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When I bought my MBP, I used NeoOffice for a while; the price was great, and it was overall a solid set of apps, but it had a few bugs that bothered me, in addition to being hard to navigate when I couldn't figure out how to do some things I knew how to do in MS Office (having used that for many years on PCs).

I've since bought Office 2008, and other than taking a bit to open when you launch it initially, I really like it. Before it was released, they talked about how they had a dedicated Mac development team for it, and how they didn't just want to make a port of the Windows version, but rather, wanted to make it fit in with the Mac aesthetic, and make it its own product. I definitely feel as though they've succeeded in this regard, and I definitely prefer Office 2008 to it's PC equivalent, Office 2007.

I bought iWork because I wanted Keynote, plain and simple. I launched the other apps briefly, but didn't really use them, because playing around in them for a bit (especially Pages) just felt strange; in the end, I didn't see any improvement over my experience in Word, and I felt as though there were things missing that I wanted to have at my fingertips. In all fairness, I haven't given much time to trying to learn the programs, and if I did, it's very possible that I would grow to love them. But since I haven't, I use Word and Excel for my word processing and spreadsheet needs, respectively.

Keynote, though -- Keynote is wonderful. :) I still think iWork was worth the money, just so I could have it.

Take care,
Sojourn
 
I use Pages for my graduate level research papers, and don't have any problems whatsoever. It does take a little time to figure out how Pages does everything, but now I have all my formatting setup as a template so I don't have to deal with formatting ever again.

As others have said, Keynote beats the pants off of PowerPoint. I definitely think iWork is worth the money.
 
I'm a grad student and I have iWork, Office 2004, and Office 2008. If I have to work with others in my group to write grant proposals and such I use Office 2008 (2004 is too slow and doesn't integrate well with Office 2007), but I hate it and it does not work with spaces. For everything else I use iWork, it is simple to use and works very well. The biggest short coming I have found is in Numbers, there is no way to add a trend line to a data set. This isn't a very big deal though because I usually use Kaleidagraph to do data analysis.
 
I love iWork.

I use Pages constantly.

Numbers is NOT a replacement to Excel for serious spreadsheet work, but it is good enough for the casual user.

Keynote blows Powerpoint out of the water.

The biggest missing feature in iWork is the ability to do a mail merge from Numbers (it can do one from your address book, though). I don't ever really need to mail merge, but my girlfriend does so she can't use iWork.
 
I use Office 2008 (2004 is too slow and doesn't integrate well with Office 2007), but I hate it and it does not work with spaces.

That's a good point. However, in my experience, it's not that it doesn't work with Spaces, but it does sometimes mess up -- for example, it sometimes misplaces the formatting palette in Word in a Space you're switching between. An annoying bug, for sure, but not a dealbreaker in my opinion.

After reading all these great reviews of Pages, though, I'm thinking that maybe I should get around to learning it properly. The little I saw of it felt like a poor Word-wannabe, but if there is a good reason behind the rhyme, it might be good to check out. After all, I'm always open to a better computing experience, and Apple does tend to give those in its software products. :)

Take care,
Sojourn
 
I have both iWork & Office '08. I like iWork for fliers and Keynote presentations. I like Office '08 for spredsheats and reports/school papers. IMO Numbers is in a totally different league then Excel, but Keynote is 100000000% better then Excel. Word and Keynote both are useful for different things. I would recomend getting both if you can afford them both. If not I would go with Office '08 (dear God did I just recommend a M$FT product!?? Never speak of this again:D).

Don
 
First of all if you need Office you need Office nothing else comes close, however most of us don't really need or even use a lot of what Office brings to the table. That's where iWork and NeoOffice (NeoOffice is just OpenOffice ported to the OS X platform) come in.

