I have Office 2004 which I barely used, apart from occasionally checking what my Pages documents look like (the very important ones) under a Microsoft software. So far from my experience, track changes has always been fully compatible between Pages and Word, when I sent my documents to my supervisors who are all on Windows.
The only compatibility issue I have between Pages and Word is positioning / aligning pictures within a document. What I've found now is if you ticked the "cause text to wrap" option under the graphic tab in the inspector, you'd only get troubles when you open it in Word. Untick that option seems to do fine, although the picture will be then "hard fixed" to the text, sometimes the picture is aligned to the middle, sometimes to the left, I haven't played around this long enough to figure it out.
Another problem I once had is, although I can't remember if I used the text wrap option with the picture, but I had it aligned to the centre using one of the align buttons on the menu bar. Exported the document to .doc and opened and edited it in Word, (i think I tried both Word 2004 [Mac] and Word 2003 [on Win XP]), if I moved a picture's position in Word, the whole document went blank, I mean it just turned straight into white empty pages of blank space. I hope this is addressed / fixed in this update.
I just installed the update and running without problems. Haven't used it enough yet to report the performance improvements.
Also thank for pointing out using NeoOffice for equations editing. I was also looking for an equation editor rather than just using the character palette.
For one of the main short-comings in functionality in Numbers - graph plotting, I recently have found a perfect complement program to Numbers - Plot 0.997
http://mac.softpedia.com/get/Math-Scientific/Plot.shtml
It's a freeware and it has very extensive functionalities, error bars, fit, normalise, etc etc, you name it! It's perfect for technical and scientific work. Easy to use, the formatting of the graph looks professional. What I do is, I create a data file in Numbers (with columns of numberic data), then export the file as a CSV file. The program can work with lots of these CSV (or ASCII) data files at the same time, so you can very conveniently switch on and off the curves you want and don't want to appear on the final graph. Afterwards, you can export your plotted graph as an image file, so it'll always look the same (ever had an imported Excel graph in Word that one day you found your document cannot display it for some mysterious reaons?)
Hope this helps someone.
