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iWork vs office for Mac

W

Weerez935

macrumors regular
Original poster
Dec 13, 2012
187
0
I'm new to the Mac world and have never used IWork. I am a pharmacy student currently and while I have no use for spreadsheets I do need some simple productive task. I only need to view power points and type papers in mla format.

Questions:
What exactly is included in iWork ?

Can a Mac open power points (not create them just for reading notes) ?

Can you save a document as a word file?

How does it compare to word, in particular?

Are there any perks / quirky features that distinguish it from office?

Is it a hdd hog? (I only have 64 gigs)
 
I prefer MS Office for Mac, for maximum compatibility with Windows users. If you don't want MS Office for some reason, there are many alternatives, such as iWork, NeoOffice, LibreOffice, OpenOffice, Google Docs, etc. Searching the forum will reveal dozens of threads discussing these various alternatives and the pros and cons of each, such as this small sampling:
 
Try OpenOffice if you need it for bare basics. If that's not good enough, iWork is compatible enough. It's sad that people have to spend an extra $150 for just making sure the same fonts show up.
 
I use iWork for everything. Never let me down. You can export to different files, including word-documents and you can view a powerpoint with keynote. Even more so, I created a keynote-presentation and the powerpoint-version that had to show couldn't handle it all...
But then again, I never liked office, even when I was still a windows-user I used open office. So that would be my advise. IWork or open office.
 
Michael CM1 said:
Try OpenOffice if you need it for bare basics. If that's not good enough, iWork is compatible enough. It's sad that people have to spend an extra $150 for just making sure the same fonts show up.
Click to expand...

This is true,

I personally have found pages to be great - if you have any issues just export as PDF.

Numbers however is not even close to excel, not even close.

I don't use keynote.
 
It is comparing to products that do the same but are completly different. iWorks is a very light version of Office.

I have tried iWorks, but I use Office at work, it is useless do try to learn both.
Numbers realy sucks.

I do not like MS in general and Office for Mac is pretty slow, still it is the best suite out there.

PS: I am hoping that MS will come soon with a 64bit Office for mac, that should make it a lot faster
 
I agree with the another poster; try LibreOffice [OpenOffice], and see if it meets your needs. Then go iWork if needed. I have Office 2011 [via Work] and rarely use it at all. I open most with LibreOffice. I have iWork mostly for Keynote. I find Keynote better than PowerPoint [IMO].
 
Word, Excel and PowerPoint are decent. However, Outlook for Mac is borked. It can't import directly from Lion or Mountain Lion mail, nor can it import mbox exports from Lion or ML. Add into that, MicroSmurf has essentially refused to fix it.
 
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