Office for Mac or iWork?

multimoog

And the Mac fun just keeps getting... funner!

I have a choice: I can either get MS Office for Mac or iWork. I know iWork "replaces" a lot of stuff from Office and has better Apple UI, but I don't want to have compatibility problems if someone sends me some Excel or Power Point thing. Has anyone used both? I'd like to hear from both sides of the fence.

Pheezer

I'd say Office for Mac is your safest bet, but don't get the current version, get the older one. 2004 I think.

RUNN1NGMAN

iWork only replaces MS Office if you can with all honesty say you will not be working with people who will want .doc, .xls, etc. file formats. As one example, Pages does not save documents in .doc format. You can EXPORT a file in .doc format, but that's a very different animal, and can be problematic depending on the formatting you've used in your document.

If you regularly send documents to others who are going to be opening those documents up in MS Office, and you want to ensure that what you see on your end is what they will see when they open the document, you're pretty much stuck using MS Office (or something else that saves documents in MS Office file formats). I bought iWork and then started school, where all my written work is submitted electronically, so I ended up using MS Office anyway.

iWork is great if you are working in a little Apple-centric bubble and never have to deal with producing work in MS Office file formats, but otherwise I don't think it is worth it. Also, I've been very frustrated using Pages as a word processor. It seems like unless you are using one of Apple's templates, it's very clunky. I open up TextEdit before I open up Pages to do any word processing.

Nataneko

well I'm not sure if it was me doing something wrong but when I did teamworks for school, my mac word version of the work didn't look the same as it did on my coworker regular Word. But maybe it was just a version thing and not a mac vs pc issue.

Lewisham

Nataneko wrote: »

well I'm not sure if it was me doing something wrong but when I did teamworks for school, my mac word version of the work didn't look the same as it did on my coworker regular Word. But maybe it was just a version thing and not a mac vs pc issue.

Could be both. Mac Word renders things slightly differently, and the inherent fragility of the way people design their documents (so they look right to them, for example putting in page breaks that work only in A4 format, and not letter format) means that it is much more likely to happen than you might think.

Unknown

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Vater5B

I say go with iWork.

I initially used both as iWork had no spreadsheet app, but the second that '08 came out, I deleted Office for good. Unless you need to do serious Spreadsheet work, I consider iWork a fitting, affordable substitute. Plus Keynote is 10x better than PowerPoint.

Desert_Eagle25

mcdermott wrote: »

iWork kinda sucks. I've used it, and as was said it's not bad if you're only exchanging documents with other iWork users or doing shit for yourself.

But really if you're going to be interoperating much at all, you're probably better with Open Office than iWork. I've had better luck with it. Still, at the end of the day you're best of just going with Office.

Another vote for MS Office for Mac.

DeathPrawn

I absolutely love iWork 08. Keynote is better than PowerPoint in pretty much every way, and I personally much prefer the Pages interface to Word. I have never had any major problems sending documents back and forth between coworkers/friends using doc format. If you do a lot of serious spreadsheet stuff, though, I'd stick to MS Office.

And if you do get MS Office, get the new version. The 2004 version was released before the switch to Intel, so it's slow as molasses. But seriously, I'd say either get iWork or OpenOffice.

FF

Sadly, even though I'd like to recommend iWork. I'm going to throw in my hat with the MS Office folks. If you're going to come across anybody running a Windows machine you'll need to be able to have MS Office.

I would recommend Office 2008, simply because a lot of institutions I've seen lately are switching their Windows machines to Office 2007. That means docx, etc. Honestly, Mac Office runs like shit on any machine, Intel or not. Sadly, it's still a mostly necessary evil.