Good one!
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I used Word/Excel for over 10 YEARS. Hated them. Worst pieces of crap EVER.
Moved to Pages/Numbers for the past 5 years. Love them.
Let me tell you a little fairy-tale about "worst pieces of crap" called MS Office and all-too-shiny software called iWork, if you don't mind.
First of all, I have been using only Macs and Apple products in general for more than 10 years now.
Six years ago I started my own company and, of course I was thinking very similar to you: who needs the crappy office, when we, mac users, have our own shiny productivity marvel.
Having some IT knowledge, I was aware of certain iWork limitations, but the usability seemed so much better to me at that point...
So, as you might imagine, we started to use iWork only for all our business needs... A decision, which almost ended to be a disaster for us.
Here are some facts from own experience:
1. LOCKED DOWN FILE FORMAT
You can name MS Office everything you want, but its Open XML file formats are documented enough to be understood by any other office suite, iWork included. Try to do that other way around with iWork file!
Fail!
Yes, there still may be some formatting issues, when opening in everything other than Office itself, but you know, you can still access you data, regardless of the software used.
It comes even better: Office now seems to understand the Open Document formats as well, it has even asked us, which format we want to use by default!
Again, go try to open .ODT with those iWork apps!
2. COMPATIBILITY
With new iWork apps Apple broke down its own file format for the previous iWork software:
- try to open a Numbers 3.X file in Numbers 09.
Inexcusable fail!
- try to edit a Numbers 09 file you got from someone else in Numbers 3.X and save back to it natively without exporting and any loss.
Fail!
- try the heck to open a Numbers 08 file with a new Numbers 3.X! You have to export it to Numbers 09 format first! Lord help you, if you don’t own Nuberst 09.
Epic fail!
3. FUNCTIONALITY
I will not explain you the benefits of “crappy” office, but in enterprise environment you will appreciate the pivot table functionality, the ability to remove duplicates in a heartbeat, the ability to have some freaking great addons, like
AbleBits Excel suite and many more!
But not even these things were driving me nuts, it was Apple itself, who had an ingenious idea to strip existing features in new iWork without any replace! Yes, they did promise to return some, but until now it is pathetic, what they have delivered.
To summarize all above I personally consider a suicide to use iWork apps in any serious productive environment! Not only you have to deal with some nonsense limitations, but you are totally at Apple’s mercy, when it comes to your data! I wouldn’t even consider iWork for home environment because of all above.
Nevertheless, have fun in your golden cage. It might become too small to fit someday, and your burning desire would be nothing but the door key!