best workable light Office app advice

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if you need compatibility just get office 2011

I have 128GB on my MBA as well. I've used office for mac (Switched to iWork because thats what I like and I don't need to necessarily worry about any compatibility issues), it's not as bloated as you'd expect on that particular size SSD. On a 64GB I'd probably be eyeballing it a bit more, but unless you're trying to carry your whole movie collection, a crap ton of CD's and be able to edit the living hell out of a billion office documents, it's your best option for being able to (relatively) seamlessly send between Windows & OSX.

just go for iWork. its cheap, its got the compatibility, and is relatively light weight for the MBA, and native mac software too.

Hello,

If I were you, I would pick MS office. I had some compatible issue with iWork before. It is a great experience to work on iWork for example cleaner interfaces, fonts etc.... However, when it comes to college documents, my IWork pages and numbers got problems opening the documents that created by older versions of Microsoft Office programs.

If compatibility is an issue you should use Microsoft Office, if you want to try some free software app, Libre Office will do the trick as well, it recently got very well optimized, I personally prefer iWork but I don't have to worry about sharing my documents and keeping the formatting, if you can give it a shot it may be worth it.

newdeal said:

if you need compatibility just get office 2011

Click to expand...

No, there's compatibility and there's compatibility. For simple, unstructured documents where use of styles (and more importantly, use of a house style) is not required, any office application that will export to Word or Excel should be fine.

I write technical documents to a tightly defined structure (required so we can do things like automate requirements cross referencing or exporting to a test management suite using VBA macros) so I need MS Office 2011. For many users who just need to be able to write the odd letter, news letter, memo and a bit of light reporting, any of the free and no so free office applications will so.

For light office use, I think iWork would be a no brainer, bearing in mind it is cheap and has full Lion/iCloud support.