used some of the more advanced features of Keynote that Powerpoint does not have, then the slideshow will not transfer to a PC as seamlessly and the presentation will not look (on the PC) exactly as she designed it in Keynote.

For that reason, I think that you would be better off with Office. Your daughter will have seamless compatibility with Word and Powerpoint documents, and they'll look exactly the same on any PC as they do on your Mac, and vice versa.

adobe files, and .jpg photos are all that I'm moving over.

Both these files are readable by the Preview application on the Mac that is used for viewing images. You will want to import your .jpg photos into iPhoto to make it easier to view them. Just copy them to your computer, put them in your photos folder, and then start up iPhoto. It should scan the computer for pictures you can them import them.

--Travis

Thank you Travis! Very helpful!

Well, I too was confused over iWork vs Office.
Chose Office finally, coz I need Windows-mac compatibility.

-
Taran

This is not entirely true. If you do try to transfer Keynote files directly to Powerpoint, yes, they will not look the same on a PC. However, if you export them as a Quicktime movie, they WILL look the same run in Quicktime on a PC. Quicktime will preserve the click-throughs, so you can have the same timing and ability to control the presentation as in Keynote.

I know this because I use Keynote presentations at work all the time, and my workplace is PC based, except our design department which is all Mac based. I have had to work out these compatibility issues already. I use MS Office too, and I really have to say that in a lot of respects, iWork is much, much better. I prefer to use it over MS Office.

I still use Keynote because my presentations blow the Powerpoint users' presentations out of the water 🙂 It is really a much superior program with a lot more features.

Can you install Office and Keynote without problem? I like Outlook and don't want to give it up. Not sure how much of Word I really use. And I don't use spreadsheets alot. But I hear Keynote is superior to PPT.

Also, if using Pages, how easy is it to be read by PC users?

Hi originale, and welcome to the forums.

You'll find that MS Office 2008 doesn't actually use Outlook. Instead the mail / organisation component is called 'Entourage", which operates somewhat differently. However the new version of MS Office for Mac, scheduled for later this year, will have Outlook instead apparently.

Yes, you can certainly install both MS Office and iWork. I regularly use both on my own Macs.

Cheers

Rod

originale,

Welcome to Apple Discussions,

Yes you can install MS Office and Keynote without any problem, I've got both on both my MBP and iMac. I used to really like Outlook too before I made the switch to Macs 2.5 years ago, however now I just find it clunky and old fashioned. I also used Entourage for about a year but finally gave up on it too and have been using the tools that came with my Mac and like them for their simplicity and easy of use. I can do everything I did with Outlook with a lot less headache.

If you use Pages you can save in a MS Word format so all of the PC users that have to read the documents should be able to open them up and edit (if you want) without any problem. Opening MS Word documents in Pages is even more simple, simply drag the document to the Pages icon on your Dock and presto they're open.

Regards,

Roger