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iWork vs. Mac Office

S

snakeanthony

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 21, 2006
7
0
Hey folks,

I just got my white 1 GB ram/80 GB hard drive/ 2Ghz Core Duo MacBook, am in love with it, blah blah blah.

I'm unsure whether to purchase the Office suite or iWork. I can tell you that I'll never use Excel or Mac version of Outlook. This machine is for college so I'll be writing lots of papers on it. The biggest thing I notice is that Pages is a lot faster than Word, and that it's $50 cheaper. I'm leaning towards it but I always hear that it's not as good as Word. I've played around with it and I think it will be fine, but I'm interested in hearing some things that you folks liked or didn't like about it.

Thanks for your time.
 
It's always such a big debate, which is better or worse. Word is decent, but it's got a lot of stuff most people don't regularly use, particularly college kids like you and I. Microsoft has created an all-in-one product, for consumers and business, but for some people, that means we're paying for features we have no interest in.

Pages is nice. Very Apple-y. If you've used Word for a long time, it will take some time getting used to, especially the Inspector. But after getting used to it, works flawlessly, does everything I've asked of it, and at a cheaper cost than Office. I'd probably recommend Apple, not out of being a fanboy, but it will likely be exactly what you need at a cheaper price.

Some here on MR might refute this, though...
 
snakeanthony said:
Hey folks,

I just got my white 1 GB ram/80 GB hard drive/ 2Ghz Core Duo MacBook, am in love with it, blah blah blah.

I'm unsure whether to purchase the Office suite or iWork. I can tell you that I'll never use Excel or Mac version of Outlook. This machine is for college so I'll be writing lots of papers on it. The biggest thing I notice is that Pages is a lot faster than Word, and that it's $50 cheaper. I'm leaning towards it but I always hear that it's not as good as Word. I've played around with it and I think it will be fine, but I'm interested in hearing some things that you folks liked or didn't like about it.

Thanks for your time.
Click to expand...

I thought Pages was slower than Word when I tried it (on a powerbook) but that Keynote was much better than Powerpoint. If I'm being honest, I did my university papers in LaTeX and I wouldn't have picked anything else. OK the docs don't look fancy but LaTeX forces you into using markup + plain text, which no matter what size of document is about as fast as you can get. It also encourages better document structure. In the end it renders to PDF.

I'd be tempted to suggest you get Pages for nothing more than the fact there is a universal version so on your machine it won't be running in Rosetta unlike Word. I suspect it does lack a lot of the features Word has but I don't know if you really need them.

I'd get trial versions of both and compare them to see which meets your needs better.
 
snakeanthony said:
Hey folks,

I just got my white 1 GB ram/80 GB hard drive/ 2Ghz Core Duo MacBook, am in love with it, blah blah blah.

I'm unsure whether to purchase the Office suite or iWork. I can tell you that I'll never use Excel or Mac version of Outlook. This machine is for college so I'll be writing lots of papers on it. The biggest thing I notice is that Pages is a lot faster than Word, and that it's $50 cheaper. I'm leaning towards it but I always hear that it's not as good as Word. I've played around with it and I think it will be fine, but I'm interested in hearing some things that you folks liked or didn't like about it.

Thanks for your time.
Click to expand...


I love Pages & Keynote they both work great for what they were intended to do. There are a few more features and improvements I would like to see added to Pages but they are nothing I can live without...I know you said that you wouldn't use Excel but if you did need it for a random assignment you could use Google's new online spreadsheet app for basic stuff for free...It works in Firefox but not Safari yet sadly...
 
iWork, one it will be faster on your MacBook(PPC vs Universal thing) and Keynote kicks PowerPoint easly, and Pages i think is mucher nice then Word(not as many people agree with me, as people do with keynote vs PowerPoint) however iWork does not have Exel, so if you never really uses it(If need be there are other Freeware App that do waht exel does just in case you need it) But if you uses Exel a lot, you might want it.
 
Thanks for all your input. You've pretty much cemented my decision; I'll be going with Pages when my free trials run out. I never even used Word on PC, I used MS Works, so I probably won't miss anything anyway.
 
At least iMacs come with both MS Office and iWork trials.

What is wrong with TextEdit.app? For just class papers, it should be enough I would think. I cannot think of any additional features from Word for writing 10-20 page papers. You can paste pictures and graphics, add tables, use all the available Mac fonts... And it is free, already bundled with your Mac.
 
theBB said:
At least iMacs come with both MS Office and iWork trials.

What is wrong with TextEdit.app? For just class papers, it should be enough I would think. I cannot think of any additional features from Word for writing 10-20 page papers. You can paste pictures and graphics, add tables, use all the available Mac fonts... And it is free, already bundled with your Mac.
Click to expand...

