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My New Macbook Pro - Should I buy Office?

M

My Name Is

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 16, 2009
3
0
Hi, I am going to be buying the 2.26GHz Macbook Pro with an upgraded 320gb HD and I was wondering if I should buy the Home & Student Microsoft Office with it. I am going to be a freshman in college next year and I am brand new to Macs. Because of this, I don't know if I need Office or not.

Thanks
 
My MBP arrives tomorrow and I'm going to try to get by with iWork and Open Office. MS Office '08 for Mac is a pain in the rear (I've seen it on my wife's MacBook).

I'd say try OOo since it won't cost you anything and if its not cutting it, the get MS Office at the point you actually need it. I've heard several people say they've gotten by with Open Office and iWork just fine.
 
I would suggest you download the trial versions of iwork and Office 08 and see which one you like the best. There are also Open Office and Neo Office (which are free) if you decide you don't want to spend money on those programs.
 
If you are new to Mac then I would reccomend getting office because the software is familiar territory for PC users. I have office and iWork and I find that I use word more than pages. Excel more than the apple version and I also prefer Entourage (outlook) to apple mail. But that's just me.

It used to be that you needed office if you wanted to share files with PC users but now things have changed and you can use any of the iWork programs instead of the microsoft version.
 
When I tried OpenOffice I had trouble with the powerpoint(glitchy) so I switched to NeoOffice. So far NeoOffice gets the job done, I can't complain.
 
So does the MBP come with any work applications at all? All I probably need is a Work, Excel, and Powerpoint-like program.
 
The only reliable way (if you can use the word reliable when transferring files between copies of Office) is to use the Windows version of Office. I have Office 2K running on XP under Parallels. Most of the time I use iWork since it is much better for document creation than MS Office. If someone using Office wants to share my docs and make edits, I can export to Office format and check it in Office 2K for formatting problems. Frankly, until a document is done you shouldn't really be worrying about formatting that much anyway but most people do for some reason.

Anyway, I have iWork, Office 2K, Office:mac 2004 and NeoOffice installed. I could drop Office:mac easily since it is slow and crashy. 2008 doesn't sound much better despite being Intel native.
 
Heb1228 said:
My MBP arrives tomorrow and I'm going to try to get by with iWork and Open Office. MS Office '08 for Mac is a pain in the rear (I've seen it on my wife's MacBook).

I'd say try OOo since it won't cost you anything and if its not cutting it, the get MS Office at the point you actually need it. I've heard several people say they've gotten by with Open Office and iWork just fine.
Click to expand...
One question: why use both?
 
1 more Q -

Can I go to the Apple store and buy it from them (that day) and have them upgrade my HD for me from 160 to 320?

Also, I am using my college's discount online. Is it in-store as well? Do I bring my acceptance letter or whatever to them?
 
You might want to see if the college you are going to gives you office. I know at my university, we pay x amount of dollars each semester for a "technology fee" and that includes a copy of office professional that we can download and use.
 
My Name Is said:
Hi, I am going to be buying the 2.26GHz Macbook Pro with an upgraded 320gb HD and I was wondering if I should buy the Home & Student Microsoft Office with it. I am going to be a freshman in college next year and I am brand new to Macs. Because of this, I don't know if I need Office or not.

Thanks
Click to expand...

If you are buying office, check with your college to see if they have any specific offers. There may also be a US equivalent of Software4students.co.uk where you can get Office for about £36 instead of the £100 or so for Home and Student (and it's legit - official microsoft-linked website).

On the other hand, there is the money off offer if you buy with your mac (http://www.microsoft.com/mac/promotions/default.mspx)
 
I've been considering getting a new iMac and I've been thinking about the same question. I think I'm coming to the conclusion that overall iWork is better than Office, however I just need to get more familiar with the interface/layout of the various programs. As of now, I'm probably getting iWork and then waiting to see if I want Office later if needed.
 
