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iWork: Should I switch from MS Office?

N

n3il89

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 13, 2006
13
0
Ok, I've had my MacBook Pro since last April and of course I love it. The first thing that I bought to go with it was Office. I was a switcher and it was something that I was used to; I knew that it ensured my compatibility to the windows world which is exactly what I needed.

More and more I've heard some great things about iWork and I finally found out today that you can export to support .doc and .ppt. I'm a student so I basically use the basic word and powerpoint functionality.

I'm considering making another switch and moving exclusively to iWork. I really just want to know what the advantages and disadvantages are to switching to iWork. If you guys have any great advice and also if you know of any blog posts/news site posts that compare the advantages and disadvantages then please dump them on. Thanks for everyone's help!
 
I don't know of any particular review sites for you to look at, but a search around here ought to yield lots of threads. You might specifically search for two users, myself and IJ Reilly. We seem to appear in most of them :). Usually defending Pages.
 
That's a tough choice...mainly because you already bought Office. So it mainly matters how you feel about your experience with it. iWork is great in terms of integration with iLife and that integration is probably just going to get stronger.

As a student, you can buy iWork with a student discount (I think it is $20 off)...keep in mind a new version is due very soon, so don't rush out and buy iWork '06....wait for iWork '07

I don't use Keynote enough to comment, but I love Pages....for me it was worth the price of iWork alone. But I didn't use Office under OS X and was typing stuff in Textedit and laying them out in Illustrator for the most part.
 
iWork is adequate for a student. However, sometimes professors use Microsoft Word's "track changes" feature to grade/comment on student work. Track changes is not compatible with iWork, so that may the reason to stick with MS Office.

Personally I use Pages for most of my writing, but keep an old version of MS office for when documents are incompatible.
 
i searched through the forums and found a couple of posts....it seems that the main theme with all of them is Excel.

I don't use Excel at all so that isn't a problem for me so let me stop anyone who will post that eventually.

I don't want to spend my money unless I understand the benefits of iWork over Office. What exactly is better in iWork then Office?
 
Exporting to .doc and.ppt from iWork is not perfect, you might have some compatibility errors especially with .ppt files which could easily be avoided by sticking with MS Word. Also a UB version of office has been announced, might be time to start thinking about saving up for the new version.
 
Another thing to keep in mind is that, as much as I love it, iWork is like the lonely spinster of the family compared to the rich uncle (OS X) and the popular swinging single sister (iLife). It is the least popular of the three, so look for free 30-day trial disks when the new version of iWork when iLife and/or Leopard are announced. They've done that in the past to boost sales and may do it again, that way you will be able to try it out and see if it will meet you needs.
 
The only way you can achieve perfect compatibility, is to use the same version of Office on the same platform with the same installed fonts. IOW, it's almost impossible to achieve. My hand has already been tipped on this, but I believe your decision should be based on factors other than that illusive goal of perfect compatibility. I suggest using the trial version of iWork for awhile.
 
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