No more iWork; welcome Office

[cavi]

I didn't wanted to do this step since I really like iWork applications, but I didn't had a choice...

before the end of 2013 I didn't used either, Office or iWork, since both suits didn't supported RTL writing (I've used Mellel). after the previous version of iWork suite I really worked hard in order to encourage Apple to make this suit better and I believed that they are intending to do so. I wrote a lot of feedbacks and also managed to contact some guy who is connected directly to the developers and giving them reports about bugs in the software and so on... the suit wasn't perfect and there was (and still...) a lot of compatibility problems with Office and a lot of missing capabilities (with compare to Office and also Mellel), but since at the time Office didn't supported RTL, I didn't have a choice so I continued to use iWork.

Half a year ago MS released their new version of Office which supports RTL writing. I didn't install this suit because (a) I really like iWork and the way iWork apps are integrating in the system, and (b)iWork gave me 85% of the capabilities I need, and I hoped that Apple will bring more 'power features' like cross references, track changes in tables, document comparison and so on with the next updates. Unfortunately, Apple didn't really doing something with iWork (did they added something "useful" since 2013 until today which is not the realtime collaboration?). Moreover, they are advertising again and again MS Office as the "PRO" app for business so I concluded that they are intending to keep iWork as high school level suit.

Too bad that this situation, I really like iWork and I think that Apple could do better with this suit. until they do, I'll use Office...

 

[Partron22]

Apple has been messing up perfectly good word processors ever since they let MacWrite languish in the early nineties.
Even if you stick with them, they'll change formats after 4-8 years and you'll have to either imperfectly update all your documents, or consign them to the dustbin of history.
I went with Libre Office. As open source, I expect it'll be around longer than any of Apple's Neato-Skeeto content creation assistants.

 

[chscag]

Too bad that this situation, I really like iWork and I think that Apple could do better with this suit. until they do, I'll use Office...

iWork apps are now a free inclusion with a new Mac. I would not expect Apple to do an awful lot of improving to any of the iWork apps. Let's face it: Office is the de facto standard in education, law, and for many other professions. I'm not a big fan of Microsoft anything, but I do use Office because I feel it's the best choice for me.

 

[cavi]

I went with Libre Office. As open source, I expect it'll be around longer than any of Apple's Neato-Skeeto content creation assistants.

I tried Libre Office in the past and it reminded me of Office 2003 apps (moreover, it wasn't stable and I experienced some bugs with Hebrew [RTL language]). After I've tried Libre Office and NeoOffice I found Mellel which accompanied me all the way to my university graduation.

iWork apps are now a free inclusion with a new Mac. I would not expect Apple to do an awful lot of improving to any of the iWork apps. Let's face it: Office is the de facto standard in education, law, and for many other professions. I'm not a big fan of Microsoft anything, but I do use Office because I feel it's the best choice for me.

I, and I'm confidant that there are a lot of Mac users who are like me, have no problem whatsoever to pay for a PRO version of iWork apps. I've no problem with MS and if they're making good product I'll be more then happy to purchase it and install it on my devices. the thing is that I don't like MS Office and I find it very unintuitive to use. that is the only reason why I tried to keep up with iWork (I also like Numbers and Keynote a lot more then PP and Excel). But, iWork is missing core features which I can't get along without them (cross references,document comparison and so on...) and also the compatibility with MS apps (which, as you said, are the market standard) are far from be perfect (some of my friends say that Libre Office actually doing better job with communication with Office).
I don't know why Apple spent time and effort to bring completely new iWork (3 years ago, I don't understand why they're calling this minor upgrade 'collaboration' a whole new version...) and not putting efforts to make this suite actually useful...

 

[maflynn]

I've largely given up in iWork, Apple had some good programs, they weren't perfect but they had some good feature, then they "updated" then apps and removed a lot of the features. I haven't looked back since then

 

[spooklog]

Meh. iWork was "upgraded" into uselessness, Libre Office never appealed to me for some reason, and MS Office was far too slow and cranky to work with. Now I often use Nisus Writer for word processing.

 

[BeefCake 15]

I always thought iWork is the project you're sent to when they can't fire you at Apple, the code probably gets few weeks of work and then "brainstorming" on top of the roof with a grill for the rest of the year...

 

[CreatorCode]

... when they can't fire you at Apple

I know that Steve Jobs' impromptu firings are all in the past, but I very much doubt that there's anyone at Apple who can't be fired. (Except for Jony Ive.)

 

[GerritV]

Full docs (Wu Yanlong) is on sale right now, don't know if it's any good though.

 

[bingeciren]

Until recently l wasn't using Office 365 even though it was loaded in my iPad. Then, l discovered that Office 365 was free (full read/write) for all iPads except the 12.9" pro.

l signed and activated the full Office suite on my iPad. So far so good, but l was using Office 2011 on my Macs and l noticed that the documents edited with Apple Pencil were not showing the pencil drawings on the Office 2011 documents. The next obvious step was to download Office 365 to my Mac and see if the pencil edited documents were visible with the Mac version of Office, and sure enough they were. However, in order to do that, l had to pay for the 365 subscription. l chose the family package, which allows Office to be used on 5 Mac/PC and 5 tablets and 5 phones, with 1TB cloud storage for each user.

l'm happy with the performance, features and cross platform compatibility of the Office 365. l've used Open Office before and it was good in a pinch but ultimately you get what you pay for.

 

[theluggage]

Office is the de facto standard in education, law, and for many other professions. I'm not a big fan of Microsoft anything, but I do use Office because I feel it's the best choice for me.

Problem is, Office has the market cornered, and makes interworking with other applications a pain. LiberOffice et. al. do a creditable job of almost loading/saving Office formats (not bad considering how badly specified the Office formats are) but still tend to mess up anything with non-trivial formatting.

Silly example: I have an .xlsx spreadsheet - if I open it in LibreOffice & save it, then open again in Excel, all the column widths are reset. Sure, if its just me, I can just do a quick auto-format but if I send that out to 10 people I guarantee that at least one will come back and say "I can't read it - its all # signs!"

Another common issue is bullet lists getting the wrong symbol, or pagination being mussed up. These are not end-of-deal problems if you're migrating your own documents from Office to an alternative, but if you're trading documents back-and-forth daily with Office users - tough, you'll end up needing Office. That's why there isn't much market for full-function wordprocessors/spreadsheets outside "personal use only" and niche user groups.

 

[cavi]

In case that there are here some Apple employees from iWork team, I'll summaries my "problems" with iWork suite; maybe Apple will decide to make it useful:
must to have:

1. cross references
2. track changes in tables (really, no track changes in tables...? )
3. document compare
4. ability to import files into a iWork file (such as PDF document or Word)
5. ability to flip one or more pages to be vertical while the others are remain horizontal (now you can flip the whole document...).
6. secondary font (for multilingual users)
7. RTL support in Numbers
8. BETTER COMPATIBILITY WITH MS OFFICE APPS(!!)

nice to have

1. more shortcuts option for styles.
2. smart fileds (file name, path etc')
3. Better date options (for example: Gregorian and Chinese...)
4. better table outline and better table behavior and function...

feel free to add to this list; although I know that Apple will not add any power features. after all, they're advertising MS Office in their website as the "PRO" tool and iWork as "easy way to create beautiful documents (which are not useful, but we sell computers and there is a "pro" tool available in the market, so everything is ok)...