MS Office for Mac 2011 vs iWork

[jdechko]

I'm not saying "If you don't use Office you're not in a real business" but what part of "MS Office is the de-facto standard for a reason" is total baloney?

MS Office is the de-facto standard, but not for the reasons you mentioned. The install base across the enterprise is enormous. Not to mention that it's readily available on almost every major platform, unlike.

If "serious" cross-platform compatibility is required, then you either go with the standard or you get left behind. What's the old IT saying? No one ever got fired for deploying IBM? The same goes with Microsoft. No IT guy is going to get questioned for deploying a Microsoft stack.

If you are a home user, college student, or you run a small business, you can likely get away with iWork, not because of features, but because cross compatibility might not be a huge issue for you. In a traditional enterprise, it's going to be harder for both users and IT to manage. When you email a file to your boss and he can't open it, he's not going to care why.

Personally, they're all just tools in a toolbox for me. I'll pick the best one for the task. It's why I have iWork & Office, Pixelmator & Photoshop, and 2 CAD programs at my disposal. Same reason I have a couple of different saws, a few drills and a dozen screwdrivers in my hardware chest.

 

[IJ Reilly]

MS Office is the de-facto standard, but not for the reasons you mentioned. The install base across the enterprise is enormous. Not to mention that it's readily available on almost every major platform, unlike.

If "serious" cross-platform compatibility is required, then you either go with the standard or you get left behind. What's the old IT saying? No one ever got fired for deploying IBM? The same goes with Microsoft. No IT guy is going to get questioned for deploying a Microsoft stack.

If you are a home user, college student, or you run a small business, you can likely get away with iWork, not because of features, but because cross compatibility might not be a huge issue for you. In a traditional enterprise, it's going to be harder for both users and IT to manage. When you email a file to your boss and he can't open it, he's not going to care why.

Personally, they're all just tools in a toolbox for me. I'll pick the best one for the task. It's why I have iWork & Office, Pixelmator & Photoshop, and 2 CAD programs at my disposal. Same reason I have a couple of different saws, a few drills and a dozen screwdrivers in my hardware chest.

I "get away" with using iWork for my business because of its features, not in spite of them. I share lots of documents without problems. Compatibility is far less of an issue than is widely advertised. The choices made by timid IT managers is not a good reason to call something essential. If we really believed that, none of us would be using Macs, would we?

In any case, once you argue that a commercial product is a "standard" what you are really saying is that it's a kind of public utility, like gas or electricity. So maybe it should be regulated as such?

 

[jdechko]

IJ Reilly,

I didn't mean to insinuate that iWork was inferior to Office. It is great that we actually have options, and it's great that we are able to choose the software best suited to our needs. For some people, it's iWork and for some it's Office.

I think it depends on your priorities (and what set of features are included in your files). And iWork isn't exactly a shining example as of late. Specifically, I'm referring to the sh--storm caused by the most recent rewrite of iWork. It's a much bigger deal when a feature you rely on is removed or isn't there in the first place. Apple has promised users future updates, but that doesn't help people use the software now.

Aside from educated users making educated decisions, you have individuals insisting that Office is "essential". People like my mother, who insisted that she needed Microsoft Office on her iPad to work. To people like her, alternatives to office simply don't exist.

All in all, I consider Office to be the standard, not because it's the best or because it has the most features, or it's the easiest to use. I consider it the standard because it's just the most common (forced to use it at work, might as well use it at home). Plus, most alternative suites provide some sort of file compatibility with Office.

 

[IJ Reilly]

IJ Reilly,

I didn't mean to insinuate that iWork was inferior to Office. It is great that we actually have options, and it's great that we are able to choose the software best suited to our needs. For some people, it's iWork and for some it's Office.

I think it depends on your priorities (and what set of features are included in your files). And iWork isn't exactly a shining example as of late. Specifically, I'm referring to the sh--storm caused by the most recent rewrite of iWork. It's a much bigger deal when a feature you rely on is removed or isn't there in the first place. Apple has promised users future updates, but that doesn't help people use the software now.

Aside from educated users making educated decisions, you have individuals insisting that Office is "essential". People like my mother, who insisted that she needed Microsoft Office on her iPad to work. To people like her, alternatives to office simply don't exist.

All in all, I consider Office to be the standard, not because it's the best or because it has the most features, or it's the easiest to use. I consider it the standard because it's just the most common (forced to use it at work, might as well use it at home). Plus, most alternative suites provide some sort of file compatibility with Office.

I am always careful not to speak in terms of "standards" when it comes to software, if only because calling a commercial product a standard is to endorse a monopoly. People like your mother, I suppose, never hear about any other options they might consider. Nobody brings them the message they really don't have to be locked in to products they don't like or don't need just because other people use them. What they hears is, if you don't use Office, you might as well be on Mars.

As for the current version of iWork, you are right, sadly. Apple totally screwed it up, as far as I am concerned. As an early adopter of iWork, I feel betrayed, and have little hope that the features I find so compelling in the previous version will ever return. So I am hanging on to iWork '09 and hoping against hope. I sure don't want to be on that forced march to Office. I won't go voluntarily.

 

[Sun-Warrior]

I use MS Office for the Mac, and have for over 20 years.

While I use Excel and PowerPoint a lot, my work is mainly writing, and Word is the center of my work life. And it has one major big-time advantage that people don't mention too often. And that is, I can configure the keyboard shortcuts easily to do what I want. Since I'm spending so much time typing, I often prefer keyboard shortcuts than mousing, and this way those shortcuts follow my way of thinking.

Actually, I think while rare, one sign of good software (aka, apps) is that it adapts to your way of working, rather than forcing you to adapt to it.

In that light, I love Word.

Also, it's Auto-Correct function is a big time-saver in ways not normally used. Here's an example: Say I wrote about MacRumors all the time. Well, instead of typing out that full name, I could set up an Auto-Correct that changes "mrr" to "MacRumors."

In fact, I have tons of such Auto-Correct shortcuts for names of companies I write about regularly or even basic words like "internet" which I shortcut by simply typing "int" -- this is nice stuff for those of us who keyboard a lot.

So, I think MS Office is a lot better than many people give it credit.

Dave, who also uses VBA a lot for more complex shortcuts and then assigns them to the keyboard shortcuts of his choice, such as a VBA macro that removes embedded URLs from text he's copied from the web which he launches with Control-R

 

[maflynn]

Office all the way, iWork has less features, it makes working collaboratively harder and if someone like professors and teachers want a word document, exporting pages to Word can frequently change the layout which the student may not want.

As for Excel, and Numbers, there's an even greater divide, Excel is easier to manipulate large spreadsheets, entering formulas are easier and Excel has a higher number of available spreadsheets, not to mention pivot tables.

One thing the current version of iWork had as an advantage was the ability to edit a document/spreadsheet from the web, iPad and Mac. With Office for the iPad and OneDrive the user has this ability. Basically you get more power, better tools and using the industry standard application.