Pages rules, Keynote rules, Microsoft Entourage rules, and the rest I give to the wonderful people at Neooffice. 
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iwork 06 vs office for mac 04 student edition
- Thread starter nickkelbackk
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After I realized that office is not universal binary and as im only in middle school I cant get it from a college im just doing to buy iwork as I am doing to be flat broke after buying my macbook
IJ Reilly said:
The times when I did try it I just couldn't get into it, so I've stuck with Office. When I'm typing documents, it usually is just a report or letter or something that doesn't need a template, so I never gave Pages a fair shot. I tried to create a school project brochure on it, and had some trouble so I gave up. Office also had a "sample brochure" and wasn't any better so I should've stuck with Pages.
buffalo said:
Report, letters -- they're all candidates for templates, assuming you ever plan on writing another one! Templates can include only paragraph and font styles, if that's all you want or need. I really appreciate having these set up before I start writing.
Office is slow if you don't upgrade RAM
Just to confirm, on a stock 512mb of RAM Macbook Microsoft Office runs slower than molasses. In fact its totally pointless. Don't bother with Office unless you are going to uprgrade your RAM, anyone who tells you different is a no good dirty liar. Seriously, I was boggled by the slowness of Office under Rosetta when I switched from an iBook G4. And running other apps like iTunes alongside Office:Rosetta is right out of the question with 512 RAM, so is looking at your non-universal widgets. Also, NeoOffice is crap right now so don't let anyone tell you to use that either. What I've found is that you are basically screwed with a macbook unless you have at least 1gb RAM.
Just to confirm, on a stock 512mb of RAM Macbook Microsoft Office runs slower than molasses. In fact its totally pointless. Don't bother with Office unless you are going to uprgrade your RAM, anyone who tells you different is a no good dirty liar. Seriously, I was boggled by the slowness of Office under Rosetta when I switched from an iBook G4. And running other apps like iTunes alongside Office:Rosetta is right out of the question with 512 RAM, so is looking at your non-universal widgets. Also, NeoOffice is crap right now so don't let anyone tell you to use that either. What I've found is that you are basically screwed with a macbook unless you have at least 1gb RAM.
Badandy said:
Much of the laity seems to think that MS Word files are a technological lingua-franca, emailing .doc files back and forth when they want to distribute papers, press releases etc. The irony of using software that costs several hundred dollars to freely disseminate information does not seem to have sunk in for many.
The OS X and Windows versions of words are fully compatible, and you can buy very steeply discounted copies of Word through various sources, or use a free alternative capable of reading and creating Word files such as OpenOffice.org, AbiWord, StarOffice, OS X TextEdit, or others. If you are a science person, try a LaTeX typesetting program.
All of the above mentioned software can generate and read basic Word files- however files with elaborate formatting or those using unusual fonts might not translate properly in either direction. (Personally, I have never had issues with opening Word files in OpenOffice, AbiWord, TextEdit, or Pages, though I've heard of others who have. I've had no experience with StarOffice, from which OpenOffice is derived.)
I personally have found Word, with its penchant for getting in the way of spelling, formatting, and writing in general, to be more trouble than it's worth, and have switched to using simpler software (specifically, LaTeX) to write my papers. However, regardless of you buy Word or use alternative software when they need to open Word files sent to them by others, I'd encourage all to use open standards such as rtf, txt, pdf, ps (PostScript), etc. when sending files to others.
Excel is a different story. OpenOffice & company's spreadsheet programs are decent, but I still find Excel's features to be marginally superior. I usually use Matlab, though...so I might not be the best judge of this.
I'd still go with iWork though...if only for keynote. Great piece of software.
How compatible is pages with MS office. I have office for mac and and I would rather use pages (because it's apple). I don't feel like ready through all of the posts and searching.....sorry normally I do....I would just like someone to let me know. Thanks for putting up with my temporary bout with laziness
macdaddy121 said:How compatible is pages with MS office. I have office for mac and and I would rather use pages (because it's apple). I don't feel like ready through all of the posts and searching.....sorry normally I do....I would just like someone to let me know. Thanks for putting up with my temporary bout with laziness
The above explanation pretty much says it all. No other word processor is going to perfectly translate the Word format, but many do a pretty good job. Pages does well, as long as the formatting isn't too complicated.
IJ Reilly said:
Thanks but I just realized if I have a copy of MS Office for Mac than it doesn't even matter. HAHAHA......wow....I'm out of it...Thanks though.
You forgot to mention that even the different installations of Word often have trouble with translating the formatting intent from a different install. It gets worse when you're dealing with different versions of Word, but I still see significant formatting changes from one copy of Word XP to another at work.IJ Reilly said:
B
balamw said:
True story, and to make matters even more (un)interesting, unless you're willing to stick to the boring and ugly ubiquitous fonts for all of your documents, then you're going to have a problem there also with sharing. I swear, I wish I didn't have to see a single other document using nothing but Times or Arial -- but that's what you're going to get with a single word processor being declared the "standard."
And to the poster who said that Pages isn't really a word processor, the response is no, this isn't true. You really do have a choice, if you want to exercise it.
Aika said:The current release of NeoOffice is free, multi-lingual and intel native. The upcoming big release will be free come the end of august too: the early access program is to drum up donations really
OpenOffice.org is quite fast on my machine. Found that there is a German version (I had to scroll the page
) but it's an ok experience. NeoOffice for me was always really slow on my old G4.I just wished X11 didn't open xterm everytime I clicked on Open Office.
EDIT: Well you can't print from the X11 environment... But Export as PDF works... I'd try NeoOffice when it gets out of Alpha/Beta though.