CS4 vs iWork vs Office

[LERsince1991]

Is it just me or do other people hardly use iWork and/or Office if you have CS4...

I used to do everything on powerpoint and word, now its Ps, Ai and ID

I suppose I would still use powerpoint/keynote every once in a while for a presentation over a projector or Excel for the odd bit of logging...

I tend to use ID for just about everything these days 🙂
My physics teacher was very impressed with my last coursework and notably the presentation of it as it was all done on ID, used a certain colour set, did some illustrations for it etc...
'Best presentation he's ever seen' 'worth of a uni assignment' 😛
He's been a teacher for a very long time and is the vice principle and science teacher for all sciences.

I just saw my dock on my macbook and it has office in... hardly ever used 😛

 

[uberamd]

I always use Office and iWork even though I have the full CS4 suite.

 

[LERsince1991]

I guess its down to what you do...
Mainly my work and projects are design based so I use CS4
Word is use sometimes but only for writing notes really, if its a coursework project I will make a layout in ID and do it all there...

 

[chaosbunny]

Blech, Office... 😀

Seriously, for me it's more difficult to get something to look the way I like it in an Office application than in InDesign. With CS4 you can even make really good presentations with InDesign where everyone will be impressed and wonders how you did this in Powerpoint.

The only Office application I still need once a year is Excel. (I use OpenOffice though)

And I often need it to open files from clients, again with OpenOffice - I don't care if they are formated differently this way since I have to layout the clients text in InDesign anyway.

For simply writing something I use Textedit - much simpler and loads faster than iWork or MS Office.

 

[design-is]

I agree completely. I only open ms office apps when a client has been kind enough to send me something they have designed wonderfully themselves and and want me to make it like that.

Clients... pfff 🙄 lol

I honestly stopped seeing the point of ms office years ago. Most people only use it for Word, and don't use the features that make it different than any free alternative.

 

[chaosbunny]

I agree completely. I only open ms office apps when a client has been kind enough to send me something they have designed wonderfully themselves and and want me to make it like that.

Clients... pfff 🙄 lol

I honestly stopped seeing the point of ms office years ago. Most people only use it for Word, and don't use the features that make it different than any free alternative.

Now to be fair, most clients just send me .doc files with text to put into various print or online mediums.

There are however, those you describe, and those who send .ppt and .doc logos...

 

[SimD]

Although I agree with you in a way that CS4 makes certain software obsolete, I have to disagree about the no need for Word part.

I'm sure others "pros" (in the business) can back me up, but I still find the need for Word. The reason being is that is, like it or not (I certainly don't), the "industry standard" ( I hate that term... ).

Sometimes I will get a very complex .doc file with very specific templates and the likes (I'm not very fluent with Word so pardon my "vague" terminology) that can't be opened in iWork. I mean Pages is great and so is Illustrator, but .doc is a standard, and until that changes I think every "pro" will need a copy of Office.

 

[semicharmed]

Office and CS have completely different intended uses.
I have sheets and sheets of data in Excel, which is what Excel is designed for. And accurate graphs. Sure, I could make graphs in Illustrator which would probably look nicer, but I know the ones in Excel accurately represent my data.
I also find it easier to do my typing in Word. I might set a final document into ID, depending on what it's for, but I find Word's interface much easier to just write on. Less distracting, because I'm not tempted to play with fonts and margins and the like, I can just sit down and write. And not worry about going beyond my set up text boxes, and having to break the flow in the middle of writing to set up more boxes. Or add more pages. Also, I like the fact that Word automatically displays the word count of a documents.
As for Powerpoint, since I'm already using the rest of Office, I saw no reason to buy iWork for Keynote. And most of my presentations get played from a USB drive, through Powerpoint, so it's much easier to make .ppt files than make a .pdf and force everything to then go through Acrobat or Reader.

 

[SwiftLives]

I hate Office with the blinding redheaded fury of a thousand pissed-off redheads.

That being said, I work for the in-house design department of a software company whose CEO came from Microsoft. So yeah. We have to make lots of Word email templates and Powerpoint presentations and Outlook email signatures. There's really no escaping it. Fortunately, we still use Creative Suite for the bulk of what we do.

I shouldn't complain too loudly. They've been very good about turning a blind eye to my non-sanctioned Mac.

 

[Blue Velvet]

Office is a necessary evil, just to work with files that others send me. It's extremely rare that I produce anything within the suite except for working with clients on production schedules in Word, which always need a bit of collaboration and to and fro-ing. I do not have any iWork apps on my Mac and I'm still managing to get away with using Office 2004; no-one has sent me a .docx yet.

Sometimes, on text-heavy projects, I'll send a client a Word template with style sheets to use before they even write a single word, so that A) I'm not having to decipher the hierarchy of the mess of heads and inconsistent subheads, pull quotes and footnotes, that usually come from a team publishing effort, and B) I can then quickly map those styles into my Quark or InDesign style sheets.

Sending out custom-made branded backdrops as jpgs for Powerpoint presentations is probably next on the list, as well as providing downsized and rasterised logos and so forth. I always repurpose and redraw graphs and so forth for print rather than using anything that comes out of Excel, because I'm usually working with that sort of material for high-end promotional pieces like corporate reports where things have to look good... besides, Excel doesn't work with spot plates, as far as I know. 😉

Occasionally, like today, someone sends me a Publisher file to extract content from, and although, in the abstract, it would be occasionally useful to be able to run Publisher through Parallels, for instance, I usually upload them to Zamzar to get something useful out of them, like a PDF that I can then pull into Illustrator.

Within the larger industry in the UK, if you're doing a lot of corporate work within the Office suite, it's still generally referred to as DTP.

 

[wallaby]

I've increasingly begun using CS3/CS4 for things I used to use Office for... InDesign PDFs trump any powerpoint presentation I've seen, although I've heard Keynote has some good templates. But there are times when it's easier to just load up Word or Excel without having to create a page layout or table in InDesign, so I still use those. Powerpoint can go to hell though.

 

[semicharmed]

Office is a necessary evil, just to work with files that others send me. It's extremely rare that I produce anything within the suite except for working with clients on production schedules in Word, which always need a bit of collaboration and to and fro-ing. I do not have any iWork apps on my Mac and I'm still managing to get away with using Office 2004; no-one has sent me a .docx yet.

And even if they do, the converter tool works pretty well, I've only had it fail to open one or two files.

 

[LERsince1991]

Office has now gone from the dock since I don't use it 😛

I realised a couple of weeks ago I-could-not-live-without-CS4 😎