iWork '09... Goodbye to Office '08???

[Michael CM1]

Eventually, everyone will be using a newer version of Word, which will include .docx As to print to PDF, not everyone can edit a PDF, a .doc, .docx, .rtf can be edited.

I at least want to put the people who assume everybody has the latest Office in that special place. There are people who send us rosters in f#%@ing Excel format. We literally don't have Office on any of our computers. Usually, it's OK because TextEdit will open a .doc file. But now we either get stupid Excel files (.xlsx) or the new .docx files that our computers won't open.

What is it out there that people need new document formats for? What has changed so much from 15 years ago that we can't have some format that doesn't change and is the default for Word? For most of the stuff I have ever done, I haven't seen a change from when I used Microsoft Works for Windows 3.1. I needed text to indent, tabs to work, a little bold, a little underline, maybe color. So as I end my rant I ask again, what is so bloody fantastic that requires new document formats that require an upgrade?

 

[dukebound85]

I at least want to put the people who assume everybody has the latest Office in that special place. There are people who send us rosters in f#%@ing Excel format. We literally don't have Office on any of our computers. Usually, it's OK because TextEdit will open a .doc file. But now we either get stupid Excel files (.xlsx) or the new .docx files that our computers won't open.

What is it out there that people need new document formats for? What has changed so much from 15 years ago that we can't have some format that doesn't change and is the default for Word? For most of the stuff I have ever done, I haven't seen a change from when I used Microsoft Works for Windows 3.1. I needed text to indent, tabs to work, a little bold, a little underline, maybe color. So as I end my rant I ask again, what is so bloody fantastic that requires new document formats that require an upgrade?

jeeze just download open office for those times you get excel files. that handles all of offices formats and its free

 

[macrem]

Most people who think they need Office only think they need Office.

So true!

I think Open Office 3 (version Goo no less ) is the clear winner for me. It does everything, is light on resources, keeps getting better... and it's free!

Totally agreed. MS Office looks like a major waste of $$.

At least the price of iWork seems reasonable, so if it is somehow more intuitive or does some things OOo cannot...

A few people have mentioned though Numbers cannot link cells between worksheets That'd be a showstopper right there for me.

Btw I have never tried MS Office 2008 on OS X. Is the UI like MS Office 2007 for Windows? Someone at work got MS Office 2007 and the UI looks really weird. One day I overheard three people spending ~20 minutes trying to find "Save as..." It sounded as though it would be easier to migrate from MS Office 2005 to OpenOffice 3 than to MS Office 2007.

As an aside, if you are familiar with the point of XML and want to have a laugh, open a new doc in Office 2005 or before, type "this is a sentence." or similar, save as XML, then open that XML in an XML or text editor and try to locate (forget parsing) your sentence.

Then, for extra credit, come back and tell us if Microsoft does not intentionally try to sabotage standards and how is that good for the advancement of technology?

 

[Hot Snowboarder]

Office 2007 interface is excellent once you get used to it. If they offered the same interface on the mac version it'd be an excellent buy! I find the current Office 08 interface horrible to be honest. All the drop down menu's - its just anti-intuitive and not useable on a laptop.

I became an avid iWork user with 08, the release of 09 has reenforced my love for the software. I prefer pages over word, but it still doesn't offer landscape and portrait pages in the same document. Keynote just tears powerpoint to pieces. Excel still beats numbers unfortunately.

 

[EmperorDarius]

I prefer iWork for everything, and recommend it for anyone.
MS Office is the only program with which I really had trouble. And I actually had more trouble opening office files with MS Office then with iWork.

 

[nanoboy]

Office 2007 interface is excellent once you get used to it. If they offered the same interface on the mac version it'd be an excellent buy! I find the current Office 08 interface horrible to be honest. All the drop down menu's - its just anti-intuitive and not useable on a laptop.

I became an avid iWork user with 08, the release of 09 has reenforced my love for the software. I prefer pages over word, but it still doesn't offer landscape and portrait pages in the same document. Keynote just tears powerpoint to pieces. Excel still beats numbers unfortunately.

Totally agree on the UI of Office for Mac 2008, it's horrible! I wonder if MS deliberately made it that way in order to differentiate their Windows version and discourage people to switch to Mac ?

