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Office or iWork?

  • Office

    Votes: 30 50.8%
  • iWork

    Votes: 29 49.2%

  • Total voters
    59

iphonenub

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 8, 2009
151
0
Taking compatibility and price off of the table and focusing solely on the features and interface. Which one do you like to use more? Feel free to explain why or simply just vote. I won't vote until I have had more time with each.
 

alust2013

macrumors 601
Feb 6, 2010
4,779
2
On the fence
Office. There are a few funky things about the interface, but in general it is a good program, especially 2011. Outlook also kills apple mail.
 

CardboardGiant

macrumors regular
Apr 15, 2011
131
0
Initially I purchased iwork on my 2011 MBA... after a week I couldn't take pages anymore.

Purchased office 2011 online and been using it since.
 

iindigo

macrumors 6502a
Jul 22, 2002
772
43
San Francisco, CA
Outlook also kills apple mail.

That's subjective, Outlook drives me nuts. The only client other than Apple Mail that doesn't is MailMate, which is easily the most lightweight and fastest of all the Mac mail clients I've tried.

Anyway, I don't find myself using Office much. iWork usually does the job fine. It largely depends on what you do, though.
 

Macman45

macrumors G5
Jul 29, 2011
13,197
135
Somewhere Back In The Long Ago
Office

Because I have to, Outlook won't send emails on any port known to man, so I have to use Thunderbird as my email client on my iMac and my Air.

It's over bloated with features I don't need, but Pages is really only okay for the iPad and iPhone.
 

danderton

macrumors member
Jul 15, 2010
72
0
Uk
Personally I use office. But with iOS5 and iCloud this may change. I spend a lot of time on my iPad a swell as my iMac, integrating them both using iworks just seems so logical
 

chrono1081

macrumors G3
Jan 26, 2008
8,446
4,146
Isla Nublar
Taking compatibility and price off of the table and focusing solely on the features and interface. Which one do you like to use more? Feel free to explain why or simply just vote. I won't vote until I have had more time with each.

I prefer iWork. I don't do a lot with office documents and its easier for me to find what I need to do in iWork programs because of the nice clean interface. Almost every option I need is in the inspector, and dragging and dropping text is very smooth.

Sure Office has more features but I generally prefer simplicity over features since I am more productive if something is simple. That being said I hate creating office documents so anything that lets me do that faster is great.


Outlook also kills apple mail.

As others have said this is definitely subjective. Outlook in general is an insanely bloated piece of software with a highly inconsistent user interface. (Take a look at signatures, sometimes you have to go into the registry to activate the feature!)

If you are simply a user of Outlook you may not run in to problems, but if you are like me and work in IT I'm sure you've seen plenty of Outlook issues. At every single job I've worked at Outlook has ranked as the most problematic piece of software accounting for the most trouble tickets. Corrupt PST files that you have to wait for it to scan for, the signature issue I mentioned above, out of office replies not sending, etc etc.

That being said it does have far more features, but its also a lot more problematic piece of software.
 
Last edited:

Macman45

macrumors G5
Jul 29, 2011
13,197
135
Somewhere Back In The Long Ago
That's Your Clincher Right There

Office - its easier to use, feature rich and is the standard.


" it's the standard." .....'nuff said.

I bought it because I had to, if you read the MS pages on Outlook for Mac, it's horrifying...vanishing emails, refusal to send using ports specified by ISP.

But Word is the standard, and while it is, I have no choice.
 
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maflynn

macrumors Haswell
May 3, 2009
73,419
43,307
But Word is the standard, and while it is, I have no choice.
Well you do, pages and libre office are alternatives, but I think they are just pale copies of Word, but people do use them in place of word
 

Kasalic

macrumors regular
Jan 20, 2011
160
2
I prefer iWork. I don't do a lot with office documents and its easier for me to find what I need to do in iWork programs because of the nice clean interface. Almost every option I need is in the inspector, and dragging and dropping text is very smooth.

Sure Office has more features but I generally prefer simplicity over features since I am more productive if something is simple. That being said I hate creating office documents so anything that lets me do that faster is great.




As others have said this is definitely subjective. Outlook in general is an insanely bloated piece of software with a highly inconsistent user interface. (Take a look at signatures, sometimes you have to go into the registry to activate the feature!)

If you are simply a user of Outlook you may not run in to problems, but if you are like me and work in IT I'm sure you've seen plenty of Outlook issues. At every single job I've worked at Outlook has ranked as the most problematic piece of software accounting for the most trouble tickets. Corrupt PST files that you have to wait for it to scan for, the signature issue I mentioned above, out of office replies not sending, etc etc.

That being said it does have far more features, but its also a lot more problematic piece of software.

