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iWork or MSoffice, Which is better?

Whats better iWork or MS office?

  • Total voters
    61
  • Poll closed .
As a graphic/web designer I rarely use Office/iWork and I really don't need the advanced features Office provides. That being the case, I use iWork whenever I have to do something TextEdit cannot. For presentations and the like I prefer to use Flash, or just make a PDF presentation.


Evo
 
iWork is so much better. It can read and export Office documents, convert to PDFs from right inside the program, and Pages isn't as intimidating as Word. Keynote has a much cleaner interface than PowerPoint (in my opinion) and the graphics and effects look stunning.

I could go on, but I do not wish to bore you all (assuming it's not already to late for that).
 
I use both, MS Office For School essays (in .doc format b/c school has PCs) so when i need to bring it in on a flash drive, i open it in word.

But when i have to do "Powerpoint" stuff, i Use Keynote and bring in my MacBook and hook it up to a projector, use the :apple: remote, wala, A+

So there both good and great :D
 
A common theme here in those that say iWork is that none of you work in a business-related field. The lack of spreadsheet program is where iWork fails. Sure, you can create a snappy presentation with Keynote, and do some papers with Pages, but for anything business, you simply can't go without Excel. In addition, for any major word processing, Pages falls painfully short of Word. Hence, I'd reason:

Home user/non-business student = Pages
Work user/business-type needs = Office
 
Veritas&Equitas said:
A common theme here in those that say iWork is that none of you work in a business-related field. The lack of spreadsheet program is where iWork fails. Sure, you can create a snappy presentation with Keynote, and do some papers with Pages, but for anything business, you simply can't go without Excel. In addition, for any major word processing, Pages falls painfully short of Word. Hence, I'd reason:

Home user/non-business student = Pages
Work user/business-type needs = Office
Click to expand...

i agree. "most" people i imagine that prefer pages don't appreciate or know the power of ms office. also compatibilty is important and that is ensured by using the industry standard. excel is hands down the killer app for office and word is pretty close

i have tried neooffice and others and frankly it screws with my formatting to some extent so just for that reason, i cant rely on it

i dont know why people hate microsoft just for the fact its microsoft?????
 
I love iWork because of all the different templets that I can use really increase my productivity overall. Pages allows me to do resumés, flyers, papers, research, outlines, lesson-plans, storyboards, and I can also easily handle graphics in the program vs. Microsoft Office. Also Keynote really is superior to Powerpoint and it just makes things look more professionally and it can make your presentation stand out above the rest the 3D effects are amazing!

However, iWork does not have Excel and for some odd reason something just feels homey about using Microsoft Word and you don't have to have multiple copies of .doc documents and pages documents if you need to send a pages document to a friend using a PC. I personally have both installed because I use Excel A LOT however I also love the templets and effects in Pages and Keynote. Word also is easier on the whole compatibility.

Pages; Great for your own documents that you want to add graphics, text, anything
Word: great for transferring and sharing with the "world";

Keynote: Great looking effects and puts yours above the rest
PowerPoint: Plain and uncomfortable to use; (I used powerpoint for years before I met Macintosh and Keynote

Excel: No comparison but great app;
 
I am not at university sadly and have to work in the real world of business. I have iWork 06, Office X and Neooffice 2.1 installed.

Spreadsheets -> Excel. I have to chart up data that I have generated and the spreadsheet in Neooffice isn't really up to the job yet. I can't do this stuff using the basic graphing features of iWork because it doesn't support more than presenting raw numbers although for presentations they can look really nice compared with the rather stale look of Excel charts.

Document authoring -> Pages. For the sort of layout of images and text that I do there just isn't any competition. For docs that I send out I always convert to PDF anyway.

Presentations -> Keynote. Powerpoint feels much older and clumsier and lacks style. If someone wants a copy of my presentation I send them a PDF or if they want to use some of my slides I convert it to Powerpoint and remove anything that looks nasty after conversion.

The main problem with Office is the thing many people see as the main selling point, compatibility with Office for Windows. Unfortunately, I have been let down so often with the conversion (mostly going from Mac to Windows, the other way works much better) that I generally boot up Windows in Parallels and fix the document using my old copy of Office 2000. The compatibility between versions can be much better if people just knew how to work with Office but many people who think they know it do horrible things with tabs and spacing manually laying stuff out on their screen which doesn't translate properly to other versions. You really need to use styles correctly but many Office users barely know their way around the applications. It has often taken me hours to fix slides sent to me by Powerpoint users which they said looked fine on their machines but which looked terrible on mine. Examples such as always using left tab stops and then using spaces to line up the right hand end instead of using right tab stops. Pages and pages of that stuff can take ages to fix and will never look right unless you do fix it.

Anyway, to all those who complain that formatting is being lost, just think about how you are doing the formatting. If you use styles correctly for instance, and tabs and justification etc then the translation will be much more reliable. Ultimately, the problem is that Office isn't WYSIWYG and in that respect, iWork wins hands down because there is a direct correlation between what you see on the screen and what hits the paper and for that reason alone I consider iWork the winner even without a spreadsheet.
 
McGiord said:
It's FREE and works fine!
http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/index.php

In the past when you bought a Mac you got all you need, now you have to pay to be able to work with your Mac: NO WAY! GO with Neo Office.

Microsoft...what???? who???? nothing further....
Click to expand...

to some, it still isnt quite the replacement

glad it works for you though

who else is almost more excited about office 08 than leopard? lol
 
I've searched in vain here and via google, but can't readily find any answer: Does iWork 08 work on a PPC machine (G4/Tiger)? One of our local online sellers says just "intel" under system requirements, so I'm a bit curious about that.

Also, seeing as both MS Office 2008 and iWork 08 have all the functions I need (as does NeoOffice), I'd like to have some idea of which of these would be fastest on a PowerPC G4 with Tiger on it (1,25 GB RAM, at least as of next week, hopefully). I mainly use the word processor (but also need the drawing tools), especially large documents containing lots of figures (not necessarily photos) and tables, say, upwards to 300-400 pages when printed.

I'll certainly give NeoOffice a try, but I assume it's not as stable as the commercial ones. Also, am I right in assuming that version 2.2.5 is the last one to function on PPC machines? If so, would OpenOffice 3 be an alternative, or is that also for intels only?
 
I have used NeoOffice off and on for 2 years; never has crashed on me. I also have been using OpenOffice.org 3.0 (Aqua) since it was in private beta, and it too has been solid. I think that NeoOffice will work on the PPC, but OpenOffice.org requires Intel processor.

iWork 08 requires at least OS X 10.4.10.

MS Office 2008 will run better on Intel.
 
To the recent poster,

I don't have first-hand experience with Office 2008, but some have said that it handles large documents worse than Office 2004. In particular, the complaints I've heard are that it takes much longer to spell-check and scroll through a large document when it's first opened.

Honestly though, with 1.25GB ram, I think iWork and Office 2004/2008 are all options. I've been using iWork happily for about a year, and haven't run into any compatibility problems (Pages '08 converts .docx files better than Office 2004's converter!).
 
Thanks! I don't know how many links I clicked on at the apple-site, but I just couldn't find that page you just linked to. (I only ended up with various sales pitches.)

I'll give NeoOffice a try, but I'll definitely also get iWork now that I know it's compatible.

Again, thanks!
 
I got iWork mainly for pages. Other than the fact that it doesn't have any form of word art it's just as good as office.
 
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