iWork 09 = No longer needing Microsoft Office!? I can REALLY open up MS documents!?

Kusuri said:

Really? I have iWork 08 and it is HARD to use because of not being able to send my documents or open up others - originally made on a PC. I just got an email about iWork 09 and while looking noticed it says we can now open up windows docs AND save our work as documents!? So does this kill the essentialness of anything windows for students?


Thanks!


Josh

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iWork '08 worked with Word. Also, I submit everything as a PDF. Easier that way.

Jack Flash said:

iWork '08 worked with Word. Also, I submit everything as a PDF. Easier that way.

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what a useless reply... iWork '08 could not SAVE AS Word files, only export to. Also, believe it or not, a lot of people do collaborative work; when the rest of the world runs on Office, having seamless integration is important.

Anyway, it does look like iWork 09 can save as Office files, which really is a nice improvement.

CrzyCanuck72 said:

what a useless reply... iWork '08 could not SAVE AS Word files, only export to. Also, believe it or not, a lot of people do collaborative work; when the rest of the world runs on Office, having seamless integration is important.

Anyway, it does look like iWork 09 can save as Office files, which really is a nice improvement.

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Export as/Save as... it's all semantics.

CrzyCanuck72 said:

what a useless reply... iWork '08 could not SAVE AS Word files, only export to. Also, believe it or not, a lot of people do collaborative work; when the rest of the world runs on Office, having seamless integration is important.

Anyway, it does look like iWork 09 can save as Office files, which really is a nice improvement.

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It really isn't any different in '09 than '08. They changed the Save command to give you the option to do an export. However, it doesn't remember the previous save options and defaults to Pages format again. Even if you tell it to save it in Word format, it doesn't default to the same location as the file you opened, making you navigate to the original location and choosing "replace." Pretty annoying.

I like iWork, but I tend to stick with OpenOffice if I need to retain the Office format, or Office 2008 if OO chokes on anything (not often). Given the choice of OpenOffice, iWork and Office 2008, there really is never a requirement for using Windows just to maintain Office format compatibility.

One of the most recent of the many recent threads on this subject:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/632894/

I've never had issues with iWork '08. At work, I use MS Office 2000. At home on my MacBook, I only have iWork. My wife has MS Office 2007 on her laptop. I decided to work from home one day and work on some Excel files. I used my wife's laptop but when I sent out the reports, my clients could not open them - I did save them as I was supposed to, as older versions of Excel. I had to send to send the reports to myself, open them with Numbers and send them out to my clients and they turned out fine. So iWork was able to integrate with Office 2000, but Office 2007 could not...go figure.

iWork 08 was able to open and save MS Word files. The BIG difference in '09 that you seem to have discovered and is not highlighted very well by apple is that this is now transparent.
In the past you could open Word files in iWork and they would be imported into a new iWork document, not opened. In order to save as a word document, you would have to export it to Word format. In '09 Word files open just as if you were opening in Word, and the ability to save any file in Word format has been added to the Save As dialog.
This is not an entirely new feature, but is a big change to the way that compatibility is implemented in the software.

Hope this clears things up.

seattlemaclover said:

iWork 08 was able to open and save MS Word files. The BIG difference in '09 that you seem to have discovered and is not highlighted very well by apple is that this is now transparent.
In the past you could open Word files in iWork and they would be imported into a new iWork document, not opened. In order to save as a word document, you would have to export it to Word format. In '09 Word files open just as if you were opening in Word, and the ability to save any file in Word format has been added to the Save As dialog.
This is not an entirely new feature, but is a big change to the way that compatibility is implemented in the software.

Hope this clears things up.

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I would say it is a minor cosmetic change, since it is still importing it into a new iWork document and you still must export it, via the Save As dialog, but exporting it nonetheless.

If you want compatibility why don't you just use Office 2008?

Xapphire13 said:

If you want compatibility why don't you just use Office 2008?

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Even that won't guarantee compatibility with other versions of Office.

dejo said:

Even that won't guarantee compatibility with other versions of Office.

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How so? I have used Macs at school with Office 08 and the files work perfectally with other versions of office (Win and Mac), even with tables and pictures.

dejo said:

Even that won't guarantee compatibility with other versions of Office.

