I don't know much about Word versions, especially for Windows. I only know that some old Word documents (around ten years old) won't open in Pages.
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iWork or Office 2008
- Thread starter Watabou
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I don't know much about Word versions, especially for Windows. I only know that some old Word documents (around ten years old) won't open in Pages.
I use iWork and Neooffice (open office derivative for OSX). When I'm creating something for personal use, I use iWork. If I'm working on a document that will go back to the Windows world, I use Neo office. If I'm opening a more complicated spreadsheet or such, I'll use Neo Office.
If I had MS Office, I would uninstall Neo Office, but keep iWork. For simpler stuff, iWork is superior.
A lot of the stuff that Word had that Pages didn't doesn't work or are missing in Word 08 (endnote is one). iWork was competitive with Office 04 for the most part but is very competitive with Office 08.
I'm getting fed up with Office '04 and its refusal to save Word documents ("Sorry your hard drive is full, I can't save this file") and total inability to handle placing of pictures in a document, and am thinking of switching to iWork '08, especially as I can get iWork for £35 through my uni network.
One question through, does the full version of iWork have an equation editor in it, like Apple Works 6 and Office '04? The "Insert Equation" option is greyed out on my trial version, and if an equation editor is not available, then it will be a deal-breaker.
One question through, does the full version of iWork have an equation editor in it, like Apple Works 6 and Office '04? The "Insert Equation" option is greyed out on my trial version, and if an equation editor is not available, then it will be a deal-breaker.
Bookends is far superior to Endnote and works fully with Office 2008 and in actual fact Office 2008 has its own citations manager.
Linking Excel tables/graphs in iWork isn't pretty you are basically stuck with how you left it in excel as it strips the forumlas from the tables. Graphs become pictures so can't edit them either.
Although if you switch over to numbers then the formulas are kept in the tables, however graphs become just pictures.
I've never had these problems, office 04 handles pictures really well, I just made a very large document with over 300 pictures in it not one problem.
However I tried to make it in Office 08 but that was a nightmare, it might have improved after SP1 but a little test I just did didn't work too well.
There is an insert equation option
. The closet I have seen is Insert - Function - Formula Editor, however that is not an equation editor it is for formulas in table. So you have to have a table selected before it will be ungreyed.You can use another equation editor such as LaTeX/Equation Editor to inset equations into Pages.
Pages is quite slow when you get to larger document sizes and it shows with general system usability.
The same document opened in both Word (04) and Pages (08) and Microsoft Word (08). The document opened in pages is a .pages file as well.
As you can see Pages uses 167% ram than Word 08 and 240% that of Word 04 (translated through Rosetta as well
).I maintain that Office 04 is much better than 08,
However the decision between Office and iWork comes down to personal needs, for me I couldn't do practically anything with iWork so Office it is.
It handles pictures themselves well, but it is absolutely awful at placing pictures where you want them to go, particularly if it's near the top or bottom of a page and you want the text to wrap around them. It once took me 30mins to place a picture just below the top of a page - Word kept insisting that it should be locked to the very top of the page, even with all the "lock to..." options turned off
That must have been what I saw.There is an insert equation option
You can use another equation editor such as LaTeX/Equation Editor to inset equations into Pages.
If there's no equation editor in pages by default then no sale. I use equations far too often to keep having to switch to another application, write the equation, save it as a picture or whatever and then import it into Pages, then find a day later I need to edit it and have to re-write it from scratch. That's simply not an option, I'll have to live with Word.
Apple have really dropped the ball here - they included EE in AppleWorks, so why not Pages?