Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

iWorks vs Office

R

rdees12

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 1, 2010
38
0
I'm a high school teacher who is forced to use a PC at work but have an ancient Mac (2003 iMac lamp) at home. I'm patiently waiting for the Back-to-School sale to start (hopefully on May 24) while all of you get to enjoy your presents early;-)

Because Office is installed on all of our machines at work I have most of my documents in Word, PowerPoint and Excel. I'm also running Office 2008 here at home on my Mac. Is it worth it for me to have Office installed on my new machine when I order it or will the iWorks suite allow me to transfer documents back and forth with little problem? Or should I install my current version of Office on my new machine? I've also heard a bit about Open Office but don't know enough about it to know the answer to this problem. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8H7 Safari/6533.18.5)

The iWork suite can open your office documents, but if you are like me and have used office for a long time, it's difficult to transition and find all of the stuff you're looking for. There is nothing wrong with the iWork suite - it's just different. In the end I bought office for Mac.
 
Have you considered the Open Office option ?

I use it and it works great, no compatibility issues whatsoever, fast software and open source thus... free :)

Edit: just saw you heard about it...In this case, if I were you, I would just download it and try it since it's free ! If you like it you can fully migrate, if you don't just uninstall...Keep in mind that there is a learning curve like with any software (as there is one with iWork, that I also use and love) !

Keep us posted !
 
As you're a teacher, you might be able to pick up a copy of Office 2011 on the cheap so I wouldn't let price be the deciding factor. For instance in the UK, you can pick it up for ~£38 as oppose to ~£110.
 
The biggest issue with OpenOffice is remembering to save your files in Office readable formats. Otherwise, the info looks like garbage (if you can open it) when you try it in office programs.

Similar to saving docs in later versions of Office with the 97-2003 extensions and compatibility so that all office users can view them.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8H7 Safari/6533.18.5)

titatom said:
Have you considered the Open Office option ?

I use it and it works great, no compatibility issues whatsoever, fast software and open source thus... free :)

Edit: just saw you heard about it...In this case, if I were you, I would just download it and try it since it's free ! If you like it you can fully migrate, if you don't just uninstall...Keep in mind that there is a learning curve like with any software (as there is one with iWork, that I also use and love) !

Keep us posted !
Click to expand...

There is another alternative by the guys who worked on openoffice but I can't remember what it's called now. It's meant to be better.
 
theSeb said:
There is another alternative by the guys who worked on openoffice but I can't remember what it's called now. It's meant to be better.
Click to expand...

Probably NeoOffice(?)

My vote would be for Office, there are alternatives but frankly desipte issues being small in some cases when moving files between the programs it becomes a pain very quickly having to check for errors.

Not to mention that iWorks for example is missing some features of Office, Numbers - Pivot tables is a big one for me.
 
Wirelessly posted (iPhone 4: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

theSeb said:
There is another alternative by the guys who worked on openoffice but I can't remember what it's called now. It's meant to be better.
Click to expand...

Do you mean libre office? It's a fork of open office created due to oracle taking ownership of sun.
I mainly use iWork now, and libre office when I need better compatibility with Office. I actually bought office 2011 but found it slow, buggy and unreliable and have uninstalled it. The combination of iWork and Libre Office works brilliantly for me and I've yet to find an office document libre office can't handle
 
Last edited:
Thanks to all! I think I'll give Open Office a shot and work with it for a few weeks. If it seems like it's doing what I want then I'll stick with it. If not, I'll probably have to get Office 2011.
 
Another alternative would be Google Docs. It's really big on college campuses nowadays.

I would suggest just going for office for mac. It's only $100 for the Home and Student version on Amazon currently. You'll run into less problems since it is true that a lot of people use Office regardless of OS.
 
I have 3 options on my MBP: Mac Office 2011, Windows Office 2007 (Soon to be 2010 on my iMac) and iWork.

iWork is there because I have a copy on my iPad and that is about it. I find that I can use Word for Mac for simple one page letters, but anything more complicated (like adding charts, tables etc to a doc) I will revert back to the Windows version. For Excel and PP, will go straight to Windows versions.

Its not that the Mac versions are not capable, but too many years of familiarity with the the Windows versions and where things are. My daughter on the other hand uses the MS version at school in computer lab and the Mac version at the house and bounces back and forth with no problems.

It is all what you are comfortable with. I have complicated spreadsheets and can't afford to have something calculate wrong because I am not familiar with the software.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back