iWork vs. MS Office?

Abd4253 wrote:

Greetings,

I am returning to college in the fall to complete my associate's degree and I plan on buying a new 13" MacBook Pro with Retina display for my school work. My plan is for this MBP to last through my bachelor's degree and beyond into grad school.

My question is this: The Apple website says Pages, Numbers, and Keynote is perfectly compatible with its Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint counterparts. But is it really?

No it is not.

Use MS Office (or a freebie such as LibreOffice) if MS Office compatibility matters to you.

Abd4253 wrote:

Greetings,

I am returning to college in the fall to complete my associate's degree and I plan on buying a new 13" MacBook Pro with Retina display for my school work. My plan is for this MBP to last through my bachelor's degree and beyond into grad school.

My question is this: The Apple website says Pages, Numbers, and Keynote is perfectly compatible with its Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint counterparts. But is it really? I've lived and worked in a Windows environment my whole life and know how to utilize the software in Office but I'm also open to sticking with the iWork suite if it really is comparable. I've used Numbers via iCloud and had some luck figuring it out but haven't had the chance to use Pages or Keynote.

I would appreciate hearing the community's thoughts and opinions on this.

Thanks and best wishes to all,

-Jason

It all depends on the meaning of "perfectly compatible". I doubt that those are Apple's exact words. There are all kinds of hiccups in the details when exchanging files. It is in the little stuff such as bullets, graphics, lines and so on. If you are writing complex research papers in Pages and then exporting or saving as doc files, this mY get you when your professor can't read some of these details.

As Csound1 wrote LibreOffice is a better alternative.

Even better, your school should / might offer academic discounts. See if they can get you MS Office 365 for a low(er) price. All that said, you can still use Pages or Numbers locally for quick entry. Just use LibreOffice or MS Office for your final products.

I would put it this way:

It works similarly to Office, it can open Office Documents, and can export to Office formats perfectly fine.

Though as mentioned by Sparkleberry there may be some differences between what you see in Pages and what is ultimately seen in Office on a PC. This would mainly be due to fonts, symbols, and other formatting differences.

You can reduce this by exporting to PDF though.

With that said, unless you are making use of complex formatting options you really should have little or no issues.

Having at least LibreOffice on hand as well would be useful, to make sure everything looks correct.

Other than that, it should work pretty much the same.

Use whatever your professors and fellow students use. If they use MS Office use MS Office.You don't want the hassles associated with professors and students not being able to read your work in the format you produced it.

You're welcome