I'll just be using Word and Excel, which from my understanding, nothing comes close to Microsofts offering on these (iWorks excel is attrocious). Secondly, there is no point having mutiple tools when one of them does what the others do better imo (open office would just be a waste of space..). So yes, my query was just more so checking MS Office for Mac isnt a basterdised version lacking features, as Open Office is.
Excel on the Mac lacks the keyboard shortcuts found in the Windows version, and I'm not sure about its macro capabilities, but otherwise it's comparable in functionality to the Windows version.
I wouldn't call Numbers "atrocious". It's actually better at some things than Excel, such as making really nice-looking tabular documents. And frankly, Excel drives me nuts quite often, on both PC and Mac. Just a host of little things (graphs, data manipulation) that are way more difficult than they used to be, thanks to Microsoft's user-interface decisions.
I wouldn't bar the door against Numbers for some things, then. But most Excel users will probably want to stick with Excel.
Word users are another matter. It depends on what you want to do. Pages is nicer to work with and certainly nicer to look at, but if you need multicolumn formats with auto-flow, advanced footnoting/captioning/cross-referencing functionality, etc., then Word's still the way to go. But Pages is better (way, way better) for laying out things like posters and flyers. I think of it as more of a page-layout package than a word-processor. And it's much more stable than Word, which for me is crashy on both PC and Mac.
There's another option that we haven't discussed: Scrivener. If you're into hardcore content creation and might want to separate storytelling from word processing, it's especially great. I love how I can drag web-based information, pdfs, etc into a Scrivener project's Research binder and have it all available at my fingertips, even if I'm somewhere without WiFi. Meanwhile my actual wordsmithing is greatly facilitated by Scrivener's cork-board paradigm and uncluttered writing area. Nothing else comes close, if writing is your gig. Just a thought.
