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I'm just hoping the upcoming iWork upgrade may be enough for me to pass on MS Office when I finally buy a Mac in August. I just need a decent word processor and occasional-use spreadsheet which is compatible with Excel. I use MS Office in the work place, but rarely use it for 'fun stuff' at home.

You will be very happy with NeoOffice, and it is FREE. It handles MS Word and Excel files with ease. No need to give MS any more $.
 
Errrr... Apple has had an Intel Version since the very inception of Mac OS X. It was kept up to date and progressed along side it's PPC sibling. Probably a similar situation with their applications.

Yes I know, but there was really a lot more to it than just deleting the PPC copy and shipping the x86 copy. I'm sure the Intel copy was just a basic version of the operating system for them to fall back on, there still was a considerable amount of work to do.
 
If you're referring to the comparative percentage of resources that Microsoft as a whole has dedicated to Mac development, that's perfectly reasonable. They're not Adobe - it's not like 25% or whatever of their Office users are Mac, as is the case with Photoshop.


For Photoshop it's said to be as high as 60% Mac. Whereas for Office its probably closer to 5-6% as everyone uses Office on Windows too.

Of course the lack of format converters for Office on the Mac side is appaling when they were available for Windows in April 2006.
 
i think this is a great idea. look what happened with itunes and the ipod. once windows users got a taste of how apple implements software solutions, people got it.

while there is no ipod-like hook to get people hooked on iWork as was the case with iTunes, i still think iWork would be a hit with windows users. just paves the way for switchers!

-kyle

Well pages is rubbish as a replacement for Word and this will be see by the world thus having a negative impact

Am I the only one that absolutely despises Pages? I mean, what a piece of crap. That inspector is worse then the ribbon, and functions seem to me to be more hidden then any version of Office I have ever used.

And to the guy who said spreadsheets are a thing of the pass, grow up and go to any corporation in their financial department, and you will see that, that is all they pass stuff around on. Sure they use SAP et all, but any exporting is done to a spreadsheet to be analyzed.

Totally agree, the Inspector is also horribly buggy on my computer despite numerous reinstalls, it gets all distorted and stretched and no longer works have to quit pages and start again, or more usually decided not to try pages again for a couple more months.
 
This is terrible for all of us who are students. Having an Intel Mac and no office suit to work with (well, one aside from Open/Neo Office). I guess Vista was just the beginning of Microsoft's "delayed products" list. I was affraid of something like this happening, esspecially since we had no news of this coming in last few months. :mad::mad::mad:

I'm a student and have been very happy with the NeoOffice and iWork combination I use.

For the longest time I used iWork alone and was very happy with it, but there was an occasional formatting error converting tables and the like into word. Also, I missed having a built-in thesaurus. (I know I can use the system one, but I hate having to cut and paste the words into the document instead of having a replace button) Usually if I wrote a huge document with a lot of formating, I would have to carefully proofread it after converting to Word.

Since then, I have discovered NeoOffice though, and the compatibility is spot on. The docs aren't as pretty as if I were using iWork, but when working with groups this isn't really that important.

Too be honest, unless there is some killer feature I don't know about, I can't see myself plunking down the money for MS Office at all anymore. The only need for it is to entice switchers who feel that they somehow must have MS Offce to survive. For seasoned Mac users though, I imagine most of us are smart enough to know that we can do 95% of everything MS Office does with NeoOffice, iWork, or LaTEX.

IMO, it is very fishy that the level of support that MS gives to the Mac platform is dwindling as Macintosh market share increases. We no longer have a MS developed Windows Media Player, the MSN client is a joke, and I imagine Office 2008, when released, will be somehow nerfed as well.

(I tried OpenOffice.org Aqua but found it to be buggy and not ready to be my primary office suit.)

What is that you are doing that you need MS Office for anyway?
 
I've been using NeoOffice since I got my Mac, I really like it a lot.

I see all this talk about OpenOffice going Aqua. Where's proof of this?
 
We use Access databases (in the company and on the company website) and so are stuck with having to run Windows. If we could get Access on Apple, we'd chuck out all the Windows machines in a flash.
 
damn, i was hoping to install leopard via format and install, and then install the new office...

oh well, hopefully iwork will be good enough to make me convert for good
 
I could've predicted this.

I got to play with an early, early beta about 4 months ago through my old job who does a lot of Mac Office work and it was extremely rough, buggy and not even close to being finished.
Let alone refined . . .
 
At least we can compare it with iwork 08, I'd probably go with iwork 08.
Regarding iWork 08, let's not be too hasty before we see it and we don't know for sure if it will include a spreadsheet !!!! ...... :eek:

I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy, but come on .... Pages isn't really a rival for Word ... or is it? .... :confused:
 
Am I the only one that absolutely despises Pages? I mean, what a piece of crap. That inspector is worse then the ribbon, and functions seem to me to be more hidden then any version of Office I have ever used.

Overall, I would say Pages is an Ok word processor. It is capable of producing documents that are head over heals nicer looking than MS Office. Still you are right, the inspector is a poorly implemented and should be re-designed. Once I got used to it though, I was able to find most things very quickly. You know you can customize the tool bar right? There are a few things that I put out on my tool bar that I actually find useful like increase/decrease indentation, and superscript/subscript icons.

