Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Sugi209

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 7, 2011
23
0
I just ordered my 13" MBA, and hopefully should be here on Wednesday. My MBA is 4GB, 256GB, 2.18 Ghz with flash storage. This is will be the first time I am getting a Mac system. I am a college student who uses Words, Excel, and especially Power Point. So, which should I get? iWork or Microsoft office 2011? And if I get the iWork 2011, what does it come with?

All the suggestions and replies are much appreciated. Thank you
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

For me, comparability was a big issue so MS Office was a no brained. Especially since you can get office student for only $99 on amazon. Good luck!
 
Well if you are used to Office then I would get that. However, if you want to try something new get iWork. Its really easy to use once you get that just about every option is in the inspector thing. Also, if you want to go the cheap route you could always just get Open Office for free. Almost like Microsoft Office, but free.

With iWork you would get
keynote - powerpoint (much better than MO)
pages - word (different workflows MO=IW)
numbers- excel (MO is better)
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

Thank you all for the reply. I'll definitely give both them a try.
 
While iWork is a nice program, I'd get Office 11. iWork has compatibility issues with windows versions of office, which won't take long to become annoying in college. They may say that they are completely compatible, but it's just not true. That made it quite difficult to collaborate a 100-page group final paper for one of my classes.
 
I just ordered my 13" MBA, and hopefully should be here on Wednesday. My MBA is 4GB, 256GB, 2.18 Ghz with flash storage. This is will be the first time I am getting a Mac system. I am a college student who uses Words, Excel, and especially Power Point. So, which should I get? iWork or Microsoft office 2011? And if I get the iWork 2011, what does it come with?

All the suggestions and replies are much appreciated. Thank you

Office 2011 for sure. You can get if for $99. Google Office 2011 Academic.
 
... They may say that they are completely compatible, but it's just not true. ...
Nobody who knows anything would say such a thing. In fact, I would go so far as to say that nothing is completely compatible with Office, not even Office.

The OP should learn to evaluate potential purchasing decisions based on his needs. If he wants an easy to use productivity suite or constituent applications from the suite, then he should give iWork serious consideration. If he has as a primary goal to share Office files with his professors and colleagues, then Office is his better choice. If he can afford both, then he might consider getting both. But he should let his needs drive his decision.
 
The OP should learn to evaluate potential purchasing decisions based on his needs. If he wants an easy to use productivity suite or constituent applications from the suite, then he should give iWork serious consideration. If he has as a primary goal to share Office files with his professors and colleagues, then Office is his better choice. If he can afford both, then he might consider getting both. But he should let his needs drive his decision.

Or, as he is at College, he may decide that Pages simply isn't good enough for serious academic work. One example: it cannot do cross-references in footnotes. For 2011, that's astonishingly bad. Other examples abound.

Keynote, however, is fantastic - I use it for all my lectures (I'm a Prof.) Outlook 2011 is buggy, but bearable. If your university email is on Exchange, it's Outlook 2011 or Mail/iCal/Address Book. I use the latter. I don't use Numbers or Excel enough to form an opinion.

So, that's my approach: a combination of both to get the best tools for the job. If I could only choose one, however, it would be Office 2011 (Academic).
 
iWork 2011 doesn't exist. Office 2011 is superior in pretty much every way to iWork '09. You can probably get it at a steep discount from your university.

I'm not denying Office has more features, but anyone can see iWork runs considerably faster and has a far cleaner UI.

I was close to buying Office 2011, just so I didn't have to export all the time. The same day, Microsoft made the trial available for download, I installed it and all the updates, it feels slower, resizing isn't smooth, and the UI is just mad.

I'm a big iWork fan, and iWork 11, or 12 by the time they release it, should bridge the gap even more.
 
So, that's my approach: a combination of both to get the best tools for the job. If I could only choose one, however, it would be Office 2011 (Academic).

both is the way to go. You simply can't beat Keynote, though Pages (while a simple, easy to use, and fairly powerful word processor) lacks some features that are needed in 2011.

I would hope to see iWork '11 by the middle of this year with many new features.
 
Or, as he is at College, he may decide that Pages simply isn't good enough for serious academic work. ...
Nonsense. Millions do serious academic work everyday with tools that have far fewer features than Pages. Millions use Word for serious academic work who use only two of Word's plethora of features--hunt and peck.

Word has one mission-critical feature--to exchange files with other Word users. Other applications can do it, but Word is the best bet for this purpose.
 
If you need full compatibility with Windows computers and do intense writing, spreadsheets and presentations then get Office for Mac 2011.

If you do the occasional paper and presentation but want to have the power to do more then get iWork.

If the idea of paying for productivity software makes you cringe but you have to do it, try OpenOffice or use Google Documents. They're free.
 
I never was a fan of how MS insists on using an unnecessary number of buttons. The ribbon interface was supposed to fix that, but Pages is still much cleaner and the ribbon feels out of place on OS X...

My personal preference is iWork, but then again I am an art student and the papers I write have little need for most of Word's esoteric features.
 
iWork 2011 doesn't exist. Office 2011 is superior in pretty much every way to iWork '09. You can probably get it at a steep discount from your university.

I have been a user of Microsoft Office, since the first version was introduced. I have both MS Office AND iWork on my 13" MBA ultimate.

Which of the the two is better depends on what is your most used application.

Pages is in my opinion for normal office use vastly superior to Word. Why do I think this? The prime use of these applications is to put words on paper, and the way Pages handles this with ease of use, speed and without unnecessary functions is IMO better than Word with all its formatting problems using styles. In Word I spend more time formatting my documents than writing. (Who hasn't by accident deleted the numbering of headings, or tried to put a page break in a specific position. Or what about inserted images that jump all over the document?). Pages handles all this much better.

Excel is superior to numbers for number crunching, but Numbers has better features for presenting your data. Macro's in Excel are for many people a must.

Keynote is in every way superior to Powerpoint. Better transitions, drawing and aligning features. Text formatting is also more easy to use than in Powerpoint.

Outlook is superior to mail app and calendar app..

I personally use iWork more, because it's leaner and faster. MS Office lacks IMO ergonomy for fast and efficient work.

The compatibility issues between OS X and Windows that everyone always mentions first when asked are not a problem. Both handle each others files without any problems if you don't do any totally exotic formatting stuff.
 
Last edited:
....

The compatibility issues between OS X and Windows that everyone always mentions first when asked are not a problem. Both handle each others files without any problems if you don't do any totally exotic formatting stuff.
In my experience, compatibility between two different versions of Office:win is a cruel joke. Up through Office 2004, compatibility between Office:mac and any chosen version of Office:win was far superior. As for as Office 2011, I have not yet gotten around to putting it through its paces.
 
I prefer Office, and 2011 is a nice edition. I use a word processor daily, and Pages just didn't deliver the basics, in my opinion. And if you need a spreadsheet I can't imagine anything other than Excel.

However, I find Keynote is vastly superior to PowerPoint. It's much easier to use and produces far better presentations from my experience. This is convenient because you can buy Keynote from the App Store for just $20, which is a steal (assuming you have the need).

I'll also add that Pages works well if you have a lot of images in your text. This was a HUGE weakness of Word 2008; not sure if it's been fixed in 2011.
 
The only people that buy iWork are arts students (lulz)

If you have a real major, Office is better in every way.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.