Office or iWork?

Office. There are a few funky things about the interface, but in general it is a good program, especially 2011. Outlook also kills apple mail.

 

Initially I purchased iwork on my 2011 MBA... after a week I couldn't take pages anymore.

Purchased office 2011 online and been using it since.

 

In terms of features, it's gotta be Office.

iWork, for some, has a slight advantage in terms of interface, especially for Keynote.

 

That's subjective, Outlook drives me nuts. The only client other than Apple Mail that doesn't is MailMate, which is easily the most lightweight and fastest of all the Mac mail clients I've tried.

Anyway, I don't find myself using Office much. iWork usually does the job fine. It largely depends on what you do, though.

 

Office

Because I have to, Outlook won't send emails on any port known to man, so I have to use Thunderbird as my email client on my iMac and my Air.

It's over bloated with features I don't need, but Pages is really only okay for the iPad and iPhone.

 

Both?!

 

Personally I use office. But with iOS5 and iCloud this may change. I spend a lot of time on my iPad a swell as my iMac, integrating them both using iworks just seems so logical

 

I prefer iWork. I don't do a lot with office documents and its easier for me to find what I need to do in iWork programs because of the nice clean interface. Almost every option I need is in the inspector, and dragging and dropping text is very smooth.

Sure Office has more features but I generally prefer simplicity over features since I am more productive if something is simple. That being said I hate creating office documents so anything that lets me do that faster is great.

As others have said this is definitely subjective. Outlook in general is an insanely bloated piece of software with a highly inconsistent user interface. (Take a look at signatures, sometimes you have to go into the registry to activate the feature!)

If you are simply a user of Outlook you may not run in to problems, but if you are like me and work in IT I'm sure you've seen plenty of Outlook issues. At every single job I've worked at Outlook has ranked as the most problematic piece of software accounting for the most trouble tickets. Corrupt PST files that you have to wait for it to scan for, the signature issue I mentioned above, out of office replies not sending, etc etc.

That being said it does have far more features, but its also a lot more problematic piece of software.

 

That's Your Clincher Right There

" it's the standard." .....'nuff said.

I bought it because I had to, if you read the MS pages on Outlook for Mac, it's horrifying...vanishing emails, refusal to send using ports specified by ISP.

But Word is the standard, and while it is, I have no choice.

 

I was ready to type a wall of text but this is says EXACTLY what I would say. iWork is cleaner and easier for 99.9% of what I do and the iPad compatibility is a big plus. For the remaining .1% I get someone else to do it on Word/Excel.

 

It's really cool of Apple to sell the apps standalone now.
I use Office on my office PC, but with my own Macs I go iWork. Office for Mac sometimes is crawling.

 

Although I have a license (via the company I work for) for Office for Mac 2011, it's not installed. Primarily because MicroSmurf can't get it's preverbial act together to address the issues it has with Lion (not being able to import from Mail, full screen, etc.).

Outlook for Mac was pretty nice - until I found out they left out certain features (ability to resize an image/video in the e-mail, read receipt) that are in the Windows version.

 

I had both. I had Word 2000 and then I bought iWork when it first came out. I find Pages far easier to use than Word to the point where I just dropped Word altogether when switching over to OS Lion. I think Apple did well in separating the three programs and pricing them accordingly.
As far as Word being the standard, it depends on how and where you use it.
I found that Word had a steeper learning curve than Pages and probably does more but Pages does all that I want.

 

I use iWork and LibreOffice. I installed Office 2011 for my wife. She needed it to open files that weren't looking quite right in iWork or LibreOffice. She had a hard drive wipe incident when I was upgrading her machine to Lion and I "forgot" to put Office back on for her. She has not missed it.

Here is my take. Office is better for compatibility and some features such as embedded files and some formulas are easier in Excel than in Numbers. I detest Outlook and I would never consider using it over mail.app but that's just my personal preference.

My beef with Office is what it did to her Mac. Some of our Macs are old enough that they came with trial copies of Office. They were set up so that anything that might open with Office resulted in a lengthy install ritual. After dragging that trialware to the trash, she prevailed on me to install Office and after I did, everything got slower. Anything that might possibly be opened with Office all of a sudden had to be opened with Office. Office nuked fonts that LibreOffice needed and LibreOffice had to be reinstalled. I spent too much time shutting down Office's constant quest to make every file format on her Mac open with Office. To be fair, I remember Quicktime pulling this kind of stunt on windows but that was windows 3.1. It's time for software vendors to learn to play nicely in their own little sandbox and stop trying to take over the world or at least stop trying to take over my machine.

If someone is trying to go "cold turkey" and switch to Mac, I always recommend iWork or Libre Office. If they need to share files with people on Windows, I reluctantly recommend Office.

 

OpenOffice.

 

Based solely on that criteria, iWork.

However I live in a world dominated by Microsoft Office, so I need both.

For me OpenOffice/LibraOffice is worth what I paid for it. I keep it on the system to open documents sent by people who use it and also to open old WordPerfect documents.

 

This reply takes into account that compatibility isn't a priority, and the main goal is a great word processor on OSX.

I think it depends on how/why you are going to use it. If it's for university papers that need a rigid structure, or quite lengthy documents (novels perhaps), or something scientific/maths based that needs equations and symbols embedded - I'd go with Mellel any day. There is a learning curve of a few hours to get into the juicy features, but its worth it. Great OSX power interface.

I agree that its worth having OpenOffice/LibreOffice installed irrespective for the odd time you might need it. It'll do for the majority of every day word processing - but it does feel a bit clumsy and bloated (but flies on a good SSD).

On the other hand if it has to be out of Word and Pages - for most typical word processing on OSX - I'd go Pages. Especially if its on lion and you want to take advantage of "versions" and other lion features. Its interface is clean, and it does the majority of what most people would want.

 

Its not dead, and Oracle didn't kill it. They (Oracle) gave it to the Apache group.

http://incubator.apache.org/openofficeorg/

 

Office. files will open with both Mac & PC.

 

I use open office, is free and have all the application that I need for an office suite.