Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

sa21189

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 23, 2009
7
0
should i get iworks 09 or office 08? i got a discount for office but im just wondering if iwork is better. im just going to be using it for word documents and powerpoints at most
 
iWork is great, but it also has its caveats.

Pages does things for me instantly where as Word has to think of the meaning of doing said stuff.

Numbers, I can't comment much, it really needs more attention. It's like the retarded cousin of Excel.

Keynote is f*cking awesome. I believe at this point Keynote is either better or on par with PowerPoint.
 
iWork is great, but it also has its caveats.

Pages does things for me instantly where as Word has to think of the meaning of doing said stuff.

Numbers, I can't comment much, it really needs more attention. It's like the retarded cousin of Excel.

Keynote is f*cking awesome. I believe at this point Keynote is either better or on par with PowerPoint.

This is exactly how i see it. I found though that the UI of the office suite is really horrible, to the point that it really does frustrate me to use it. I only keep exel installed because it does the job better than numbers and keynote is awesome!
 
I use Office '08 because I got it for free from my university. I don't think it's that bad; the spelling/grammar check is kind of annoying though. As I remember, in Word for Windows, if you clicked the icon for spelling/grammar check, it would check the entire document. With the Mac version, you have to keep clicking on the little icon on the bottom for every single word. I don't know, maybe I'm just doing something wrong, but that's really the one thing that bothers me about Word. I haven't yet used the PowerPoint or Excel versions.

I would, however, like to uninstall completely Microsoft Entourage and Messenger and a couple other things that I don't use, but I don't know how to do that without messing up the whole suite... Does anyone know?:confused:
 
I use office for word, excel and access in windows. I really wish office had access for Mac.

Keynote is is awesome.....and so is the rest of the iwork apps, I just work in between OS's for business and they don't communicate so I use office.
 
iwork 09' or office 08'? - OpenOffice!

Both personally and at work we switched over to OpenOffice (OOO) when 3.0 was released providing a native OSX implementation. The latest version of OOO is really quite good - in some areas it lacks compared to Excel, but in others (such as database connectivity) it is superior. It also seems to be quite compatible with the Office apps, although there are glitches.

BTW - I have all three of these installed on my machine (Office, iWork, and OOO) and mainly use OOO at this point.
 
If you are going to do a lot of Excel work, get VMware, install Windows, and buy Office for Windows. Learn some of the keyboard shortcuts. It is much more productive for the power user.

If you are not going to do anything terribly exciting with Excel, the decision is down to personal preference and price.
 
Neither - OpenOffice, its free, it provides great compatibility to MS Office and works better then iWork imo :D
 
I got have both, and I tried to use iWork for school but have found it to be insufficient.

My professors use Windows/Office, and whenever they upload a file, and I try to open it with Pages, there is a formatting error. It will still open the document for the most part, and you can still read it, but sometimes the formatting is off and it makes everything messy. On top of that, it will always prompt you if you want to review the formatting errors everytime you open up a document.

I got sick of this, and just switched to Office 2008 for mac. I haven't had any problems since.

So if you depend on using files that other people create with Office for windows, I would still recommend getting office for mac.
 
I agree with the Open Office people, because it really works great. I used it on a Windows machine for years until I was given a copy of Office 2007 for Windows and Office 2008 for Mac from my older brother who got them for free from his university.

I don't really like Office 2008, but it's great for a quick print of notes. Two of my professors email the class powerpoint slides for the lecture because they're just awesome, and I have a friend who always has formatting errors with Pages.

I generally just use VMWare and open Office 2007 in Windows for One Note and Word. I don't like how Office is formatted for OS X, perhaps they'll fix it when '10 or '11 comes out.

If you already have Windows installed for some reason, you can get Office 2007 for something like $50 I think. Microsoft almost always has some really big deal with Office for students if you check on their website or Google it. The deal comes straight from them, I have a lot of friends who got it that way, one person for $36 last year I think.
 
if you just have a mac, i would say Parallels/Fusion + Office or bootcamp + office. I have tried using either and for my business, it didn't suffice and it honestly could be a lack from me knowing how to do it in their "versions"
 
after using both i suggest you try out both of them... there is trials for both of them so you might as well. after i tried both of them out i went for iwork
 
I have both...I use iWork for everything except when I have to electronically hand in things to my professors over the internet, the website only excepts .docx files.



IMHO Keynote beats PowerPoint by miles in terms of features and ease of use. (They are still pretty similar though.)

Numbers....well...
 
You don't have to use the whole suite.

My preferences are:

Word 08
Excel 08
Keynote 09

I wouldn't recommend using virtualization due to the added steps to make it work. It's also very taxing on a 2GB ram MBP.

If I had to only pick one, it would be Office08. Mainly because most people around me use Office and it ensures 99% compatibility when sharing documents.
 
have been testing office 2010 and its quite nice.. but still using iwork more for day to day stuff (pages/keynote, never used numbers.. always excel)
 
ya numbers is horrible, along with doing graphs in pages.

so... iwork 09 still though.
i use pages, keynote and excel.
 
I found the transition between Office and iwork took significantly more effort than the transition between Windows and OS X. Maybe that was just me...

iwork just wasn't for me.
 
Everyone uses office, so use office. Iwork is nice, unless you have to send stuff to other people or try opening stuff on another computer.
 
I've used Pages to fix the occasional Word document that was too hosed for Word 2007 to deal with. I just got Office 2008, so I can't speak to that yet.

That said, on my Mac Pro I have Parallels set up to map MS Office documents to Office 2007 on Windows XP. It's just easier to deal with that way. Similarly, Windows XP triggers Photoshop on the OSX side when I want to deal with graphics.

The application mapping is great. I toyed with VMWare's Fusion last year, but found Parallels to be faster and more seamless to deal with. Every now and then I've had a clipboard problem, but I usually go a week without needing to reboot the Windows XP virtual machine.
 
I uninstalled Office '04 from both my machines. I'm able to open all office docs and I send PDF's via email. I was having compatibility issues with '04 Office and the new docx... They'd open in Pages, but not Word.

I wasn't really willing to drop more $$$ on Office, the cheap upgrade doesn't apply to the student/teacher addition and apparently Microsoft is going to release a Office 10 for Mac next Spring. So why jump now.

I thought the transition to iWork '09 only would be a bigger issue. It's been great and fast.

+1 iWork '09

Coachingguy
 
I have Office '07 for Windows and iWork '09 for Mac. I use VMware to switch.

I teach in Japan and highly prefer Keynote and Pages. All of my designs are done in iWork and exported to Word/PP when needed for colleagues. I publish Pages to .pdf to upload files on the internet as it's just a picture and there is no need to worry about the end-receiver's software being compatible if they don't have to edit anything.

Pages has full-screen which is awesome for zooming in on worksheets in class for my students. Keynote is also awesome for presentations.

As a teacher, I absolutely despise having to work in Office. As a presenter, I'd be an idiot to not use my Mac apps.

Office/Windows only exists on my machine for other people. Which is strange.
 
I hope not...

Why? I use access constantly on my Mac and its a pain to have to boot up windows every time and there is nothing out there that compares to access for creating a client database like I have.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.