[voken]

I am new to the Mac world. I just bought a MacBook Pro which has this iLife 06 as part of the package. Now I am looking for a text and a word editor that I can use which in this case will be iWork 06.

Is it that Page 2 of iWork corresponds to Word in MS world and Keynote 3 corresponds to PowerPoint in MS world ?

Can this iWork 06 be used to open MS word, excel and edit & save them in Mac's native format. And also can I save the doc created using iWork in microsofts native format so that I can use them on Microsoft as well ?

[D'Espice]

In theory it should work. In theory. Real world experience is often not based on theoretical assumptions. Pages is a simple word processor / desktop publishing application (it's kinda a bit of both) which, in professional environments, will not be considered Word's equal. For simple word processing and/or desktop publishing it will suffice. Keynote on the other hand should be able to replace PowerPoint.

If it's really important for you to import and save Word documents then you might consider purchasing MS Office 2004 - only Word is compatible to itself, not always but in most cases. Your co-workers/friends/boss might get pretty mad after receiving files they can't open

[TETENAL]

Pages is a word processor like Word and Keynote is a presentation program like PowerPoint. In that way they "correspond". However they are by no means functionally identical. Let's say Word is more feature complete than Pages, and Pages has some touch of a desktop publishing program.

You can import and export Word documents from Pages and you can import and export PowerPoint documents from Keynote, but since the programs are not functionally identical to their Microsoft Office pendants you have to export some loss of information and/or formatting when doing so.

[slugslugslug]

Feature sets notwithstanding, going back and forth frequently between Pages and Word is a bit of a pain in the butt. Every time you open a Word document in Pages, it imports it into a brand new Pages document. So if you make some changes and just do File->Save, you'll get a Save dialog, which only creates documents in Pages format. So if you want to save your changes into your original Word file, you have to remember to choose File->Export every time. Adds a lot of steps to your workflow. I'd recommend Pages only if you don't expect to go back and forth a lot.

TextEdit (included with OS X) actually opens and saves Word files without the import/export nonsense, but it chokes on some formatting and doesn't give you any control over margins.

Also, iWork doesn't help at all with Excel files. I know there are some alternative Mac spreadsheets, but I don't know how well they deal with MS's file formats. It seems to me that if several people are going to be editing Office files, you should get Office for Mac. But if you're mostly working on text, presentations, and spreadsheets that you deal with from creation to completion, it's worth checking out alternatives if you've got time to learn 'em.

[CharlesS]

Because there seems to be a possibility of some confusion in this thread, I just want to point out that Word and Excel are available for Mac OS X, as is the entire Office suite. It hasn't been updated to a Universal Binary for the Intel Macs (such as the MacBook Pro), but it will still work. The only problem will be that it may launch a little more slowly than a Universal Binary version would.

[TheMosco]

If you need to open and save alot of .doc files,g et office for the mac. Its actually pretty decent and it will save you from having to worry about converting file formats and stuff

[D'Espice]

I want to add one more thing. I did some testing with Pages 2 on my Mac Mini Core Solo yesterday and it's horrible. It's fine for short documents with less than 10 pages. I imported my thesis paper (currently on pg. 32) into Pages 2 yesterday and it was impossible to work with. Scrolling lagged several seconds behind, as did typing. I'm writing that paper in Mellel which, even though it requires the Rosetta emulation layer to run on Intel Macs, is a lot faster than Pages 2 which btw is a universal binary therefore does not require Rosetta.

Long story short: It's fine for short documents for up to 10 pages but for more than that it's just horrible. Not worth a dime if you ask me, you can get better software that handles documents with 50+ pages fairly well for way less than what Apple charges you for iWork. And even Office 2004 is faster than Pages even though it also requires Rosetta. Think about it.

[indigoimac]

I think MS Office does a pretty good job, but it is ery expensive. Another possibility might be openoffice

http://www.openoffice.org/

[D'Espice]

Originally Posted by indigoimac

I think MS Office does a pretty good job, but it is ery expensive. Another possibility might be openoffice

http://www.openoffice.org/

Which is already available as Intel native binary: http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/2.0.x-intel.html

[Cadaver]

I agree with many of the other suggestions... if you want/need 100% Microsoft Office compatibility, just get Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac OS X. OpenOffice.org would be the low/no cost alternative, though some compatibility issues might arise.

Pages can transfer most basic files back and forth (Pages <--> Word) but anything complex will fail. You can always send your recipients PDF files instead, however.

Keynote does reasonably well opening PowerPoint files, but since Keynote has many features that don't exist in PowerPoint, transferring files the other way doesn't always produce the best results.

And do realize there is no spreadsheet application in Apple's iWork. There are Excel-alternatives (MarinerCalc), but no reason not to use the Mac version of Excel. Its actually better than the Windows version, IMO.