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

Is iWork '09 good bang for the buck

L

lion-king

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 24, 2009
5
0
I am gettting a new macbook pro, and apple is giving a $30 off on iWork '09. I am just considering iWork '09 just because of this one-time discounted price I will get. I am not sure if I will miss this in future if i don't buy it. Anyways, I plan to install ms-office and openoffice. Currently, in my PC, I use mostly excel and rarely word and ppt.

Do you folks have any feedback of having ms-office, openoffice and iwork '09 installed? and which one do you use alot if you have all three installed?

Thanks a ton in advance.
 
lion-king said:
I am gettting a new macbook pro, and apple is giving a $30 off on iWork '09. I am just considering iWork '09 just because of this one-time discounted price I will get. I am not sure if I will miss this in future if i don't buy it. Anyways, I plan to install ms-office and openoffice. Currently, in my PC, I use mostly excel and rarely word and ppt.

Do you folks have any feedback of having ms-office, openoffice and iwork '09 installed? and which one do you use alot if you have all three installed?

Thanks a ton in advance.
Click to expand...

I have MS Office and OpenOffice installed. I mainly use MS Office, but somehow OpenOffice grabs the default for most file types, which is annoying, also because it loads a lot slower than MS Office.
I manually set the file-types for MS Office, but OpenOffice somehow keep changing them back...

If you come from Excel on Windows, you might need some time to adjust to to the Mac version, mainly because the input field for formula is no longer attached to the same window.

You should try iWork, before you buy, on a real project. I did so for Keynote and discovered that I am more happy with Powerpoint, but you may find different...
 
If you are installing MS Office, why are you installing Open Office? And why then would you want iWork?

That's like having three software suites that do the exact same thing, except one of them (MS Office) will do pretty much anything better.
 
Pages and Numbers....

.... I am a convert from PC to the Macworld. So having said that, I have found Pages and Numbers a lot more user friendly and workable. I have created multiple spreadsheets using Numbers and if you are just doing basic stuff I have found it to be as good as, if not better, than Excel.

However, if you are on a budget, you might just go ahead and use OpenOffice's version of "excel", which obviously is free.

I am yet to try out the fancier things that Pages and Numbers have to offer. I've also used Keynote and I liked it. Its got a easy to use interface and I'm pleased with iWork so far. I haven't checked out the '09 version, the one I have is the '08 version.
 
If you are using mostly Excel, then iWork will not work: Numbers is way inferior to Excel in everything but very small documents. It is slower than Excel 08 on my G4 PB, G5 iMac and intel C2D iMac, to the point of being unusable for large documents.

In addition, Numbers will not handle or open a spreadsheet containing more than a certain number of rows (more than ~30,000-ish).

On the other hand, if you are currently mostly using Word and particularly Powerpoint, then iWork is worth a look, especially at a discounted price.

Do not take just my word for it - go to Apple's site and download a trial version of iWork (on somebody else's Mac if you do not have yours yet) and play with the likes of Excel files that you expect to work with.
 
miles01110 said:
If you are installing MS Office, why are you installing Open Office? And why then would you want iWork?

That's like having three software suites that do the exact same thing, except one of them (MS Office) will do pretty much anything better.
Click to expand...

I need OpenOffice because sometimes people send me OpenOffice Documents. So far I have not come across a sensible stand-alone converter...
 
I bought Office 2008 for Mac and used that until iWork '09 came out. Now I use iWork '09 exclusively. I'm writing research papers for school and general office documents at work. I haven't had any complaints yet about odd formatting.
 
It seems iWork '09 understands Office 2007 OOXML, but not Office 2003 XML.

OpenOffice opens Excel 2003 XML documents, but it seems cell menu values don't work right.

iWork also doesn't handle VBA macros.
 
iWork is the way to go.

Up until iWork 09, MS Office had some advantages, but now iWork 09 has surpassed many MS Office features, and made productivity even faster with the app. I haven't really put much pressure on Numbers, but Pages is outstanding, considering some exclusive built in page layout tools that can't be found in MS Office, or Open Office.

Additionally, iWork is very affordable and with your $30 off, it couldn't be a better time for you to buy it.

Cheers.
 
iWork is fine unless you, or any of your friends, co-workers, etc. use Office in a serious way. I find Office 2004 for mac is the best, and can handle the new office formats.

On anything beyond simple documents made with office it doesn't quite convert them right - so if you interact with office, get office.

IF not, it is the way to go - even has some sharp looking templates. Especially Keynote over powerpoint.
 
drewster said:
iWork is fine unless you, or any of your friends, co-workers, etc. use Office in a serious way. I find Office 2004 for mac is the best, and can handle the new office formats.

On anything beyond simple documents made with office it doesn't quite convert them right - so if you interact with office, get office.

IF not, it is the way to go - even has some sharp looking templates. Especially Keynote over powerpoint.
Click to expand...

Ditto. I tried to use iWork 09 instead of Word and I found problems. Mostly, with the way Pages and Word differ with widows and orphans (formatting).

I had to submit a paper that had to be exactly 15 pages (give or take half a page). So, I wrote my paper in Pages and I finished right at the end of the 15th page.

I convert it to Word format and sent it to my professor. Apparently, when the document was opened in Word, the paper ran 16 1/2 pages (1 page and a half over). I was docked 5% for that.

So, I would recommend just using Office 2008 if your sharing with others. But if this is just for yourself, iWork 09 does the job.
 
I use Office 08 and I also recently installed iWork 09. I wanted to run them side by side to see which I like better. I'm pretty well versed in Word as my law office has used it for years. It's really the gold standard in word processing.

The reason I'm trying Pages is because Word (obviously) doesn't feel like native Apple software while Pages (and the rest of the iWork programs) is/does. I find that Pages is a little easier to use, as well. It seems a little "lighter" than Word, if that makes any sense. You can also save/open/convert Word docs in Pages with very little formatting issues. You can find a boatload of templates for both Office and iWork so I'm not sure that either has an edge on the other regarding this issue.

I haven't done much with Keynote and Numbers so I can't tell you how they compare with PP and Excel. PP and Excel are also the bar setters for presentation and spreadsheet software so if you use these programs regularly I think it would be important to make sure that Keynote and Numbers can save/open/convert PP and Excel docs with no loss in formatting.

FWIW, I used OpenOffice (on my office Windows machine) and didn't care for it. However, many people really like it and certainly the price is right.

For $39 (if I read your post correctly) I think it's a no-brainer. Get iWork 09 and compare the two side-by-side to see which one YOU like better. That's a relatively inexpensive experiment.
 
Anyone who thinks they're getting 100% compatibility by using Office 2004/2008 is dreaming. You can't even get 100% compatibility between different versions of Word on Windows.
 
pmullins11 said:
Anyone who thinks they're getting 100% compatibility by using Office 2004/2008 is dreaming. You can't even get 100% compatibility between different versions of Word on Windows.
Click to expand...

Perhaps -- but the odds are much higher than with iWork....

Although in my experience with Windows 2008 users, Mac 2004 and 2008 users I have not had any compatibility issues. Especially on the larger, complex documents that I have worked on, Word 2004 once the XML update is install is perfect.

It does get laggy after awhile though, remember it is still PPC code. (I hope it still works in Snow Leopard) iWork being native and Coccoa, and having less cruft than word being carbon. Also the iWork widgets are nicer, but would still recommend Word over it for any serious use.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back