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iBunny

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Apr 15, 2004
1,254
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I just got my Tiger and iLife 05... and it came with a trial of iWork. I am not really a fan of installing stuff for the hell of it... so Which one do you all prefer?

Thanks
 
They're two completely different packages. iWork is a fancy presentation app + a lacklustre, yet easy-to-use word processor-cum-DTP app. Office is a suite of legacy compatible document, spreadsheet, and presentation apps.**

Horses for courses.

**And Entourage. But why bother?
 
Hrmm

It was totaly my thought that iWork was apples version of Office completly... with Apple versions of Word, Excel And Powerpoint... Thats what they made it sound like anyway
 
iBunny said:
It was totaly my thought that iWork was apples version of Office completly... with Apple versions of Word, Excel And Powerpoint... Thats what they made it sound like anyway
There's no spreadsheet in iWork. Just Pages and Keynote.
 
they are both good...

I use Office for all of my word processing and spreadsheets documents, it's great. I just graduated from high school and recently purchased a 15'' PowerBook that also came with the 30 day trial of iWork. I don't use pages much because I don't make too many flyers or anything, but before I graduated I had the opportunity to use Keynote, and Keynote blows PowerPoint away. If you think that you might be doing a lot of presentations or slideshows with your computer, I would definitely get iWork just so you could have keynote.

But if you can only really have one, go with Office. Work and Excel are great applications (as other posts have said) and PowerPoint is good enough that you could do some decent presentations. But after using Keynote for a few last school projects and checking out a few things that Pages was capable of, I went ahead and purchased iWork with the education discount.

And oh yeah, I hate windows as well, but you gotta remember how compatable Word and Excel are.
 
NeoOffice/J (the mac version of OpenOffice) is a pretty good suite that covers MS Office apps, and is pretty compatible with pc's. It's a beta version and is not the fastest launching, but I like it. It's in the process of being ported fully to mac at the moment.

It's also free.
 
If you're in education at all, Office all the way. Compatibility is a major factor.
If you're a scientist Office too, excel can be very useful.

If you're just in it for fun try iWork and see if it does what you want.
 
Rest of the world is on a MS standard, so you only need to get one that has decent compatibility.

Unless you will be swapping files back and forth that need to maintain a lot of Word features that don't always translate well. The you are stuck with Word.

However, if you get involved with a bunch of lawyers or court filings -- you'll probably be stuck with a bunch of WordPerfect files, and will end up buying a dataviz product like MacLink Plus.
 
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