When it comes to design and ease of use I really like iWork, but it doesn't play nice with MS Office files. First off it has to convert them files before it can open them then it can only save in it's own package file type. It can export into a MS office file type, but if you're going to need to bounce the file back in forth with non iWork users you're going to have to maintain a copy in each file format. NeoOffice can read and write MS Office files and while its default is to save new files in the open document format that can be changed via preferences to several other formats including Microsoft's. On the other hand I've always found NeoOffice's UI to be a bit clunky and unexciting. It works and it's not hard to use it's just well ... meh.

The gist of this is that if interoperability is more important than UI don't get iWork.
 
After reading all these great reviews of Pages, though, I'm thinking that maybe I should get around to learning it properly. The little I saw of it felt like a poor Word-wannabe, but if there is a good reason behind the rhyme, it might be good to check out. After all, I'm always open to a better computing experience, and Apple does tend to give those in its software products.

A short list of features you should learn about, if you'd like to appreciate how Pages does things differently and better than Word:

The Inspector
Paragraph and Character styles
Using and making templates
 
appreciate how Pages does things differently and better than Word:

The Inspector
Paragraph and Character styles
Using and making templates

I used pages for my design work at work for many years (moved up to indesign / cs3 now) and found it multi talented - the inspector is brilliant and the general text manipulation is amazing.

If I wasn't forced into it every day of my working life (I work in a print shop) I would never use word again. The sad fact of it is that I am, and therefore I may never use pages again.

Buy pages / iwork if you want to do things in a nice way, buy office if you need to do them in a compatible way. I guess thats the sad reality of the mac user. :(:apple:
 
I like iWork in general for home, but not for enterprise use. I receive far too many Word documents, Powerpoint presentations, and Excel spreadsheets from my boss that don't load correctly in iWork even as read-only; I certainly would never attempt to use it to edit such documents. Even though I bought it for work, I now use it only at home. As slow as it is and as much as I dislike it, NeoOffice if far more compatible (and free!), so it is what I use everyday at work. I also have Office 2004, but it is too out of date for serious use at my work, and I don't plan to upgrade to the 2008 version.
 
That's a good point. However, in my experience, it's not that it doesn't work with Spaces, but it does sometimes mess up -- for example, it sometimes misplaces the formatting palette in Word in a Space you're switching between. An annoying bug, for sure, but not a dealbreaker in my opinion.

For me the active window jumps around to different spaces and separates from the formatting bars, this happens when I flip between spaces to look at a pdf or the web. I still can't find a guaranteed way to get them back together, but I really haven't put that much time into it. Spaces is one of my favorite features though so it is probably a bigger deal to me than to others.

The other thing that really bothers me about 2008 is the microsoft update, it takes forever and slows down my whole system and sometimes crashes it completely. The computer is pretty much unusable while it is updating (2.2 ghz MBP).

But even though I hate Office 2008 it is a necessary evil for me and it maybe to the OP as well, I recommend looking closely at what you will be using the suite for and choose appropriately, if you will be working with others on group projects you will probably need Office 2008. I got lucky and got Office 2008 S&T edition for free after buying 2004 for twenty something bucks on amazon (I'm pretty sure the deal has expired), but having both has worked out really good for me.
 
keynote(for presentions & office

When I bought my MBP, I used NeoOffice for a while; the price was great, and it was overall a solid set of apps, but it had a few bugs that bothered me, in addition to being hard to navigate when I couldn't figure out how to do some things I knew how to do in MS Office (having used that for many years on PCs).

I've since bought Office 2008, and other than taking a bit to open when you launch it initially, I really like it. Before it was released, they talked about how they had a dedicated Mac development team for it, and how they didn't just want to make a port of the Windows version, but rather, wanted to make it fit in with the Mac aesthetic, and make it its own product. I definitely feel as though they've succeeded in this regard, and I definitely prefer Office 2008 to it's PC equivalent, Office 2007.

