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IWork or Office for college?

If you can only buy one. Get office and do not listen to anyone on this forum that tells you to get iwork.

I love iwork and especially pages!! But I always need office around for compatibility issues. Whenever I can, I try to use pages but most of the time for real work I need to go back to office (it sucks I know).

Numbers is a joke of spreadsheet program. In college I had to use excel almost everyday. I would cry if I had to use the numbers program for all of my work. It is great for cute things like budget and kids stuff. You will need office excel in school.

Keynote kicks the crap out of powerpoint!! Guess what. When you give lectures or talk at other universities and they have a projection system setup, you better be using powerpoint. I always have my laptop with me but I just gave a talk and they wanted me to use their PC. So I converted my keynote to a compatible powerpoint presentation and it looked horrible and all of my cues didn't work.

iwork is great for people that do home activities or very light word processing. Unfortunately, it is still and office run world and you can't get away from it.

Do yourself a favor and get the crappy copy of office.
 
asdf1234567890 said:
I'm buying a Mac Book Pro for college today :) I want to make sure I can email all assignments to my teachers if i need to. Should I go with Office or IWork? My major is secondary education in history so I know the computer is good but I dont know if IWork files are compatable for PCs because the college im going to is PC based.

Thanks so much!!!! :D
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office not because it is better, but because it is more compatible. it is the business and education standard. for school i use office, although deep down iwork seems like a more fluid productivity suite to me.
 
5DollaFootlong said:
office not because it is better, but because it is more compatible. it is the business and education standard. for school i use office, although deep down iwork seems like a more fluid productivity suite to me.
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+1 Perfectly written.
 
Office will support footnotes, styles and edits better - especially if thats what most of your colleagues are using.

I tried it for a bit, but with most professors, and other students using office, it just isn't the hassle.

There are some good edu deals on office - although I prefer 2004 over 2008, perhaps you can find a copy on ebay?
 
ButtUglyJeff said:
You might want to check with your college on that question. Every campus seems to be in bed with somebody different.

With that said, if you have any presentation classes, Keynote is the way to go....
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Don't get me wrong...I love keynote but without your own computer very few school projectors are macs. Furthermore, very few have iwork installed.
 
I also vote for office.

I used iWork for school for as long as my trial lasted, and I really liked it. It seemed faster than office, the common actions were well thought out as far as the GUI goes, and the format conversions worked relatively well. Having an office suite where your files "just work" with everyone else's without having to worry about formatting or whether a file conversion worked correctly just turned out to be more important for me, however. (Office also seems to have much better graphing options)

On the downside, office sometimes feels a bit quirky. (it is one of the only apps to ever crash on my mac)
 
I love iWork, but in the end I choose Office as there's better compatability there out of the box instead of having to "export" into .Doc all the time with iWork. Just my two cents.
 
both

As has been said numerous times, you can probably get Office on the cheap through the school. Long documents work better in word (or even better Scrivener). And if you use spreadsheets for class work you'll eventually get frustrated with Numbers.

On the other hand, for presentations, Keynote kicks Powerpoint to the curb, and Numbers does lovely charts for other purposes. You do need to learn to export to a Quicktime file for PC compatibility, but audiences are so used to crappy Powerpoints that Keynote presentations are worth the price of the suite all but themselves. Again, learn to convert to Quicktime.
 
Get iWork, and then send all documents as PDF files. That way there won't be any compatibility problems.
 
Galley said:
Get iWork, and then send all documents as PDF files. That way there won't be any compatibility problems.
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This is not always possible, and there may need to be collaboration and sharing of editable documents.

Woof, Woof - Dawg
pawprint.gif
 
I've never had any problem with Office using spaces, it seems to be something only certain people experience.

I initially bout iWork, but after a few weeks, always having to convert documents to office format, and always receiving documents from teachers/fellow students in office format, I took the plunge and got Office for Mac. iWork was indeed a waste of my money. Choose Office.
 
bjb.butler said:
I initially bout iWork, but after a few weeks, always having to convert documents to office format, and always receiving documents from teachers/fellow students in office format, I took the plunge and got Office for Mac. iWork was indeed a waste of my money. Choose Office.
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Well, I don't personally find it to be a pain converting files to Word documents, but I was using OpenOffice for maybe 6 to 10 papers a semester. That's not THAT much, so I didn't have to convert files often enough for it to get annoying. No idea how it handles any other file type, but for regular old essays, I think exporting from OpenOffice is a good, affordable (free) option, if you find that iWork won't do it right.

My plan: Use iWork, and if it becomes a problem, use OpenOffice. (I haven't tried NeoOffice.)

Something else to note: With an Education Store discount + pre-installing iWork onto a new Mac, it only cost me $41. That same discount with MS Word Home + Student Edition would cost me $119. Price may not matter to you, but if it does, those are the numbers.
 
Depends on what you're studying

I've studied both social sciences/humanities and mathematics/computer science.

For social sciences/humanities I would recommend office, as quite a lot of work and collaboration is done in the .doc format.

For natural sciences it doesn't really matter that much (hasn't for me at least), as not much work is done in word processor/spreadsheet apps. And if you don't need office, I would go for iWork.
 
A big +1 on the recommendation for LaTeX. If I were you, I'd trade papers with profs and classmates in PDF format - which all software packages now support. The profs can annotate the paper just as easily. I've never had a Prof have a problem with not submitting a paper in a word processing format.
 
I have to go with the majority of posts on this thread and say "Office", mainly for compatibility issues. While I have no doubt that iWork is better designed and far nicer to use, most of the work world uses Office as do most educational establishments. I have a wonderful MBP, but I have Office for Mac on it as my entire work universe uses Office and I simply could not do without it.

Cheers and good luck
 
asdf1234567890 said:
I'm buying a Mac Book Pro for college today :) I want to make sure I can email all assignments to my teachers if i need to. Should I go with Office or IWork? My major is secondary education in history so I know the computer is good but I dont know if IWork files are compatable for PCs because the college im going to is PC based.

Thanks so much!!!! :D
Click to expand...

If you need full compatibility, use Microsoft Office. Unlike the Windows version, Office for Mac is a memory hog and a buggy piece of software, but it is still the standard.

iWork is nice and has a good interface, and it is also compatible with Office files. However, there is nothing like the real thing. In addition, iWork does not have support for cross-references, and that may be a deal-breaker for a student.

OpenOffice.org also reads and writers Office files. To my experience, it is less compatible with Office files than iWork. You may try it, since it's free. But the interface is poorly written.

If all you need is a word processor, you may try Nisus Writer or Mellel, both of which are very good piece of software. Mellel, although great, has several compatibility issues with Office files.
 
asdf1234567890 said:
I'm buying a Mac Book Pro for college today :) I want to make sure I can email all assignments to my teachers if i need to. Should I go with Office or IWork? My major is secondary education in history so I know the computer is good but I dont know if IWork files are compatable for PCs because the college im going to is PC based.

Thanks so much!!!! :D
Click to expand...

iWork is for people who do not need to exchange documents with others.

Go with Microsoft Office to be on the safe side. But do yourself a favor and add Scrivener (http://www.literatureandlatte.com) to the mix for your heavy duty writing; Scrivener exports your finished writing to Microsoft Word, but while you are still researching and writing, Scrivener is superior to any other writing tool on the market.
 
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