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iWork or Office 2008
- Thread starter Watabou
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It just depends what you're looking for. For my personal needs:
Pages>Word
Keynote>PP
Numbers>Excel
Its partly due to the fact that Excel offers no benefit to me over Apple's offering, and Numbers starts up much faster.
IJ Reilly
macrumors P6
Don't we just love it when someone states their opinion as though it was a fact?
Julien
macrumors G4
Will iWork read and convert older versions of Windows MS Word and Excel files? My mom has lots of Word files over many years and probably many versions. About to switch her from PC to Mac but not sure which to use iWork or Office. She doesn't have Office 07 so she will have to learn all new anyway.
IJ Reilly
macrumors P6
How old are we talking?
TextEdit is a good fallback for really old Word documents. It opens all of them, AFAIK, although with considerable loss of formatting.
northy124
macrumors 68020
Well they don't or at least I never had any success with opening them & got so pissed I went and paid for Office 2008 which I now use most of the time (Stupid school don't have Mac's).
Instead of paying $400-$450 for office 2008 at a retail store, I bought the brand new sealed full version of office 2008 special edition for about $175 on ebay. Much cheaper that way.
I went and bought iwork. Haven't opened it yet since I'm calibrating my mbp battery. But does anyone know how to get a gray background behind the white sheets on Pages like Word? I like Word's appearance better than pages. Pages has that all white look that kinda bothers me.
LOL.
Anyways, for the most basic of tasks, iWork is clumsy yet sufficient, but for anything more than the bare essentials, Office is a must; especially in business. Additionally, Office for Windows (vs Office for Mac) is increasingly becoming more important too--- as it supports macros and document protection, and includes Access, three key things that the Mac version doesn't.
I have all three (iWork '08, Office 2007, Office 2008), and I use Keynote if, and only if, I will be making the presentation myself. I occasionally use Pages, but never as a word processor---only as a Publisher substitute. I used numbers once for making a very nice, visually appealing budget, but I could never [get away with] using it for standard spreadsheets.
Shadow
macrumors 68000
IJ Reilly
macrumors P6
I don't find this to be an issue. You will get "warnings," but most of them are not meaningful, and are the result of Word users who don't have a clue about how to properly format a document (which is almost all of them).
Spritey
macrumors regular
That's why when doing collaborative work I always volunteer to do the final editing and layout, and force my other group members to use Google Docs before I import it into Pages, then send it back to everyone in pdf format. If there are any changes after that, it's usually very tiny and they just report back to me.
Normally people are happy enough to get away with not doing the final editing that they'll gladly use Google Docs for collaborative writing. But it obviously depends a bit on your group members.
Once they've tried editing collaboratively like that without juggling several versions of a word-file, they never go back. And when there's essentially only one working version of a document like you get with Google Docs, there's normally very little editing left to do, just making it pretty. And Pages makes that really easy :c)
Its not perfect, but here's a link to an Applescript from the Apple forums that implements a poor man's autosave.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=2187234&
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1338600&tstart=0
Or this, although I can't say I've tested it...
http://scriptbuilders.net/files/autosavepages1.0.html
They have a few people dedicated to it now (thanks to Sun). Once it's finished it'll be better than NeoOffice because:
It uses Cocoa not smelly Java
It should be included in their release cycle with the Windows and Linux versions
Is everyone using the 3.0 beta - I really couldn't fault it for its OS integration (being truly cross-platform) 🙂
Julien
macrumors G4
So iWork will open most of the newer Office Windows XP formats but may not open older versions? I could just be sure that all files are converted to her current Word XP version (about 2000) if iWork can read them.
Pages is better than Word ... to a point. Once you go beyond the critical mass of deep features, Word trumps it.
Same with Numbers. For simple stuff it trounces Excel, but if you need any of Excel's deep power features, numbers leaves you flat.
Keynote is wonderful. Just for the ability to give a presentation without a template that everyone has seen 7,000,000 in powerpoint alone makes it look like you spent more time on it. However, the newer power points have copped a lot of Keynotes tricks and is catching up to it.
Same with Numbers. For simple stuff it trounces Excel, but if you need any of Excel's deep power features, numbers leaves you flat.
Keynote is wonderful. Just for the ability to give a presentation without a template that everyone has seen 7,000,000 in powerpoint alone makes it look like you spent more time on it. However, the newer power points have copped a lot of Keynotes tricks and is catching up to it.
This is a really good thread. I am in the same boat... I have used Office since its first version and was going to load Office 2008 on my new iMac when it gets here next week. My wife and I use Windows boxes at work and we frequently work on files at home, and would definately need the compatibility with Office files and such.
Coming from a mac newbie, can iWork open Office files?
On of my work friends is planning to use OpenOffice 2.4 as well.
Aside from chewing up disk space, would anybody load iWork and Office or iWork and OpenOffice?
Coming from a mac newbie, can iWork open Office files?
On of my work friends is planning to use OpenOffice 2.4 as well.
Aside from chewing up disk space, would anybody load iWork and Office or iWork and OpenOffice?