I was ready to type a wall of text but this is says EXACTLY what I would say. iWork is cleaner and easier for 99.9% of what I do and the iPad compatibility is a big plus. For the remaining .1% I get someone else to do it on Word/Excel.
 

iphonenub

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 8, 2009
151
0
Well, I spent sometime using word and pages today for college and I found it took me half the time to make a beautiful essay in pages than word. I also exported it and opened it in word to see how the conversion went and everything was there even the pictures. I didn't get lost in pages thanks to the simple layout and multiple menus to show or hide based on what I was doing. I also found inspector to be much harder to get lost in than the ribbon. I own office and I'm just using an iWork trial so buying iWork seems pointless but...I might buy pages since I rarely make power points and never make spreadsheets.
 

Bernard SG

macrumors 65816
Jul 3, 2010
1,354
7
Well, I spent sometime using word and pages today for college and I found it took me half the time to make a beautiful essay in pages than word. I also exported it and opened it in word to see how the conversion went and everything was there even the pictures. I didn't get lost in pages thanks to the simple layout and multiple menus to show or hide based on what I was doing. I also found inspector to be much harder to get lost in than the ribbon. I own office and I'm just using an iWork trial so buying iWork seems pointless but...I might buy pages since I rarely make power points and never make spreadsheets.

It's really cool of Apple to sell the apps standalone now.
I use Office on my office PC, but with my own Macs I go iWork. Office for Mac sometimes is crawling.
 

Bending Pixels

macrumors 65816
Jul 22, 2010
1,307
365
Although I have a license (via the company I work for) for Office for Mac 2011, it's not installed. Primarily because MicroSmurf can't get it's preverbial act together to address the issues it has with Lion (not being able to import from Mail, full screen, etc.).

Outlook for Mac was pretty nice - until I found out they left out certain features (ability to resize an image/video in the e-mail, read receipt) that are in the Windows version.
 

Gaelic2

macrumors 6502
Aug 17, 2007
277
7
Mountains of N. California
I had both. I had Word 2000 and then I bought iWork when it first came out. I find Pages far easier to use than Word to the point where I just dropped Word altogether when switching over to OS Lion. I think Apple did well in separating the three programs and pricing them accordingly.
As far as Word being the standard, it depends on how and where you use it.
I found that Word had a steeper learning curve than Pages and probably does more but Pages does all that I want.
 

r0k

macrumors 68040
Mar 3, 2008
3,611
75
Detroit
I use iWork and LibreOffice. I installed Office 2011 for my wife. She needed it to open files that weren't looking quite right in iWork or LibreOffice. She had a hard drive wipe incident when I was upgrading her machine to Lion and I "forgot" to put Office back on for her. She has not missed it.

Here is my take. Office is better for compatibility and some features such as embedded files and some formulas are easier in Excel than in Numbers. I detest Outlook and I would never consider using it over mail.app but that's just my personal preference.

My beef with Office is what it did to her Mac. Some of our Macs are old enough that they came with trial copies of Office. They were set up so that anything that might open with Office resulted in a lengthy install ritual. After dragging that trialware to the trash, she prevailed on me to install Office and after I did, everything got slower. Anything that might possibly be opened with Office all of a sudden had to be opened with Office. Office nuked fonts that LibreOffice needed and LibreOffice had to be reinstalled. I spent too much time shutting down Office's constant quest to make every file format on her Mac open with Office. To be fair, I remember Quicktime pulling this kind of stunt on windows but that was windows 3.1. It's time for software vendors to learn to play nicely in their own little sandbox and stop trying to take over the world or at least stop trying to take over my machine.

If someone is trying to go "cold turkey" and switch to Mac, I always recommend iWork or Libre Office. If they need to share files with people on Windows, I reluctantly recommend Office.
 

talmy

macrumors 601
Oct 26, 2009
4,725
332
Oregon
Taking compatibility and price off of the table and focusing solely on the features and interface. Which one do you like to use more?

Based solely on that criteria, iWork.

However I live in a world dominated by Microsoft Office, so I need both.

For me OpenOffice/LibraOffice is worth what I paid for it. I keep it on the system to open documents sent by people who use it and also to open old WordPerfect documents.
 

alvindarkness

macrumors 6502a
Jul 11, 2009
562
397
This reply takes into account that compatibility isn't a priority, and the main goal is a great word processor on OSX.

I think it depends on how/why you are going to use it. If it's for university papers that need a rigid structure, or quite lengthy documents (novels perhaps), or something scientific/maths based that needs equations and symbols embedded - I'd go with Mellel any day. There is a learning curve of a few hours to get into the juicy features, but its worth it. Great OSX power interface.

I agree that its worth having OpenOffice/LibreOffice installed irrespective for the odd time you might need it. It'll do for the majority of every day word processing - but it does feel a bit clumsy and bloated (but flies on a good SSD).

On the other hand if it has to be out of Word and Pages - for most typical word processing on OSX - I'd go Pages. Especially if its on lion and you want to take advantage of "versions" and other lion features. Its interface is clean, and it does the majority of what most people would want.
 

albert2k

macrumors newbie
Sep 20, 2011
21
0
I use open office, is free and have all the application that I need for an office suite.
 
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