MS Office 2004 or iWork '08

[shana]

I have been struggling with this same debate, but I have a few specific questions:
Pages allows one to see section breaks and delete them. Does anyone who has used Office 2007 know if this is possible in Word 2007? I really despise the way my old version of Word handles section breaks. (Can't see 'em, spend hours deleting ones you didn't want entered in the first place!)

Also, I noticed that Word 2004 for the Mac allows a note-taking view into which one can record audio. Is this available in Pages (I did play around with Pages myself, and wasn't able to find anything of the sort...also went to two mac stores and no one there could tell me)? Anyone love/hate this feature?

My work needs to be very compatible with Office for group work, but I can't stand the way that Word mucks up my formatting.
Thoughts, please--and thanks!

 

[Mac In School]

I really wanted to like iWork. Unfortunately, it didn't work out for me. It simply makes it harder (sometimes impossible) for me to do my job. I don't actually create office docs very often. In fact, it is extremely rare.

Instead, I spend my days working on documents/spreadsheets that were created by others. All Windows users. Usually making edits to them, and sending them back. Sometimes importing them to MySQL databases.

The database work in Numbers is pretty much impossible. It doesn't handle my databases at all, and requires exporting to another format to import to MySQL.

I also don't like that I can't use the programs to work on Word/Excel documents. I can open a Windows doc, save it as an iWork doc, then export it as a Windows doc again, but that's a huge waste of time.

I actually spend most of my time working in NeoOffice. It has it's own file formats, but doesn't mind me working in native MS Office formats.

The one thing I do absolutely love about Pages is the way it displays the "track changes" stuff. It's much nicer to have it off to the side, than intermixed with the altered document. Especially when I spend a day copying stuff and pasting it into Dreamweaver.