thoughts on iWork

[fjs08]

Is it a real alternative to Office???

I've just started to use the Demo of iWork '09. Seems pretty good.
Just curious as to what others think.
Thanks.
Frank

 

[macjram]

Openoffice.org is my main office replacer.

 

[fjs08]

Ahh, I may have to try that too.... can't beat the price<g>.

Thanks.

Frank

 

[kasakka]

I much prefer iWork to MS Office and OpenOffice. iWork from a usability point of view is just better, even if it can't match MS Office in features. Keynote is far superior and I find that Pages gets in my way much less than Word. Numbers is the weakest link in the package.

 

[miles01110]

Nothing replaces Excel.

 

[theARNSKI]

This semester was my first semester using iWork for school related work and while at first thinking it was gonna be a hassle, it was quite the opposite. FWIW, I really like Pages and Keynote more than Word and Powerpoint, but for some reason, I wasn't really able to handle Numbers like I would Excel. I thought compatiability was going to be an issue since my college is still primarily MS Office (for reasons of having to email professors my essays or saving my work to be worked on school computers in lab), but with being able to convert documents into Word format or presentations into powerpoint format, it made things much easier. And vice versa, I was easily able to open Word/PPT files, while only having trouble opening Excel files.

 

[DKatri]

Short answer is: Yes

Long answer is:
It depends what you need and what you use. For word processing and presentations yes, infact it is better.
for spreadsheets iWork will work fine but exel is better.

 

[-Ryan-]

Depends:

• Pages is about as good as Word. No real problems here, they're both just feature rich word processors. Nothing much more to say.
• Numbers is certainly inferior to Excel. It's just not as good and probably never will be, simply because Excel is a much more complex program to try and 'copy'.
• Keynote is infinitely better that Powerpoint. It's easier to use, and the themes and transitions are much better. They've got that 'wow' factor that Powerpoint simply can't muster up.

One general comment, is that in all iWork programs, image cropping is far inferior to the Office suite. It just isn't intuitive and it isn't accurate. Also, there's a few small niggles with exporting in Office formats; image formatting is not properly preserved. Other than that, I use iWork (I bought it only because it's cheap and I couldn't afford Office at the time) and I've fallen in love with it. I use it daily, and have no problems at all. I, however, don't use Numbers on a regular basis simply because I don't use spreadsheets often.