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IWork or Office for college?

iWork is not always compatible with Office. But then again, Office is not always compatible with Office either.

More specifically, Pages oftentimes does whatever it wants with formatting of Word documents sent over from the PC side. Line spacings go awry, pages get shifted, empty pages appear, with no easy way to fix the document to restore the way it originally looked.

Office for Mac preserves formatting of the same documents much better.

Ideally, I would get both Office and iWork. If you have to chose only one, then Office would be my vote.
 
iWork

I vote for iWork. How many times have you read about security issues with Office? I have never heard of any with iWork. I just switched to iMac from an XP desktop and a Vista laptop and iWork is so much cleaner. I have had it open every file I throw at it without any reservations. Office seems to have trouble with versions and even with files it has created itself. Plus, I would rather give my money to Apple than Microsoft.
 
Edited for being a bone head.

Just to make this a productive post, you could also consider adding EndNote to iWork. Papers (see link in sig), EndNote, and iWork is a very powerful researching workflow. I'm not sure about y'all but we all use PDFs. I've been using PDFs through undergrad and grad school - it's just the default format. If a student sends me a paper in .doc, I'll knock him 5 points and send it back to them asking for a pdf copy.
 
kufford said:
Edited for being a bone head.

Just to make this a productive post, you could also consider adding EndNote to iWork. Papers (see link in sig), EndNote, and iWork is a very powerful researching workflow. I'm not sure about y'all but we all use PDFs. I've been using PDFs through undergrad and grad school - it's just the default format. If a student sends me a paper in .doc, I'll knock him 5 points and send it back to them asking for a pdf copy.
Click to expand...

Two points: one, check out Bookends in place of Endnote. I am a fan.

Two, some people have bosses who sometimes send them papers in .doc format for back-and-forth editing. Unfortunately, Pages opens some documents and screws them, and then the boss gets (rightfully) pissed for getting the paper that had been all properly formatted all screwed up again.
 
i would try open office for free first before you make any purchases. If you just need to author documents this is a pretty decent office suite. If you are going to be getting complex documents that were built in Office, i would bite the bullet and pick it up, and either bootcamp or VM/Parellels. To me, iWork is not even on the same leve as either open office or microsoft office.
 
get both

If you can pony up for a MacBook, you can add iWork 09 to the order for $41 with edu discount. Office 2008 for Mac can be had for $80 to $100 for the student version if you look around the web for it. Office is great for compatibility/collaboration with others. I am using it to write my PhD dissertation (and had to choose Word because my dissertation committee only has Word and if I export from Pages some of the formatting isn't quite right). For my dissertation oral defense, I will be using Keynote, which is hands down better than Powerpoint, in my opinion.

My CV is done in Pages, and I send out PDFs of it as needed.

Both Word and Pages are now integrated with EndNote, which means you can use either one for writing term papers and quickly formatting bibliographies.
 
I had both on my machine last year. I am a student at Princeton University. I used Office as little as possible. I wrote all of my essays in Pages. All of my presentations is Keynote. I had a 300 level marine bio class that used lots of stats and I used excel for some of it since that's what they taught, but to be honest, other than some graphing issues (i.e. getting axis to use the right data was a PITA), Numbers was up to par with Mac Office 2008. I specified Mac 2008 Office, because there some more advanced statistical tests that could only be done in the old version of Office or the Windows version. So the Mac 2008 didn't have a lot of Numbers. In the same class I used Keynote for the end of term presentation and it was much more elegant and eye-pleasing than any of the powerpoint presentations. I know that seems like a very "skin-deep" type thing, but I think it really makes a difference since presentations are a visual medium. With that said, I didn't slave over it either, just picked a theme, some picture borders, and GO. The program was even intuitive enough for my two lab partners to use (one was a mac user who had never used Keynote, and one was a STAUNCH PC adovacate...so he hadn't used it before either) Some of the powerpoint presentations looked really poor
 
Is iWork a good deal for 50 bucks? I know some people are saying to use office, but are you saying we should pass up on the iWork deal?
 
Another vote for Office. I find the only iWork app. I use is Keynote. Prefer Word & Excel. For some reason the iWork suite has never been easy for me. Probably because I'm old and feeble.:eek:
 
For college, iWork all the way. Office costs way too much and sucks even more. iWork's templates make writing essays or making presentations much easier. You choose between fiddling around with crap for hours/days or getting work done. The first description is of Office, the latter of iWork. You make the decision.
 
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