No page numbering, headers or footers for a start.
 
IJ Reilly said:
No page numbering, headers or footers for a start.
Click to expand...
You can print with page numbers, can't you?

I forgot about footers, but if you rarely need them, it is easy to get around it. Most of college papers discouraged footnotes anyways. They did not want our essays to look like technical articles. We were supposed to state our sources at the edn of the paper, but not in footnotes.
 
theBB said:
You can print with page numbers, can't you?
Click to expand...

Yes, but you get no control over the results. In addition to page numbers in the lower right corner, you get the document name in the upper left and the date and time it was printed in the upper right -- of every page. Not acceptable for most purposes.

I mean footers, not footnotes, BTW.

insomniac321123 said:
What about integration with other people using word on pc's? Is there a problem going between iwork and office?
Click to expand...

Not really, no. Pages imports and exports .doc files. The translations aren't always perfect, but neither are they perfect between the many versions of Word.
 
insomniac321123 said:
What about integration with other people using word on pc's? Is there a problem going between iwork and office?
Click to expand...

Pages imports and exports fine to Word. Sometimes the fonts get changed and the format a little too if you are using a unusual font (not Arial or Times New Roman) but that is easy to fix. If you need to print on a Windows PC or someone just needs read only access to the document you can export to .pdf in Pages so prints come out perfectly no matter what platform you print from...
 
Why not have a look at NeoOffice (OSX port of OpenOffice that doesn't require X.11) - http://www.neooffice.org/ - there is an early adopter program open at the moment where you can get a pre-release version for Intel for $10.00. It doesn't look much like a mac native app (but at least the menu bar is where it should be), but the functionality is up there with Office (and it's a UB so it's much faster).
Personally, I've got iWork simply for Keynote which is fantastic and I use NeoOffice for all my other Office type work.
 
Spent over 2 hours this morning at the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue and a good portion of the time I was using Pages. The more I get familiar with the look and various features, the more I like it. My choice ... Pages over Word.
 
ddrueckhammer said:
Pages imports and exports fine to Word. Sometimes the fonts get changed and the format a little too if you are using a unusual font (not Arial or Times New Roman) but that is easy to fix.
Click to expand...

The fonts only gets "changed" if the receiving computer doesn't have the fonts used in the document installed. The same is true for Word documents opened in Word. Probably the biggest issue related to exchanging Word documents via Pages is when the "track changes" feature of Word is used. This feature isn't supported in Pages.
 
IJ Reilly said:
Probably the biggest issue related to exchanging Word documents via Pages is when the "track changes" feature of Word is used. This feature isn't supported in Pages.
Click to expand...
That is the only reason I use Word. Most of the time, even with work documents, I use Pages (took some getting used to, now I love it). But, when I need to look at or track changes, I use Word. I don't like too, esp. on an Intel Mac, but I need to.
 
I use both apps on a regular basis, but quite honestly iWork is fantastic for the money. Keynotes is just brilliant, but Pages scores at least a few points over Word in its image manipulation - it's just so much easier placing images onto your work than the nightmare it sometimes can be with office.
 
LaTeX is a high-quality typesetting system; it includes features designed for the production of technical and scientific documentation. LaTeX is the de facto standard for the communication and publication of scientific documents.

more info on http://www.latex-project.org/
 
I dumped Word ages ago for Pages. Last semester I did several papers all in Pages, converted to pdf and everything was fine. As a matter of fact they even looked better than my fellow students' who had used Word.

If you can get a hold of the MS fonts used in MS Office and drop those into your fonts folder (I had them from my previously owned MS Office) you will avoid the "missing font" scenario when opening Word documents.
 
Bern said:
I dumped Word ages ago for Pages. Last semester I did several papers all in Pages, converted to pdf and everything was fine. As a matter of fact they even looked better than my fellow students' who had used Word.

If you can get a hold of the MS fonts used in MS Office and drop those into your fonts folder (I had them from my previously owned MS Office) you will avoid the "missing font" scenario when opening Word documents.
Click to expand...
I am in the process of adding Pages in my daily workflow and have created two propsals for my clients. The paper I created looked very nice.

But, I noticed Pages is sluggish as I type. There are some noticeable delays as I type. I have used my iBook (with 1.5 GB ram)for this as I take it on the road. I have not yet tried Pages with my PBs that much.

Is this normal? I just felt like new intel Mac is running non UB software on Rosetta, because of this sluggishness.
 
If you're a fast typer, you possibly can overrun Pages' ability to keep up. I'm not the world's fastest typist, but even I have noticed this. It depends a great deal on the size of the document -- if it's heavy in illustrations and tables, Pages can get pretty slow. When this happens, saving the document or even quitting and restarting Pages seems to help.
 
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