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iwork vs microsoft office for mac

S

Sossity

macrumors 65816
Original poster
May 12, 2010
1,360
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I am looking for a word processing program, & notice these 2, would like help in deciding which to choose, anybody who has either of these, which is better?

I need the software, (whichever I get) to; make excel documents, powerpoint documents, & basic text or word documents.
 
It depends, if you have to share your documents with other people go with office, iWork can export to office formats, but it doesn't always do a good job. I prefer iWork, but you can't beat office for compatibility with other people.
 
Whereas iWork is a nicer program than Office, so is Wordpad. If you want to remain compatible and have powerful office tools, Office is the way forward.

iWork is only good for Keynote in my opinion. And even then, PowerPoint 2010/11 isn't far behind.
 
I had iWork to begin with because I didn't like Office for Mac 2008. However, I couldn't use it much because I found compatibility with my already made Word document created on my Windows PC wasn't very good, so whenever I opened up an essay I was part way through, stuff would be missing from it.

I took a risk and purchased Office for Mac 2011 and I love it. It has a very similar look and feel with Office 2007 and 2010 and it has great compatibility. It's not perfect but it's close. If you need to work with Excel, Word and PowerPoint documents, I would recommend Office for Mac 2011. If not, go with iWork.

You can get trial version of iWork and Office so get those and see what works best for you.

I don't totally regret getting iWork '09; Keynote is an excellent application. :)
 
I have iworks09, ms office 2008 and 2011. ms office 2008 is trash, very slow start up times, but 2011 is amazingly fast with great looking templates, the user face looks a lot better as well. iworks is my go suite if I want to incorporate graphics such as photos, png andpsd files. I love using iworks, it is easy to use and I feel at home. iworks does a petty good job exporting to MS format, but if I work in iworks, I usually export to PDF, so I dnt have to worry about rendering mistakes.

all in all, if you will send your docs to folks using windows, I recommend you to get ms 2011, so you know that what you see is wht you and your recipients will get.
 
As others have said, you cannot beat the compatibility of MS Office. Close to EVERYONE uses it, and for me there is little advantage with iWorks over Office. If you can still buy the 2008 edition for cheaper than the 2011 edition...and it comes with three installs!
 
iWork is useful only if all your fellow co-editors also use it and all other people send you PDF/HTML/RTF documents only.

The main argument for iWork is that it comes from Apple (which makes it a must-have app for some fellows here) and is beautiful to look at and work with.

If you need to edit anything together with or get editable non-iWork files from other people, don't bother with iWork. Try OpenOffice or MS-Office 2011 (which is quite beautiful and nice to work with as well).
 
I'd choose Office 2011, iWork 09' and lastly Openoffice... Any of them will get the job done but I think Office's just leads in this category.
 
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