[adventures]

I'm planning on buying a MacBook and have been a Windows user my entire life, so I'm not sure whether I should get iWork or Microsoft Office. In general, the reviews for iWork seem to be much better than those for Office. A few people have told me that buying Office is the last thing I want to do, whereas others tell me that it works brilliantly for them. I was hoping I could get a few more opinions before deciding, so what does everyone think?

[analogika]

Well, Windows works "brilliantly" for a lot of people, too.

iWork is an Apple-developed product, and it shows. Dragging a graphic from iPhoto directly into a text document and seeing auto-textflow arrange itself around the photo as you drag it around on the page as if it were the most natural and expected thing in the world is just one tiny aspect of this. It's a true Mac application package, and it uses the standard Mac OS X dialogs and tools, and follows the standards and conventions that make using a Mac so homogenous and graspable.

Microsoft has been known for reinventing the wheel in flashy, "non-standard" and completely and idiotically unnecessary ways for at least the twenty years I've been dealing with their software - why do they build their own colour chooser and font panel when the Mac OS X toolbox offers superior tools that they just need to call upon, and that the user already *knows* from every other application, already?

Oooh, but the new ribbon is all shiny and animated (slowly, on current hardware), which makes using Office much - er, no, not easier...annoying. Until you turn off that crap.




Unless you

- regularly need to collaborate with Windows users (meaning sharing and editing documents back and forth)

- rely upon Excel's complex functions (Numbers is perfectly fine for most any "household" spreadsheeting)

- have a penchant for horribly inconsistent, ooh-it's-flashy-and-moves bullshit interfaces on bloated software 98% of which you are NEVER going to need

- require Word's advanced auto-indexing/outlining features,

the definitive way to go is

iWork for content creation (if you need to send stuff to Windows users, you can export to Office formats, or, even better, use Mac OS X's built-in PDF-print service in the standard print dialog box available in every single application that can print *anything*)

in combination with

NeoOffice/OpenOffice (both free) for maximum compatibility, should anyone send you an Office document that might not convert properly when opening it in iWork.



If you ever hold presentations: I know a number of people who bought a Mac JUST FOR Keynote. It's that much better than PowerPoint.

Check out the introduction here: Apple - iWork


Note that if you require VBA scripting in Office documents, even Office 2008 is not an option, since Microsoft was unable to get that done for '08. I have the slight suspicion that not making this a priority also has to do with the fact that they're scared shitless by the flood of Vista refugees switching to Macintosh.

If you need VBA, running Windows Office in VMWare Fusion or Parallels is your only option.

And: Welcome.

[TETENAL]

iWork

[analogika]

Originally Posted by TETENAL 

iWork

[JKT]

Originally Posted by analogika 

If you need VBA, running Windows Office in VMWare Fusion or Parallels is your only option.

Depending on the degree of compatibility you need, a second-hand copy of Office 2004 (Mac) is also an option, as are the free NeoOffice or OpenOffice.org which do have some, if limited, VBA support.

[Cold Warrior]

I like Office 2008, although it launches horribly slow. iWork is also good. Like others have said, it depends on your collaboration needs.

[Kenneth]

I would go for iWork '08.

[ibook_steve]

I have both and would love to work in iWork, but I just can't. We make complex presentations for work. Bringing them into Keynote and exporting them for Powerpoint (which everybody else here uses) just changes things around too much. Keynote's export to Powerpoint is just OK. It still screws up a lot of spacing and many of Keynote's cool animations simply don't translate into PowerPoint.

It's awful that I've got this fantastic tool and I simply can't use it for most of my work.

Oh, but if you can, go with iWork.

Steve

[MacosNerd]

I have office 2007, 2003 and iwork and I can safely say if you're used to MS office then you'll be better served getting office mac over iWork. Excel is much more robust of a spreadsheet application then numbers is and the same goes for word. Don't get me wrong I use iWork, in fact I don't use the Mac flavor of office. I use iWork, but for items that it cannot handle, i.e., VBA or work related spreadsheets that I need to distribute, I use office 2007 and vmware's fusion.