I've also switched completely to using iWork '08 and not touched Office '08 (and there's no need to for me) for over a year now. Pages is much more pleasurable to write in (UI done the Mac way, no junks), I think I also tried to make a landscape page within a portrait document, can't remember if I succeeded using section break....? I had one huge chart I needed to put in which fits better in landscape, I think I ended up rotating the chart instead.

For those who like to embed their Excel graphs into their Word document, I'd advice don't do it!! I done it in the past, and somehow the graphs won't display, causing troubles. Maybe that's due to I moved my file around (the .doc not in the same folder as my excel file). Instead of having to keep track for these things and prevent potential disaster in the last minute of submitting your document, it's much safer to export everything as an image and paste it into your documents. It's not too much of a hassle of you needed to change your data and paste another graph in. For that reason, I wouldn't embed graphs from Numbers into my Pages file either (i think you can do that in iWork '09?).

Numbers for me suffice for my scientific/engineering data organisation and plotting. If someone needs really data intensive (like accounting) operations with large numbers of worksheets linked to each other, then that might be a different story. If someone need to deal with a huge amount of data (like in astronomy - data from telescope, locating star maps etc.), they'd be using some more suitable programs than Excel anyway.

 

[Brammy]

What is it out there that people need new document formats for? What has changed so much from 15 years ago that we can't have some format that doesn't change and is the default for Word? For most of the stuff I have ever done, I haven't seen a change from when I used Microsoft Works for Windows 3.1. I needed text to indent, tabs to work, a little bold, a little underline, maybe color. So as I end my rant I ask again, what is so bloody fantastic that requires new document formats that require an upgrade?

I think it's the Document Elements stuff, like bibliographies. Sure, they may be useless to you, but I used them a lot for research papers. If I keep the file as a .docx format, I can right click on the elements and up date them with new citations. If I save it as a .doc file I lose the ability to do that.

 

[Patillac]

Sorry, maybe I missed it...
but if you can export from iWork to a .doc file, wouldn't that make Office and iWork compatible? Sorry if this is a mundane questions!!

Also, I've never worked with iWork, but every presentation that i've seen created from keynote BLOWS away the PowerPoint, and I just got a job where presentations are gonna be important - so I think I'm gonna take the dive into iWork. Just my 2 cents!!

 

[kepardue]

Unfortunately, office documents are where the web was in 1997: there are half a dozen different file formats with one format having greater market share but being far from open and standard. I've got issues committing to *any* single office suite until we reach a point where office documents are like HTML: vendor neutral and displayed reasonably consistently no matter what is being used to view them. I'm a big fan of OpenDocument for this, but given the conditions I can also see why Apple decided to create its own format for the suite.

Professionally, I'll have to continue to use OpenOffice.org since it's cross platform and allows me to collaborate with my coworkers. My company maintains a set of 78 tediously-formatted workbook units that are in a combination of ODT/MS Word format. But personally? The last time I actually had to share one of my documents for collaboration was probably in college some 10 years ago. The few things that I send out nowadays could easily be sent as PDF. The user experience in iWork is sooooooo much better than OpenOffice for too many reasons to list, and yet I still use OpenOffice because I can't commit to be locked into a single platform. I've been reconsidering this lately, especially realizing that Apple's file format is not only XML-based but documented. I'm considering that I should be less of an open standards junkie and instead actually enjoy using my computer more. Nobody seems to care about OpenDocument, after all.

Much to my dismay though, when/if Apple does add native file support for another format to iWork, it'll likely be OOXML rather than ODF. OOXML will be more widely used in the market place and Apple has already contributed large chunks to the OOXML spec.

More of my internal debate in the thread I started here.

 

[kepardue]

What is it out there that people need new document formats for? What has changed so much from 15 years ago that we can't have some format that doesn't change and is the default for Word? For most of the stuff I have ever done, I haven't seen a change from when I used Microsoft Works for Windows 3.1. I needed text to indent, tabs to work, a little bold, a little underline, maybe color. So as I end my rant I ask again, what is so bloody fantastic that requires new document formats that require an upgrade?

