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Student Pick!! - iWork or Office

R

rudyrox

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 4, 2009
49
0
should i get Iwork or Mac Office. iv always been a office guy but im afraid of change. lol thanks guys:eek:
 
iWork for Sure!!!

Definitely get iWork....

- It's MUCH cheaper
- The templates are beautiful
- I assume it takes up less space on your disk
- It looks more mac-like
- It's easy to use if you know how to use the iLife suite
- Your money isn't going to Microsoft
- You get Keynote which is far superior to PowerPoint

Ok, so some of the points were a little bogus, but REALLY GET iWORK!!! It's all I've used on my mac and it's amazing.

ALSO: If you're transitioning between a PC and a Mac, Office for Mac seems very different than the program on windows. (I've seen it on friends MacBooks)

How about testing them both out at the Apple Store?
 
I'd check with your campus to see if they have an agreement with Microsoft. You shouldn't be paying much more than US$30 for Microsoft Office as a student.

Keynote makes iWork well worth it for its SPINNAN CUBES.
 
I have Office 08, it's decent, not bad, and I haven't had any trouble using it. It does everything I ask of it.

But I've also wanted to try iWork 09. Now that I have Office I feel like that opportunity is out the window.

You can't go wrong. Ones just cheaper than the other.
And I've also heard people saying pages and numbers aren't all that great, that iWork is just good for Keynote and other stuff is better on Office.

That's what I've heard, I wish I could try iWork, but I digress.

Oh and sorry, I forgot to mention I am a student, a freshmen at GMU to be precise.
 
rudyrox said:
should i get Iwork or Mac Office. iv always been a office guy but im afraid of change. lol thanks guys:eek:
Click to expand...

Personally, I'd never use Pages over Word. Word is just better and has had a lot more development. If you'll be using anything more than the very basic fonts etc, then I suggest getting Word, since the compatibility may well be an issue.

On the other hand, Keynote is far superior to Powerpoint.

Get them both, or even find someone who has a spare license for iWork (someone who bought a family pack or something) and buy Office for yourself.

Both of them have their plus points, but Word and Keynote is the golden combination.
 
I don't understand how anyone could ever suggest iWorks over Office when you'll be working with various documents made by various people on different versions of Office...

I downloaded iWorks 09, opened a .docx file that I made in Office 08, and it was horribly botched. Sure I could get what it said, but every icon and graphic was the wrong size and.. it was just a mess. For something as important as school, don't take the chance.
 
office.. if you have collaborators that work largely with pcs or with ms office you'd avoid compatibility issues if you just use office from the get go. until i work uses a system that is more comprehensive and trouble-free with other comp systems i refuse to compromise my workflow, productivity and integration with other members of my research team - especially when data analysis is crucial to processing my work.

if you do not have these concerns. use iwork. frankly, i could care less if the program looks less "mac-like" and appear more "pc-like" to people. what matters are my results, my work and the way i work which, for the most part, i want to remain headache free. as a fallback, this is why i also run PCs and Macs alongside each other. if i got a buck for every-time i heard the excuse,"oh, i don't know why this file isn't opening..although it is a mac, it is supposed to recognize files from the PC software counterpart," i'd be rich.
 
I'd go with Office. I've never seen a job advertise, excellent iWork skills. :rolleyes:
 
Just got back to this thread and reading the other responses, I think it's kind of a shame that iWork doesn't get a chance because of the popularity of Office.

Given I use Office, but would like to try iWork, it just seems like one of the only things holding iWork back is the popularity of Office.
 
179202 said:
Personally, I'd never use Pages over Word. Word is just better and has had a lot more development. If you'll be using anything more than the very basic fonts etc, then I suggest getting Word, since the compatibility may well be an issue.

On the other hand, Keynote is far superior to Powerpoint.

Get them both, or even find someone who has a spare license for iWork (someone who bought a family pack or something) and buy Office for yourself.

Both of them have their lus points, but Word and Keynote is the golden combination.
Click to expand...

i have both...... both are very good and do the job.....but as someone who grew up thru school and college using word-- its what i know better--with iwork 09 im a bit lost as to where everything is

with iwork -- theres the combatibility issue if you wanna say print of a doc on a pc....however with word you can make it combatable
 
I have both, and for now am using iWork. I would kind of like Office, but it has some major issues still with spaces, which is unacceptable to me. Also, Office is god-awful expensive for what you get, so keep that in mind. Not to mention the fact that Office '07 for PC is like 1000x better (IMO, ribbon haters shutup :D)

You might also check out Open Office. It seems to do a better job of playing nice with Office files than iWork does (it is ugly as hell though, if that matters to you)
 
stu3ufc said:
i have both...... both are very good and do the job.....but as someone who grew up thru school and college using word-- its what i know better--with iwork 09 im a bit lost as to where everything is

with iwork -- theres the combatibility issue if you wanna say print of a doc on a pc....however with word you can make it combatable
Click to expand...

lol, what a fitting typo :D OK, M$ hate session over, lol

If you really need files to look just right though, you can always save it as a PDF or something, that is VERY universal...
 
I use Office for assignments and iWork for more personalised documents (such as CVs, invitations, etc). Thing is, as much as I'd like to use Pages over Word, I feel much more comfortable in the blandness of Word to make a simple, black and white, double-spaced printout for submission.

Again, as much as I'd love to use Keynote for all its much better effects, smoother transitions and speedier performance, a great deal of the bells and whistles are lost when you try and play a Keynote exported .ppt file on Office. Ultimately, it becomes a waste of time. There is also the addition of the unnecessary risk that it might all fall apart, and believe you me, that's the last thing you want when you're trying to focus your attention on giving a kick-ass presentation when leading a seminar.

Sadly, Numbers is nowhere near what I need for my spreadsheet work either. Whilst I don't claim to do anything blindingly difficult (I do statistical analysis for business and management alongside my economics and politics degree) the ability to be able to write, simple, effective VB and VBA macros that can give you reams of useful information on a massive series of numbers within a few seconds is a godsend. Whilst Excel for Mac is a garbage version of the Windows one, working with a Windows Excel file with Excel on a Mac is much easier than working with it in Numbers on a Mac. :(

Office is a crime of convenience. It's r-tard easy to use, it will be the standard issue on your campus, and it's dirt cheap to get through either your institution or Microsoft themselves, via http://www.theultimatesteal.com.
 
If you're doing collaborative assignments where you will annotate and review work, get Office... but get it for Windows and run it in a VM. This also goes for Excel usage. Microsoft's Office Suites for Mac are sluggish.

If you're doing word processing that doesn't require digital exchange than I advise iWork '09. Save your documents as a .PDF and distribute them that way.
 
You should try iWork first and see if it fits into your needs. iWork is a better program on the Mac platform - less buggy and more streamlined.

However, iWork lacks some of Office's functions. Pages does not have cross-referencing, and you may miss that. Numbers is a less capable spreadsheet program then Excel. KeyNote is actually better than PowerPoint - but if you have to open your presentation on someone else's Windows-based computer, you'd better stick with PowerPoint.

You could also try OpenOffice.org, which is free, by the way. It tries to replicate most of Microsoft Office's functions. Given that Office 2008 for Mac is such a buggy program, you should give OpenOffice.org a try.
 
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