Unless you're collaborating with a lot of other people who only use Windows I would recommend iWork for these reasons:

  • It's cheaper
  • It's faster
  • It's prettier
  • It's better integrated into the OS
  • KEYNOTE
 
office

There are some functions that Office can do that Numbers in iWork and the others can't touch. I use pivot tables and as such must have Office as iWork, open office & neo office have poor excuses for pivots compared to Office. It's a niche, but really powerful, tool for pulling information from large databases. But I'm in the position of having 100,000+ lines of data and over 200 columns and needing to pull specific information out for reports all the time. It's really the only reason I had to buy Office, I wish I could have gone with Numbers.
 
Doju said:
One question: why use both?
Click to expand...
Keynote is a must-have for presentations. It blows powerpoint and its open equivalents out of the water.

Pages is great for some things (esp. templates), I'd rather use Word for typing a letter or paper.

For spreadsheets, I haven't liked Numbers much. I'd rather use Excel or open equivalent.

So I think iWork plus MSOffice/Open Office/NeoOffice is best option. You just have to decide which of the Office suites is best for your needs.
 
You should get office

I just got my MBP and decide to try iWork instead of office so here is my experience.

I am a teacher and taking college classes as well so I use office daily (no exaggeration). I liked the price of iWork and I think I like keynote over powerpoint so this is why I purchased it. I started my testing of pages with word documents that have special formating and it just destroyed the formating. THis is a problem because I need to share documents with co-workers at times and they might have an issue if they don't know what they are doing. You can play around and try to get your formating back but it is a waste of time. Just one example was making a document in pages in landscape mode, saving it as a word file then opening it in word set the formating back to the normal view making it look crazy.

I would say if you will never share a paper or do any kind of special formating (unlikely in your situation) then iWork is totally fine for you. I can't use iWork only but I spent the $41 on keynote and I think you really should get office-I doubt you would regret it.

Also, Apple and Microsoft allow you to try their programs for free for 30 days so just download the two and play around with them.

Maybe others could talk more about using the two.
 
I'd try Openoffice first, iWork second, a VM machine with a copy of Office for windows third (if you already have office for windows that is)... then buy the OSX version if you must.
 
Heb1228 said:
Keynote is a must-have for presentations. It blows powerpoint and its open equivalents out of the water.

Pages is great for some things (esp. templates), I'd rather use Word for typing a letter or paper.

For spreadsheets, I haven't liked Numbers much. I'd rather use Excel or open equivalent.

So I think iWork plus MSOffice/Open Office/NeoOffice is best option. You just have to decide which of the Office suites is best for your needs.
Click to expand...

+1

Only thing I would add is the use of LaTeX for extensive papers and reports. Nothing beats it in terms of stability, portability, expense (free), and oh such beautiful typesetting.
 
Jigsawjammer said:
I just got my MBP and decide to try iWork instead of office so here is my experience.

I am a teacher and taking college classes as well so I use office daily (no exaggeration). I liked the price of iWork and I think I like keynote over powerpoint so this is why I purchased it. I started my testing of pages with word documents that have special formating and it just destroyed the formating. THis is a problem because I need to share documents with co-workers at times and they might have an issue if they don't know what they are doing. You can play around and try to get your formating back but it is a waste of time. Just one example was making a document in pages in landscape mode, saving it as a word file then opening it in word set the formating back to the normal view making it look crazy.

I would say if you will never share a paper or do any kind of special formating (unlikely in your situation) then iWork is totally fine for you. I can't use iWork only but I spent the $41 on keynote and I think you really should get office-I doubt you would regret it.

Also, Apple and Microsoft allow you to try their programs for free for 30 days so just download the two and play around with them.

Maybe others could talk more about using the two.
Click to expand...

Agreed. I certainly cannot afford to use iwork for daily work due to this reason.
 
I just found out my University sells Office 08 for Mac for $50 and jumped on that. I'm job hunting and sending out resumes/coverletters in the .doc format, and would rather not encounter any formatting errors. However, if it had cost more than that, I probably would have tried to get by with a beta of Windows 7 and an old copy of MS Office 03 Student Teacher edition (which can be installed on up to 3 computers...).
 
I am in the same situation as you, op. What I am doing is saving the money for now and downloading the free trial of iWork. I am going to download open office. By the end of the summer after some playing around with both I'll make my decision. Don't decide right now...you are already probably familiar enough with ms office...so don't spend the 120 bux quite yet.
 
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