A couple purchasing questions on iWork and Office

[jwhite878]

Hey guys. I currently have Office 2008 home/student edition and it gets the job done. I'm assuming that Apple will be releasing iWork '11 with the Mac App Store, or very shortly after. I'm definitely going to make a purchase of keynote, pages, and maybe numbers. Is it worth getting Office 2011 in my current situation to make up for features that may be missing from Pages or Numbers. I'm not really aware of the reviews of Office, so maybe its likely to be superior to iWork '11. Thanks!

 

[bgjbgj88]

iWork vs Office

My daughter and I just switched to Macbook Pros. The sales people talked us into getting iWorks. My Excel spreadsheets transferred to Numbers but I could not do a basic sort without making a formula. My daughter also had problems with her teachers being able to read Pages files.

I bought Office 11 last week and everything appears to be working perfectly. My daughter had warned me that this could be a problem. She was right. LOL!

Bruce

 

[Slurk]

I would suggest, seeing that the trial hasn't been released yet, that you wait for the trial to be released. If you're comfortable with 2008, then just use that for the moment. It would be risky, as you don't know what new features there is going to be in the new iWork. I would suggest searching up the new features in 2011 first, and wait for the trial. Only consider buying 2011 after you get iWork.

 

[philxor]

I like Keynote but having used both I would choose Office 2011 over iWork at this point.

 

[roadbloc]

Excel > Numbers
PowerPoint < Keynote
Word vs Pages is very debatable, personally I prefer Pages.

For compatibility with the rest of the world (ie. If you need to work on the same files on a PC), Office > iWork. iWork's compatibility with Office is more questionable than OpenOffice.

For most usable program (startup time, least bugs, ease of use... etc), Office < iWork. iWork is all round a much nicer package to use. I have found Office to be rather buggy and slow, whereas iWork just simply works.

Entirely depends on what you wish to do at the end of the day. A few documents for yourself (and maybe to export as Office/PDF format for a friend) then iWork is your program. If are going to be doing work or critically need 100% compatibility, Office is your program.

 

[jwhite878]

Thanks for the input! Very helpful!