I just bought my first Macbook last week for school and so far i love it! its sleek, stylish, and very fast. I plan on using it for school next semester and this has brought up a few questions. Ive been using good ole Microsoft works on my xp machine at home for sometime now. It works just fine for what i need but unfortunately i cant haul a desktop to school with me (which lead me to purchase my macbook) I plan on buying office for mac but i want to make sure i can transfer files from machine to machine with no problems. Also after looking at reviews for mac office 08, ive seen alot of negative feedback centered around the functionality of the software. What should i do? Sorry if this has been posted before or if this is in the wrong forum. Any advice is appreciated!
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Office for Mac vs iWork for college
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There's an awesome feature on this forum called "search." I predicted that you would ask this question and answered it many, many times, but hid my response in other threads with similar titles. It's a game! It's called find the 12 million old Office vs. iWork threads. See if you can do it! 
I currently am using a combination of iWork and Neooffice for dealing with college work. I only use Neooffice when there are some formatting issues when opening documents in Pages or just checking to make sure everything looks the way it should after export from Pages. Otherwise, compatibility is pretty good. All my document creation is done through the iWork apps.
You shouldn't have any problems with transferring files from machine to machine if you're going to be using Office. I don't have a copy of Office 08 for Mac so I can't say much about all the negative complaints, but OpenOffice, Neooffice, and iWork are viable alternatives in case you wish to not purchase Office. Cheers.
You shouldn't have any problems with transferring files from machine to machine if you're going to be using Office. I don't have a copy of Office 08 for Mac so I can't say much about all the negative complaints, but OpenOffice, Neooffice, and iWork are viable alternatives in case you wish to not purchase Office. Cheers.
theres a good comparison/review between the two here.
if youve been using Office for a while then i would suggest buying Office for Mac.
but if your willing to learn iWork then get that. Pages is very simpe to learn and easy as to write papers with it. you can export to .doc and its works great on a PC. keynote is also miles better than PowerPoint if you learn it
if youve been using Office for a while then i would suggest buying Office for Mac.
but if your willing to learn iWork then get that. Pages is very simpe to learn and easy as to write papers with it. you can export to .doc and its works great on a PC. keynote is also miles better than PowerPoint if you learn it