I bought iWork because I wanted Keynote, plain and simple. I launched the other apps briefly, but didn't really use them, because playing around in them for a bit (especially Pages) just felt strange; in the end, I didn't see any improvement over my experience in Word, and I felt as though there were things missing that I wanted to have at my fingertips. In all fairness, I haven't given much time to trying to learn the programs, and if I did, it's very possible that I would grow to love them. But since I haven't, I use Word and Excel for my word processing and spreadsheet needs, respectively.

Keynote, though -- Keynote is wonderful. :) I still think iWork was worth the money, just so I could have it.

Take care,
Sojourn

sojourn:
I am so glad that you mentioned that you use keynotoes and office. that is what i was going to ask. i see the value of both and was curious if anyone else did the same
 
iWork is great, although I still write my papers and essays in Word, that's just because Pages has all these templates and I just would like to create a solid 5 paragraph essay, without any templates or fancy stuff. Word is easier to create everything by yourself, but Pages is also great.

Keynote makes presentations so much simpler, I have since learned that most ppl dont listen when you have PowerPoint with a bunch of text displayed, its easier thru pictures and phrases that help expreess the mains points. Numbers is cool, but seeing as this is only the first version, I think theres much much more coming in version 2..0.
 
iWork is great, although I still write my papers and essays in Word, that's just because Pages has all these templates and I just would like to create a solid 5 paragraph essay, without any templates or fancy stuff. Word is easier to create everything by yourself, but Pages is also great.

Just use the included blank template. Better yet, create your own blank template with the paragraph and text styles you like to use. Word isn't easier because it makes this stuff so much harder to do that hardly anyone bothers.

I keep being reminded of the book which was so popular a number of years ago, "The Mac is Not a Typewriter." It was all about using your Mac's typography features to create more visually appealing documents. It seems as though Word has turned most people's PCs right back into typewriters.
 
iWork is great, although I still write my papers and essays in Word, that's just because Pages has all these templates and I just would like to create a solid 5 paragraph essay, without any templates or fancy stuff. Word is easier to create everything by yourself, but Pages is also great.

Ahh, the days of the five-paragraph essay. . . ;)

I've been working on my senior thesis all day. I was writing the text in TextEdit and then copying over to Pages. I always liked this better. Typing in Pages just felt like it had too much latency. I liked the feel of TextEdit -- it was a little more snappy.

There's going to be a lot of math in this paper. To tell the truth, I'll probably copy this paper over to Mathematica and set the type there. I'm not very good with Tex. Mathematica's a little simpler to learn.

I use Numbers for simple things like a checkbook and it's great. It's simpler than Excel -- that's the point. I don't need an Excel sheet for something like a checkbook. If I have to do serious analysis, that's what Stata is for (At this point, I prefer using Excel to export an Excel file as a .csv file, importing the .csv file into Stata, then working with the data there.). My friend is an accountant and he uses Excel all the time. For academics, it seems like using Excel for your data analysis will bring condecending looks:

Professor: I love this paper. Could you send me the Stata file so I could recreate your results?
Me: Actually, I did everything in Excel.
Professor: Oh. . . that's. . . one way to do things. . . I suppose.
 
Is it good? Bad? How does it compare to Office 2008? In the past I have heard that it's Office support was hit or miss and had limited features. I will be using all of the applications it contains, and would like to feel comfortable knowing that it plays nice with Office, and can do whatever I want it to do. Are the features numerous? Useful? Is it buggy or rock solid?

Thanks for your answers. I have tried searching with limited success and did not find a definitive answer to my question. I currently use Office 2004 for Mac and would like something that... sucks less.
I use iWork for home use.

Numbers is fine for lightweight home use. It's a toy compared to Excel and would be completely inadequate for professional use.

Pages I rarely use. It opens my older Word files, but the formatting isn't exactly preserved; I've not mustered the strength to figure it out.

