iWork vs. Office 2004 vs Office 2008

[Quest3]

So I'm switching from PC to Macbook. I'm in college and we use Excel a lot.
From my research, I heard that Office 2008 doesn't support VBA, which is a big negative sign for it since we use VBA in school and tools like Solver in Excel. Does Office 2004 support VBA and solver?

How about iWork? what are your impressions? Is there a solver tool in Numbers?
How about the compatibility issues when using files with PC, especially with Office 2007/2003 ??

 

[scokim]

Office 2008 broke my safari fonts.

Stay with 2004 or go to iwork.

 

[Cromulent]

If you need VBA the only two options are 2004 or running Office for Windows 2007 in something like Fusion or Parallels.