The main reason there is a focus on new document formats is because the old .doc, .ppt, etc. formats are closed and controlled by a single vendor. This can lead to roughly as stupid as a situation as having a wealth of valuable data from the 1970's that's completely useless now because nobody makes a machine to read them. The new file formats, both OpenDocument and OOXML, are obviously XML based and human readable. In the case of OpenDocument, it also has official implementations across all three platforms: Linux, Windows, and Mac, something that I don't think can be claimed about the .doc formats. Also, there are things being pushed today that the old file formats can't support. Just look at Numbers' ability to have multiple-tables-on-a-sheet. Can you express that in .xls? I don't think so. Improvement brings new storage requirements, let's just hope that these new storage requirements also become standard so that we don't wind up right back where we started.

 

[tflash]

My daughters are doing applied chemistry & pharmacy courses. We've all moved over to Macs & use NeoOffice, which does a reasonable job.
However, the biggest drawbacks for Numbers 08 was inability to do scatter charts. This has been solved for Numbers 09 - but she does a lot of team assignments with other students & trying to send a scatter chart, heavily formatted docs, from Numbers to an Excel user looks to be a problem (as is case using NeoOffice).
Using the trial of iWork 09, a Numbers file exported as an Excel file seems to suffer huge losses by time gets to Excel (numbers are all recorded but no chart).
Will Office 2008 overcome these headaches? Any good "work-arounds" for NeoOffice or iWork 09?
Any advice appreciated!

 

[nsbio]

I don't understand why I (that's I as in me, personally, not generally) should pay $150-200+ for Office when I get iWork which is comparable in many ways, better in some other ways, and regardless of either of those things, just as good for me (better because I like the interface more) for $79.

IMHO

Reason #1 - Apple iWork is $ 79 per annum. Office is $150-200 per ~3 years. There is not much of a price advantage there, unless you want to hold on to an old version of iWork for long.

Reason #2 - Excel has no alternatives for scientific work.

Reason #3 - The preceding post illustrates a group of users who benefit from having Office instead of iWorks. Apple's "just works" just is not enough - it must actually work, and in that regard Office 2007 Windows >Office08 Mac >iWork

 

[kuwisdelu]

Reason #1 - Apple iWork is $ 79 per annum. Office is $150-200 per ~3 years. There is not much of a price advantage there, unless you want to hold on to an old version of iWork for long.

That doesn't change how much you paid for the program. Upgrading every year or not is completely optional. It's not like the old program suddenly got worse.

Reason #2 - Excel has no alternatives for scientific work.

Scientific?

I can see financial, but when I need to do scientific work, I'm going to be using something a lot more advanced than Excel, like SAS. Excel isn't worth much to me for scientific work, because once my needs get past basic spreadsheets and plots (for which Numbers is fine), Excel just isn't going to cut it for the analyses I want to do.

 

[jive turkey]

I would suggest that $79x3 years is better than $200 once in this case. It will cost you a couple of steak dinners over the course of 36 months, but you'll also get (what should be) 2 significant upgrades to the program. Excel 2008 will still be Excel 2008 2 years from now, just with a few bug fixes. Numbers '10 will be significantly better than Numbers '08.

 

[spaceballl]

I think it goes like this. If you don't NEED MS Office, then use iWork. Not sure if you need it? You don't...

I need to use Office since I work at a place that has Exchange and Office 07, so everyone has docx files that i need to be able to read / write with 100% compatibility.

 

[daneoni]

I've always viewed iWork as a toy (and still do sans Keynote). It simply cant replace office for me because i exchange a lot of office documents and everything has to be formatted 100% accurately or i'm screwed and pages doesn't afford me that

So if want to play around i use Pages/Numbers but for serious work, Office. However when it comes to presentations...nothing beats Keynote

 

[kepardue]

One minor note that I don't think has been mentioned about the new iWork is that the file format that it uses has received an overhaul. They are no longer bundles, but actually proper files, apparently a zip file. This brings Apple's iWork XML format even closer to mimicking OpenDocument and OOXML (not to mention makes it a LOT easier to send files to folks via web based email or most email programs outside of Mail.app).

I can't help but feel that one day many years from now the three formats will be able to losslessly convert from one to the other and work in harmony with one another. There's already effort to make ODF and OOXML harmonize, and MS Office is supporting ODF natively in Office for Windows with SP2.

 

[IJ Reilly]

One minor note that I don't think has been mentioned about the new iWork is that the file format that it uses has received an overhaul. They are no longer bundles, but actually proper files, apparently a zip file. This brings Apple's iWork XML format even closer to mimicking OpenDocument and OOXML (not to mention makes it a LOT easier to send files to folks via web based email or most email programs outside of Mail.app).