Keynote is superb and is a complete replacement for PowerPoint.
 
the only but is numbers

I've just finished my second postgraduate thesis last week (I'm on my 7th year and second degree of postgraduate training) and I did it all in Pages, and at the end just exported it to PDF to burn the CD the university wanted to have an electronic copy of my thesis. I know is nothing as lengthy as a novel, but hey, I invested lots and lots of time preparing for writing those 70+ pages.

I did all of my note taking, paper research, brain storming and concept organizing in iOrganize (a great, great tool for this kind of task), and then just copied, structured and polished it on pages. I used Numbers for the data harvest, organizing and number crunching (I like to do my statistical analysis twice, once in SPSS and then confirm the main data on Excel, or in this case, numbers). Finally, wrote all the results, discussion and conclusions on Pages. Pages was great for writing, editing, inserting bibliography, paginating, laying out the main page, and pretty much everything I needed to do for the text document.

Last week I also delivered a Keynote presentation to my peers, in order to get their Vo.Bo. for the final draft of my thesis. Everyone was very impressed both at my data and at the presentation. I mean, the visual kick of Keynote is way beyond Powerpoint.

BTW, the graphics and tables came out great from Numbers. However, I must admit that I was more than once frustrated from the statistical and power crunching weakness of Numbers. I ended installing just Excel because I couldn't stand the limitations of Numbers.

So, Pages IS capable of serious word processing... Keynote is way superior to powerpoint and Numbers is a great pain in the ass for number crunching.
 
I've just finished a 100 page business document in Pages. The document started out in Word because I was collaborating with Windows users but the task of putting together the final draft fell to me.

I spent most of yesterday trying to finish the document in Word 2008 and it was a painful experience. The program crashed on me about a dozen times and as it got larger, my ability to move around the document was greatly reduced.

Late last night I finally reached the breaking point and decided to use Pages instead. The conversion created a few hiccups but they were easily overcome. Pages handled the document much better; scrolling was quick, objects were easy to place, and there were no crashes. I exported to PDF to send the final version of the document to my client.

iWork doesn't convert Office documents back and forth accurately enough to be seamless and Numbers is certainly a weak link, but I'm hoping the next version of iWork allows me to take Office off of my hard drive for good.
 
Thanks for making me aware of this trial! I'm downloading it now on stolen wireless using the 802.11b airport card, so it's going to take 15 minutes. Guess I'll try opening my work schedules and old word documents and take everything for a real spin tomorrow.

As you mentioned also, $80 seems like a steal even next to the $150 home and student, and seems downright FREE next to a $500 copy of Office Pro.

Best Buy always has MS Office on sale for 99.99 and if you have a Micro Center they have it on sale a lot for 89.99.
 
Something about Pages just never seems right to me.

It feels too "Artsy" and "Creative" for everything I need to do.
Even it's templates for things like letters and resumes just don't feel quite professional. (and I'm a High School student :p)

The truth is, if I handed in any assignment formed using the templates that Pages has...I would probably irritate teachers who typically look for "straight to the point" assignments. They don't really care for the "Oh look they put a nice little photo of Jesus in their Essay" as much as they did back in middle school (well atleast at my school).

I always think of Pages as more of a Mac alternative to Microsoft Publisher rather than Word.

But if you really don't want to spend the cash on MS Office, download NeoOffice, which is an amazing office suite.
 
I love iWork. I was a die hard MS Word and Powerpoint user before it came along. No I don't even have MS Office installed on my Mac.
 
I write for a living. For a long time I used Office v.X, which I got in 2003 with a TiBook. I really liked it. Then I decided that I better try out some alternatives and get more up to date. I tried Office 2008 and it was awful - slow and buggy on my MBP, and could barely run on my PBG4. Then I tried Pages and liked it a lot, but exporting all of my documents to PDF or Doc to share them with people was a pain.

In the end I went back to Office v.X - but in the future I could see standardizing on Pages. As far as I'm concerned Office 2008 is worthless. I also like the Excel that comes with Office v.X.
 
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