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iWork or MSoffice, Which is better?
- Thread starter wildthing1994
- Start date
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depends on your needs and uses.
for many people they prefer Office: Mac
but a lot of people like and use iWork since it fulfills their needs.
and there is always NeoOffice as well.
like i said, all depends on what you need it for. i personally prefer Office: Mac
for many people they prefer Office: Mac
but a lot of people like and use iWork since it fulfills their needs.
and there is always NeoOffice as well.
like i said, all depends on what you need it for. i personally prefer Office: Mac
I don't know anything about iWork, other that it doesn't have a spreadsheet. And even if it did, Excel is THE spreadsheet -- no need to bother with anything else.
Luis
macrumors 65816
dukebound85
macrumors Core
How so? I have used both and keynote is better but not a crapload better by anymeans.
anyways, office takes the cake for me and im personally more excited about office 08 than possibly even leopard
the office suite is what i rely on for work and until ilife has an equally powerful spreadsheet fully compatible with excel, no way am i thinking about switching
BilltheCat
macrumors regular
I came to Apple to avoid Microshaft !
NeoOffice does everything office ever did and it is open software.
MS is a disease not an app!
NeoOffice does everything office ever did and it is open software.
MS is a disease not an app!
Bern
macrumors 68000
I've been using iWork since it's first release. I don't use Keynote all that often (never used Powerpoint either), but Pages has been the perfect replacement to Word for me. With it I have written various manuals, Uni papers, letters and so on. Even when I owned Word I never sent a .doc file via email (don't want to harbour any virus) and so would convert to pdf. I do the same with Pages which converts to pdf without a problem.
If someone sends me a Word document it's usually somebody I don't know so I bounce it back.
If someone sends me a Word document it's usually somebody I don't know so I bounce it back.
sushi
Moderator emeritus
Exactly.
Although now with Parallels/Boot Camp, if you have an Intel base Mac, you can use Office for Windows which is nice too.
siurpeeman
macrumors 603
iwork meets my needs just right. no reason to pay more for office, which is still not yet intel-native.
I prefer MS Office...but that's because I got it as a trade for some coding work. Things that irk me:
* spell check (why not use Apple's built in dictionary?)
* slow redraw ("What do you mean 'between' is misspelled? [click] Oh! You lazy-ass bastard!") 😛
* rosetta memory hog. Really, I don't like giving up over a gig of RAM to Word and Excel (one Word file open right now, one Excel doc minimized = 1.25GB vRAM).
* occasional psychotic window movements. I had my dock auto-hidden on the left side of my screen, but I decided to move it to the bottom while Word was still open. Apparently confused, Word endlessly jumped side-to-side in a frozen state.
* non-docked formatting palette. Come on MS, everyone else is doing it!
* MS font palette. Nothing like slowly scrolling through all individual fonts, not families.
* every font MS installs.
* styles should be tabbed!
But aside from all that, I still like it much better than it's Windows 2003 counterpart. I just wish MS would actually release useful, free updates to it, like a Universal update. 100% unlikely given the '08 update, but I can dream. I especially wish they would have rebuilt VPC, given I have a brand new copy that I can't use on my iMac. Anyone want to buy it?😀
* spell check (why not use Apple's built in dictionary?)
* slow redraw ("What do you mean 'between' is misspelled? [click] Oh! You lazy-ass bastard!") 😛
* rosetta memory hog. Really, I don't like giving up over a gig of RAM to Word and Excel (one Word file open right now, one Excel doc minimized = 1.25GB vRAM).
* occasional psychotic window movements. I had my dock auto-hidden on the left side of my screen, but I decided to move it to the bottom while Word was still open. Apparently confused, Word endlessly jumped side-to-side in a frozen state.
* non-docked formatting palette. Come on MS, everyone else is doing it!
* MS font palette. Nothing like slowly scrolling through all individual fonts, not families.
* every font MS installs.
* styles should be tabbed!
But aside from all that, I still like it much better than it's Windows 2003 counterpart. I just wish MS would actually release useful, free updates to it, like a Universal update. 100% unlikely given the '08 update, but I can dream. I especially wish they would have rebuilt VPC, given I have a brand new copy that I can't use on my iMac. Anyone want to buy it?😀
Meh, back when I just had the Powerbook, Pages scrolled better than Word did, and that was a good enough reason for me to just go with Pages.
Then again, I think the most advanced feature I ever use is indenting... which I think is done better in Pages anyways 😛
Oh yeah, and Word always seems to be zoomed too far out...
Then again, I think the most advanced feature I ever use is indenting... which I think is done better in Pages anyways 😛
Oh yeah, and Word always seems to be zoomed too far out...
Eraserhead
macrumors G4
Dont be so Dramatic, Microsoft isn't that bad... just Vista. XP is actually pretty good(but not as good as OSX). Oh and their failed iPod rival(Zune)
I reccomend MS office because compatibility issues will be solved but it's more expensive than the windows version for no apparent reason.
I reccomend MS office because compatibility issues will be solved but it's more expensive than the windows version for no apparent reason.
It really depends on what you use it for. I hear a lot of good stuff about Keynote, and Steve Jobs' keynote-presentation are a walking commercial for it. Pages seems like a good app for simple writing and simple graphical design-jobs. But if you need a simple writing-tool, there are plenty of apps out there too that do a great job, including the free Textedit.
