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iWork '08 for college

GusR9

GusR9

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 20, 2007
72
0
Hello guys, I'm wondering if buying iWork '08 would be a good solution/substitute for Microsoft Office. The programs that I'm going to use is Pages and Keynote, I know about the quality of Keynote and that it is a very good subsitute for PowerPoint but what about of Pages?? I'm going to use it for school works and similar stuff, it is a good solution/subsitute??
I have Microsoft Office 2004 but I really like iWork for its simplicity and easy of use. Should I buy this version??
What do you think?
 
This really has to be determined on a per person basis. What sort of course will you be doing.

How much is the student version? If it is not much, again per person, then the cost to get Keynote is worth it and then Pages is a bonus.
 
This is a question I am currently considering myself. I am already a Keynote user and to hear audible gasps from old academics when they see some of the effects (used tastefully - like the cube effect for a related concept where you can go off to another cube face and come back to the main topic) is quite fun!

Pages is another thing altogether. I'm working on a fairly long document at the minute in Word and I tried to convert it to Pages and it looked good, worked well apart from the table of contents. I think it has improved a lot in the latest version.

Out of inertia I will probably keep using Word, but Keynote is worth the academic price of iWork on its own! xUKHCx is right. You could buy it and try it. If it is good enough don't buy Office, but you haven't lost if you need to.
 
Definitely check to see how much your university charges students for MS Office. The student version of MS Office 2004 (word, excel, powerpoint and entourage) costs LESS than iWork '08 at my university.

Also, if you plan on taking science courses and/or statistics courses then Numbers will not be a viable option. There is no ability to do regression analysis. Being a chemistry graduate student, not having this function makes Numbers useless.

The new Keynote is nice and the upgraded Pages feels more like a viable word processor. The user interface is less cluttered and it feels snappier than Word (probably a rosetta vs. UB issue).

Overall, I would love to be able to substitute iWork for OFfice but I don't believe it's possible if you are in the science field.
 
I have a question about this...if I make a presentation on keynote, is there anyway I can run it on a windows based machine...I can't really drag my computer to class, not a laptop, and the school mostly has windows based PCs.
 
I think that iWork is OK when you're making documents or presentations for yourself... you make them and don't pass them off to anyone else (or if you do, they're using iWork as well)... but university involves a lot of sharing documents... downloading .pps files from WebCT, editing your friends' .docs, sending around a group project for everyone to work on... and when there's that much file-swapping, eventually iWork will stumble, and won't import or export something properly... so I don't think that it's appropriate for students to rely 100% on iWork... get iWork for when you make your own presentations, but I think that Office is unavoidable... it's the standard, and you're only making trouble for yourself if you avoid it. If it comes to one or the other, I would choose Office. If you can afford both, get both. At the very least, get Neo Office, though I don't think that that's a complete solution.
 
I'm a Law student and well I already have Microsoft Office the student version but I really like iWork so what do you think? Should I buy it?
 
DO NOT GET IWORK!! Get the Office Student Edition, it is much better and at least the Word and Excel are the same as the Windows version (not Powerpoint, it is not compatible - really messes up, but I never use Powerpoint anyway).

I have both of them anyway.
 
Everyone already knows that Keynote rocks the socks off of Powerpoint. Pages is getting closer to a viable alternative, and thanks to the new version might in fact be one. But I think to guarantee head-ache free sharing Office would be wise, for Word, if anything. You could try iWork and test its conversion/importing abilities, but I think Office is needed and if you want rockin presentations, iWork is needed (c'mon everyone knows Keynote alone is worth the price)
 
iWork would be great if it had a equation editor... If your not taking anything technical then you will not need this feature. I think iPages is great but I would love to have built in functionality for an equation editor. Again if your using a spreadsheet nothing beats Excel functionality. It all depends on what you need.

For $49 (download version not box version) you can't beat the price for iWork.

Nuc
 
kikobarbada said:
(not Powerpoint, it is not compatible - really messes up, but I never use Powerpoint anyway).
Click to expand...

I open up PowerPoint presentations made on the Mac version in Windows all the time and vice versa and they come out just fine. If you're using Mac-only fonts, you'll have problems in Windows, but the same can be said for fonts in Word.

I'd go with Office, just for compatibilty. I used the previous version of Keynote to make a presentation, exported to PPT (since I was presenting on a Windows machine) and it looked pretty bad. Fortunately, I was able to open it up in PowerPoint and fix everything before the presentation. Export capabilities aren't 100% up to par (unless that's fixed in iWork 08)
 
IJ Reilly said:
Several threads are currently running on this topic. You may wish to use the board search function to find them.
Click to expand...

^^^Listen to this man, he's very wise.

Anyhow, if you're not going to be working with others too often, then Office is a waste. Sending documents to teachers/professors should be done in PDF format anyways, so you won't need to worry about things too much. If they do put up a stink, you can always ask them why they need a format that isn't read-only;)
 
The word processing mode in Pages 08 is very nice from what I've used in the trial. I'm at least going to give it a shot this fall to see if is good enough to replace Word.
 
zioxide said:
The word processing mode in Pages 08 is very nice from what I've used in the trial. I'm at least going to give it a shot this fall to see if is good enough to replace Word.
Click to expand...

I think the main concern for many is speed. Pages used to be slow for large documents (at least many have claimed this, I personally have no idea). Have you tried it out with 20+ page documents? How's the performance?
 
I wouldn't use iWork as a replacement for MS Office.

iWork is pretty compatible with MS Office but why not just use MS office. I haven't used the new spreadsheet app but excel is used by everybody and is probably more advanced.

I find Pages to be such a overly power hungry app for what it is. Keynote, however, I think is a great application. When everyone presents there cookie cutter PowerPoint presentations (all looking exactly the same), I amaze everyone with the awesome effects and different look of Keynote.

If you have the money, I would get MS office and iWork, but use MS office primarily.
 
All I really needed was a decent word processing program for my upcoming classes so I opted to pick up a copy of iWork '08. It's been working great for me so far, but like many have already said, it depends on the classes you take. For me, iWork does the job just fine.
 
Most colleges have discounts which price MS Office Student at 74$ at their own student stores. I would get Keynote and MS office since I been hearing and seeing so much better Keynote presentation compare to those done by PowerPoint...

But when it comes to sharing files with other PC users, Word, and Excel are a good tool to have.
 
They give free copies of Office 2004 for Mac in my college.:)

But for some unknown reason I still want iWork:p


Damn you Apple, you have made me want everything you sell
 
you send me office and il send you iwork if you want. i work is really great though, and totally office compatible
 
If you do decide to go with iWork it would be an idea to download either NeoOffice or OpenOffice. If there are compatibility issues you can copy the work you've done in iWork into one of these programmes.
 
I personally use a mixture of Pages and a bit of NeoOffice for my schoolwork...and I've never had compatibility problems...
 
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