Transitioning from Windows

[thewoz]

I'm almost sold on a Macbook Air after trying other 11.6" ultrabooks that suck.

Now, to the real question. What do you do if you want a Mac, don't want to spend all the money on getting Office for Mac and want to use iWork? How does the exporting REALLY work with iWork when you are surrounded by other people with Windows and Office?

We're talking about not very complex documents. The most complex elements would be Tables. When you export them, do they really get all screwed up? Do I really have to use OpenOffice? I'd rather not.

 

[Macman45]

Pages tries hard, but when it comes to tables, particularly margins in complex documents, it sometimes struggles to get the formatting right. I bit the bullet and bought a copy of Office for Mac, I only use Word, and then only for compatibility with Windows users.

If you don't mind a little re-formatting in Pages and your documents are not too complicated I'd say go with Pages...You can always buy a copy of Office if you find it's not up to the job. Whatever you do Don't buy a copy with Outlook...it is so full of bugs it's unusable....I paid the price, but use Thunderbird as my email client now. Just take a look at the Office for Mac support forums for the tales of woe. Don't let this put you off a Mac though, they are great machines, and I wouldn't buy anything else.

 

[thewoz]

Pages tries hard, but when it comes to tables, particularly margins in complex documents, it sometimes struggles to get the formatting right. I bit the bullet and bought a copy of Office for Mac, I only use Word, and then only for compatibility with Windows users.

If you don't mind a little re-formatting in Pages and your documents are not too complicated I'd say go with Pages...You can always buy a copy of Office if you find it's not up to the job. Whatever you do Don't buy a copy with Outlook...it is so full of bugs it's unusable....I paid the price, but use Thunderbird as my email client now. Just take a look at the Office for Mac support forums for the tales of woe. Don't let this put you off a Mac though, they are great machines, and I wouldn't buy anything else.

Have you ever tried NeoOffice?

 

[Slinkwyde]

Just FYI, OpenOffice is basically dead. LibreOffice is the continuation of that project.

Last I read, NeoOffice was a two person development effort. Because of that, there are limits to the enhancements they can do. It's LibreOffice with some tweaks.

 

[Macman45]

Have you ever tried NeoOffice?

No, it's not an app I've ever come across....Open Office is a non starter as posted....It really comes down to iWork or Office.

 

[Mal]

No, it's not an app I've ever come across....Open Office is a non starter as posted....It really comes down to iWork or Office.

No one else posted that, and it's really not true. LibreOffice (the continuation of the OpenOffice project) is quite capable and probably just as good at dealing with files from the Windows versions of Office as the Mac version of Office overall. I personally prefer Pages, but LibreOffice is quite good overall.

jW

 

[balamw]

FWIW for most simple stuff, I tend to use Google Docs these days.

In my experience complicated documents don't even stay well formatted if you stick with multiple versions of Office on Windows and do something as simple as change printer drivers.

B

 

[ixodes]

No one else posted that, and it's really not true. LibreOffice (the continuation of the OpenOffice project) is quite capable and probably just as good at dealing with files from the Windows versions of Office as the Mac version of Office overall. I personally prefer Pages, but LibreOffice is quite good overall.

jW

Working in a cross platform environment, we've migrated from OpenOffice to LibreOffice and it's very capable, as well as interfacing with Office no problem.

In fact, I quite like it more than Office, which is what we used once upon a time, before converting to a multi-platform engineering lab.

Yet that said, I'm with you, whenever possible I do prefer and use Pages quite regularly. My personal preference has always been Mac since way back to the early PowerBooks.