As far as comparing Office-suites is concerned, I don't think it's fair to do so with Microsoft. For one, Office includes Entourage, which would compete with Mail and iCal then, not a part of iWork. And the Excel-app, which many would consider unparalleled. Word is definitely a class-A wordprocessor with many features Pages is missing. And Powerpoint, while maybe not as elegant as Keynote, is still a feature-rich, perfectly functional app. Of course, Intel-considerations play a part, I'm on a PPC myself, so for me Office is clearly the winner in terms of features at least.
As far as comparing Office-suites is concerned, I don't think it's fair to do so with Microsoft. For one, Office includes Entourage, which would compete with Mail and iCal then, not a part of iWork. And the Excel-app, which many would consider unparalleled. Word is definitely a class-A wordprocessor with many features Pages is missing. And Powerpoint, while maybe not as elegant as Keynote, is still a feature-rich, perfectly functional app. Of course, Intel-considerations play a part, I'm on a PPC myself, so for me Office is clearly the winner in terms of features at least.
Veritas&Equitas
macrumors 68000
iWork can't really compete with Office, at least in the working world. Word is much better for word processing than Pages. Keynote>Powerpoint, I will cede that, but iWork doesn't have an Excel type program that many people, including me, need badly. Outlook and Powerpoint work just fine, IMO, and are pretty nice. At least in a business environment, iWork can't compete with Office.
iWork is a million times better!
I am a senior in college and a journalism student. So to say I write documents is an understatment. Every day I use Pages, it is open nearly as much as iTunes and iChat. And I have to say, when I first switched to my mac mini I was skeptical, I grew up with MS Word and Powerpoint, but after I gave iWork a try and got over the freakiness of no huge toolbar at the top, I feel in love with the program. I now use the suite for everything including designing fliers for my fraternity, writing my articles daily, and creating keynotes for my class presentations. It's $59 vs $150 for Office, it does all I could ever need and it has the best media integration I have ever used. Inspector is an amazing tool. I can only complain that I prefer the font selection in Word, but that ius a very small complaint. Try iWork, give it a chance and realize that one-click export to pdf, word or anything else you need is enough to set you free from Redmond's poor excuses for software.
P.S. I don't know how to use Excel, never have used it, but I welcome with open arms Steve's version of the program in iWork '07
M Godfrey Denver,CO
Mac Mini G4 1.25, 1 Gig RAM--SOLD, Intel Mac Mini 1.5 solo, 1 GIG w 20"ACD, Macbook 1.83, 2GIG, 120g hdd, 20" iMac C2D 2.16 1GIG, AEBS-N w/wireless printer and 160 gig hdd, Airport Express, PS3-Thanks CNET, XBOX 360, Wii, 27 WestinghouseWidescreen HDTV LCD
I am a senior in college and a journalism student. So to say I write documents is an understatment. Every day I use Pages, it is open nearly as much as iTunes and iChat. And I have to say, when I first switched to my mac mini I was skeptical, I grew up with MS Word and Powerpoint, but after I gave iWork a try and got over the freakiness of no huge toolbar at the top, I feel in love with the program. I now use the suite for everything including designing fliers for my fraternity, writing my articles daily, and creating keynotes for my class presentations. It's $59 vs $150 for Office, it does all I could ever need and it has the best media integration I have ever used. Inspector is an amazing tool. I can only complain that I prefer the font selection in Word, but that ius a very small complaint. Try iWork, give it a chance and realize that one-click export to pdf, word or anything else you need is enough to set you free from Redmond's poor excuses for software.
P.S. I don't know how to use Excel, never have used it, but I welcome with open arms Steve's version of the program in iWork '07
M Godfrey Denver,CO
Mac Mini G4 1.25, 1 Gig RAM--SOLD, Intel Mac Mini 1.5 solo, 1 GIG w 20"ACD, Macbook 1.83, 2GIG, 120g hdd, 20" iMac C2D 2.16 1GIG, AEBS-N w/wireless printer and 160 gig hdd, Airport Express, PS3-Thanks CNET, XBOX 360, Wii, 27 WestinghouseWidescreen HDTV LCD
ingenious
macrumors 68000
I use Office 2004 all the time, but I really like Keynote. I don't know about Pages quite yet.
I really like the 2.1 NeoOffice release, except for the fact it's written in Java and it's horribly SLOW!
Get Office 2004 or wait for 2008. It's faster than NeoOffice (even though NeoOffice has more features [database app and drawing app]) and commercially supported. If you like iWork, wait until iWork 4 ('07) to see if it becomes more complete. That's what I think.
iWork is not yet a complete offiice suite so you really can't compare iWork to Microsoft's Office.
But I did.
Does iWork do graphs? I use MS office for school. I use excel to make graphs, and Word type labs reports, but I hate it because I don't really know how to use either program very well and it drives me up a wall. I had used powerpoint to make a presentation and hated it because I couldn't use keynote on the windows computers at school.
Does iWork do graphs? I use MS office for school. I use excel to make graphs, and Word type labs reports, but I hate it because I don't really know how to use either program very well and it drives me up a wall. I had used powerpoint to make a presentation and hated it because I couldn't use keynote on the windows computers at school.
clevin
macrumors G3
Eraserhead
macrumors G4
It can do bar charts with simple data, they look good, but excel's are more customisable.
Install LaTeX, and use LaTeXiT.