[Mithras]

Yeah, it goes like this:

Keynote >> Powerpoint
Excel >> Numbers
Word > Pages

[jwpacker]

I don't have Office 2008, but the wife and I both have Office 2004 and iWork 2008 (Family Pack) on our Macs and while she does need to use Word and Excel for interoperability, I tend to use iWork for most everything I do. Pages is excellent, as is Keynote, but Numbers is a 1.0 version program, and it shows a bit. It's usable, but it's no Excel.

That said, for interoperability, you may find that Pages exports to PDF and Keynote's export to Quicktime are serviceable alternatives to trying to save in an Office format. Too much is lost in translation that way, while PDF and Quicktime give near 100% fidelity.

Also note that Office 2008 is probably going to run faster on Intel hardware than 2004 ever did, as 2008 was written for the Intel hardware platform.

[moep]

If you don't have to worry about Windows users editing your files, iWork is the clear winner in my book.

[analogika]

Originally Posted by jwpacker 

Also note that Office 2008 is probably going to run faster on Intel hardware than 2004 ever did, as 2008 was written for the Intel hardware platform.

This, for whatever boneheaded reason, is apparently NOT the case.

[infowarrior]

Originally Posted by analogika 

This, for whatever boneheaded reason, is apparently NOT the case.

Agree. I have a recent iMac with 4GB RAM and after having Office 2008 on for 2 months yesterday I dumped it and "upgraded" back to Office 2004. Word '08 seemed big, bloated, and at times very inconsistient. Heck, it took forever to open and even then, wouldn't read other Office files on my desktop --- yet Word 2004 opened 'em just fine. And from what I've heard/read from friends and elsewhere on the Net, not a lot of folks are impressed with Office 2008, even on intel Macs.

If I wasn't primarily using my Mac to write a PhD thesis I'd stick with iWork. Pages and Keynote are more than adequate for my professional and personal needs.

[cgc]

I'd get iWork and download OpenOffice v3 when it's released for those times when you need to convert a file (or when iWork chokes on a file)...probably will never need OO but it don't hurt to have it (free).

[mindwaves]

As others here have said, iWork if you don't plan doing a lot of collaborating, but Office 2004 or 2008 if you do plan on collaborating with others a lot. Indeed Office 2008 runs slows as ever on my C2D 2.0 GHz iMac with 3GB RAM.

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by Mithras 

Keynote >> Powerpoint

I wouldn't say that, at least not in all cases.

E.g. try embedding a Numbers spreadsheet into Keynote, keeping the original Numbers spreadsheet completely intact, incl. links to external sheets. In order to update you charts, all you have to update your feeder spreadsheets.

Won't work with Keynote + Numbers, works well in PPT + XLS.

-t

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by analogika 

If you need VBA, running Windows Office in VMWare Fusion or Parallels is your only option.)

Or use Office 2004, or wait for the Next Mac Office version, which will include VBA support, once again.

-t

[brettcamp]

I don't use the more complex features of MS Office, but for me, iWork will handle about 90% of my needs when working with Office files, and the other 10 % have so far been resolved by using the free NeoOffice or Preview (for Word docs with complex formatting -- Preview now lets you mark up and add notes to pdfs).

[calverson]

Ah, this is fairly old, but I have found that I HAVE to use Office 04 for one reason:

ALL MY OTHER APPLICATIONS HAVE ⌘ + e AS THE CENTER TEXT SHORTCUT

Whereas, damn Pages has ⌘ + shift + \ on my Macbook Pro.

And it kills me, as when writing documents, I use it pretty often.

[TETENAL]

You can change keyboard shortcuts to your liking in System Preferences->Keyboard & Mouse->Keyboard Shortcuts.