For an everyday Word processor though, I find NeoOffice very good for the average user.
 
20% of Office is sold to Mac users, hmmm.....

If twenty percent (20%) of all Microsoft Office sales in the US are for Mac computers, does this mean that piracy is totally rampant in the PC world or does the market share myth really exist?

I think it's a little of both. Of all my PC owning friends that have Office installed, I can only think of one that has bought the suite. I know that's anecdotal, but it's all I have to work with :)

As for the market share, how can 5% of computers sold run 20% of a purchased copy of a productivity suite. Can the market share be artificially low because of all the devices that are sold and counted as PC's. I would love to see the numbers showing Mac desktops and notebooks compared to PC desktops and notebooks, and not servers - Wal-Mart registers (Windows XP OEM machines) - kiosk installations - ect...
 
If twenty percent (20%) of all Microsoft Office sales in the US are for Mac computers, does this mean that piracy is totally rampant in the PC world or does the market share myth really exist?

I think it's a little of both. Of all my PC owning friends that have Office installed, I can only think of one that has bought the suite. I know that's anecdotal, but it's all I have to work with :)

Out of all of my mac using friends (15) i only know of one who has purchased office (me v.X)
 
Hey Guys, Finally registered and decided I had to respond to this.

As far as it being delayed, whatever we'll get it soon. The comment i really wanted to respond to was when doing presentations, i almost always convert them to a .pdf then present them that way, this way there is no chance of formats getting messed up. Plus most of the effects are just plain annoying. I do realize that if you wanted a movie or animation you can not do this, but i find it works really well for 90 percent of presentations

Also as far as excel, they really need to update this. I'm a chemist and usually need to graph about 60,000 points. Excel 2004 can only handle 32,000, so i have to split it up into 2 data sets, not that big if deal other than the 10,000 error messages i get trying to do this that bogs the system down. I heard excel 2007 can handle up to one million points.

Oh and btw I really only find the office suite slow when i bring in files from my PC to the mac. it has to convert it. But If i make the file on the mac, I don't have any speed issues.???

Please oh please make iwork with it's own spreadsheet app.
 
We use Access databases (in the company and on the company website) and so are stuck with having to run Windows. If we could get Access on Apple, we'd chuck out all the Windows machines in a flash.

How big are your databases? I imagine they aren't that big if you can use Access for them. Most of the companies I have worked for had to use SQL Server or Oracle due to shear size and reliability concerns.

It would be a bit of a hassle but you could probably switch to Filemaker as it is cross-platform, has been around forever, and works great. I know it would be annoying to have to learn a different program, and convert existing records, but as you say, your Windows machines are annoying too. You could download the 30 day trial to see if this might work for you.

I haven't tried the database in NeoOffice but you might download that and see if it converts your databases over well. My experience with documents, spreadsheets, and presentations has been pretty solid so far with this suite. And as others have said, you can beat free.

Also, I hear MySQL is nice too. Here are some links to get you started:

Filemaker Pro Trial

Neo Office Download Page

MySQL Dowload Page
 
We use Access databases (in the company and on the company website) and so are stuck with having to run Windows. If we could get Access on Apple, we'd chuck out all the Windows machines in a flash.

You could just run MySQL, which is free, AND highly reliable, and there's tons of free support out there for it (community based). Be sure to get phpMyAdmin if you go the MySQL route, it makes administration a thousand times easier.
 
one again, microsoft has outed itself as a bunch of bumbling idiots.

wow, getting office for mac to run on the intel processor IS SUCH A HUGE TASK! we have no experience in that area! the thousands of programmers we employ are all tied up with more important stuff, like the vista menu button...
 
Microsoft obviously doesn't care about Mac anymore. This and the shocking MSN client without cam support just stinks.

How did you come up with this? Office 2008 looks far better than its Windows counter-part...and they just released a new/updated version of Remote Desktop.

I believe they care quite a bit about the Mac still...even if they are a little slow.
 
If twenty percent (20%) of all Microsoft Office sales in the US are for Mac computers, does this mean that piracy is totally rampant in the PC world or does the market share myth really exist?

I think it's a little of both. Of all my PC owning friends that have Office installed, I can only think of one that has bought the suite. I know that's anecdotal, but it's all I have to work with :)

As for the market share, how can 5% of computers sold run 20% of a purchased copy of a productivity suite. Can the market share be artificially low because of all the devices that are sold and counted as PC's. I would love to see the numbers showing Mac desktops and notebooks compared to PC desktops and notebooks, and not servers - Wal-Mart registers (Windows XP OEM machines) - kiosk installations - ect...

You didn't read the article.

"Sales of the Mac versions made up about 20 percent of dollars spent on Office at U.S. retail stores and Web sites in 2006"

Most copies of MS Office are purchased through Volume license or Educational license. Retail and web are the most expensive ways to buy MS Office, so maybe that says PC users are statistically more careful with their money. :p

BTW, the latest version of Office is REALLY cool. The development team has really taken a complex product and made ALL the features intuitive and accessible.
 
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