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Agreed. I've had people send me poorly, overly-complex styled Word docs that Office 2008 mangled. I keep an arsenal of OO, Office 2008, iWork, Office 2003 via Crossover Office (could probably go with 2007, but I dearly hate the 2007 ribbon bar) and Bootcamp Office 2007.

keyboard shortcuts...

I use iWork '08 exclusively, exporting to word docs when necessary to send editable docs to my clients.

I used Quicksilver to create a keyboard shortcut (Command-Option-Shift-P) that was similar to the stand print command (since it was easier than the 'S' key). If I hit command-S just before exporting, it exports to the same folder.

It works seamlessly, and with my aversion to using the mouse, I probably will prefer that to having to change options in the Save As dialog.

ebika said:

Agreed. I've had people send me poorly, overly-complex styled Word docs that Office 2008 mangled.

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You put your finger on the problem -- most Word documents are poorly formatted, I presume because Word makes properly formatting them so difficult. These documents are candidates to be mangled, no matter what you use to open them.

I've always wondered how many people truly collaborate on documents. By this I mean, more than one contributor and no one person responsible for the final production. I'd bet that almost nobody does this.

Is compatibility any better with iWork '09 vs '08? I have '08 on my Mac at work but it won't open even half of the Word documents that get sent to me (by open I mean open and display something that is readable). It mangles most documents so bad that I have to keep Open Office installed and use that most of the time. Yes, I agree with IJ that they may be badly formatted, but it should still be able to show me a readable document. If I didn't have to work with others I would probably prefer iWork, but as it is it was mostly a wasted purchase.

EDIT: And no, Office 2008 is not a solution b/c I don't think it supports Word automation macros (or am I wrong?).

But again I would ask, are you doing true collaboration, or simply providing your documents to others, to read, print, or incorporate? It it's to read or print, PDF is by far the best choice. If incorporation is the purpose, then the least-formatted type of file is the best choice. Even RTF would be overly-formatted for this purpose.

danny_w said:

Is compatibility any better with iWork '09 vs '08? I have '08 on my Mac at work but it won't open even half of the Word documents that get sent to me (by open I mean open and display something that is readable). It mangles most documents so bad that I have to keep Open Office installed and use that most of the time. Yes, I agree with IJ that they may be badly formatted, but it should still be able to show me a readable document. If I didn't have to work with others I would probably prefer iWork, but as it is it was mostly a wasted purchase.

EDIT: And no, Office 2008 is not a solution b/c I don't think it supports Word automation macros (or am I wrong?).

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If you mean VBA, then no, Office 2008 doesn't support that. There are rumors/tidbits that indicate they're going to put VBA support into a later version.

As for IJ's collaboration post, Microsoft Sharepoint is pretty awesome for Office collaboration. However, it requires massive corporate buy-in, so it probably won't ever be that "common." I'm pretty sure (not positive) that Office 2008 is unable to participate in the Sharepoint goodness. My hubby is the head architect for a large non-profit that has tens of thousands of users using Sharepoint to collaborate on Office docs. I'm sure there are more outside that too.

IJ Reilly said:

But again I would ask, are you doing true collaboration, or simply providing your documents to others, to read, print, or incorporate? It it's to read or print, PDF is by far the best choice. If incorporation is the purpose, then the least-formatted type of file is the best choice. Even RTF would be overly-formatted for this purpose.

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No true collaboration, just trying to read documents sent to me, and sometimes update/comment those documents and send them back. In my experience iWork has not been at all useful for this simple task. However, as I said, if I did not have to exchange documents with others iWork would be my preference.

danny_w said:

No true collaboration, just trying to read documents sent to me, and sometimes update/comment those documents and send them back. In my experience iWork has not been at all useful for this simple task. However, as I said, if I did not have to exchange documents with others iWork would be my preference.

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What kind of problems did you have?

IJ Reilly said:

What kind of problems did you have?

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• Scrambled pages with words and sentences running over each other and making the whole page unreadable.
• Some multi-page documents were cut down to one page.
• Tables that became unreadable.
• And of course, macros disappeared, which makes forms useless.

I don't think I have ever had a document import completely correct even once, but at least most are useable to some extent.

Wow, I've never had any of the kind of wholesale corruption you describe. If anyone ever sent me a Word document with macros, I wouldn't have known.