Interesting. Can anyone confirm this?

I can't help but feel that one day many years from now the three formats will be able to losslessly convert from one to the other and work in harmony with one another. There's already effort to make ODF and OOXML harmonize, and MS Office is supporting ODF natively in Office for Windows with SP2.

It's a nice goal, but practically speaking not attainable. Unless and until all word processors support the exact same feature sets (read: never), then all of the conversions will have to be less than perfect.

 

[Wolffie]

OpenOffice.org

+1
OpenOffice 3.0

I have not used it on a Mac, but Linux and Windows it is great!

There are plenty of plug-ins and tutorials to learn and expand on.
Yes, you can save as a PDF!

I might be building a hackintosh just to start playing with OS X beyond iPhone and AppleTV

 

[nanoboy]

Scientific?

I can see financial, but when I need to do scientific work, I'm going to be using something a lot more advanced than Excel, like SAS. Excel isn't worth much to me for scientific work, because once my needs get past basic spreadsheets and plots (for which Numbers is fine), Excel just isn't going to cut it for the analyses I want to do.

Yeah, that's right, for some professional data plotting, I'd recommend this nice open source little program called Plot.

 

[netdog]

I am lucky enough to have not needed to open MS Office '08 in ages.

 

[Macmel]

Well, we can say that Pages is equivalent to Word (more or less).
Regarding Keynote, what's what it does that is so fantastic and different from Powerpoint. In my field (science) I have never seen a presentation using Keynote, and I have seen many using PP that were amazing. So I don't really believe that the final result will be so different and of course, professional presentations can be done with PP (it's done everyday in more that 90% of the cases).
Excel is a wonderful piece of software and there's nothing in iWork than can even compare to it. It's extremely powerful and that alone, makes the difference. I wouldn't buy iWorks just because it does not have Excel.
And because nobody else is using it in the world: Mac computer share is 10% and for my experience (10 years surrounded by Macs) I don't know a single person that uses iWork, so I guess, being very optimistic, that less than 5% of the people using an Office-like program, actually use iWork (I believe is 1% or less, but I'm just being optimistic).
So you want to use a piece of software that is basically used by no one else, that is not the standard, provides no real advantage over the standard (anything you can do on iWorks you can do on Office), and lack some functionality (Some things you can do on Office you can't do on iWorks: Excel). That's really smart.
Ohh, I forgot something that makes the difference: iWorks has an Apple on the box and Office is made by Microsoft...

 

[BornAgainMac]

i use Pages '08 exclusively, and work with Word and Windows users mainly my supervisor when writing research papers in collaboration. [snip]

Good review. I think if people give Pages a one week trial, they will see it is possible to survive without Word.

I don't "fight" with Pages with formatting as much as with Word.

 

[miles01110]

To get equations and bibliographies, you have to spend $350.

Actually you can do equations and bibliographies for free with a combination of LaTeX and BiBTeX. Why even bother with proporietary format? Output directly to pdf or ps.

Equations from the equation editor in OpenOffice is very good, personally it's better to use (as you can just type syntax) than MS equation editor.

As for bibliographies, cheaper alternative is Bookends (already mentioned in earlier post), it costed me only £35, and it works with Pages. Bookend is easy to use, and for me it does exactly the same job as Endnotes.

So, iWork '09 + Bookends, is cheaper than MS Office 2008. And arguably, nicer to use.

But it's still not as good as LaTeX.

IMHO
Reason #2 - Excel has no alternatives for scientific work.

If you're doing actual science with Excel then you probably aren't doing anything worthwhile. Any real scientific application involving significant amounts of data and analysis is going to be done using a combination of C programs, various scripts (bash, TCL, perl, whatever), and root.

Yeah, that's right, for some professional data plotting, I'd recommend this nice open source little program called Plot.

Try the R project.

 

[bilboa]

IMHO
Reason #1 - Apple iWork is $ 79 per annum. Office is $150-200 per ~3 years. There is not much of a price advantage there, unless you want to hold on to an old version of iWork for long.

There's no reason you have to upgrade iWork every time a new version is released. For instance I'm not planning to upgrade to iWork '09 because the only new feature that I personally have a use for is Pages' new outline mode, but that's not worth $79 to me. I like that Apple is constantly improving the feature set. I will buy the new iLife for instance because that does have a lot of new features that are useful to me.