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Why do people buy Microsoft Office for Mac when there's a better, shinier iWork?

I

iAppleseed

macrumors regular
Original poster
May 11, 2011
177
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We all know Microsoft Office is crap, especially PowerPoint. I have never seen how ugly my presentations are until I switched to iWork. However, I noticed that my colleagues buys Microsoft Office and some of my friends and family members. For some reason, I believe that Microsoft Office for Mac is selling better than iWork even if iWork is so much better. Now, why is that? :confused:
 
iAppleseed said:
We all know Microsoft Office is crap, especially PowerPoint. I have never seen how ugly my presentations are until I switched to iWork. However, I noticed that my colleagues buys Microsoft Office and some of my friends and family members. For some reason, I believe that Microsoft Office for Mac is selling better than iWork even if iWork is so much better. Now, why is that? :confused:
Click to expand...

Because Microsoft Office has a lot more features, especially Excel and Word, personally I hate Pages and Numbers. The only iWork app I use is Keynote, I find some of its templates stunning.
 
pjhamill said:
Because Microsoft Office has a lot more features, especially Excel and Word, personally I hate Pages and Numbers. The only iWork app I use is Keynote, I find some of its templates stunning.
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Has more features? Pages is both Word and Publisher, it has more features! I tried designing a lot of newsletters and cards on it and it looked so proffessional. In fact, the next time I'll write a short book, I'll do it on pages since it's a great graphic designer and organizer. What a great app, compared to Word and/or Publisher. In Word, you can't even make a font "Light" or "Semibold" or "Bold SemiCondensed" or "SemiExtended"! All you have is Bold, Underlined, Italic and Regular.
 
Because of industry and education demands

Microsoft Office had a hell of a head start on iWork and because of this, .doc/.xls/.ppt are the standard formats used almost everywhere. My college bought a ton of iMacs and installed Windows on them. They then purchased Office for Mac and use that primarily. All of my homework/project/assignment submissions also have to be in either pdf or office format.

I still use iWork'09 primarily and use LibreOffice to check the formatting when I export to other formats.
 
It depends on your needs.

For me, I personally like iWork over Microsoft Office because of its ease of use. That being said my needs for business software are minimal.

As far as features go, they look like this:

Word > Pages
Excel > Numbers
Powerpoint < Keynote (Keynote is generally regarded as being much better than powerpoint).

That being said I think most would agree pages is easier to use than Office, but for some power business users nothing can replace office for them.
 
Because I co author a lot of documents with colleagues who use Microsoft Office.
 
I personally prefer Pages to Word, but I can easily see why most people wouldn't. Numbers is a heap of ****. If you rely on spreadsheets for anything other than light personal use, I would consider it unusable. Also, Office has been updated inside the past 2.5 years.
 
One word...Compatibility. I bought two copies of Office for Mac in order to use Outlook to communicate with clients....Musicians are not ted. savvy, and most are using the Windows platform...Unfortunately, Outlook is so full of bugs, now made worse by the latest round of updates that I can't use it. Back to Thunderbird which does work.

An expensive, and somewhat useless purchase as I rarely use Excel for anything, and have Pages as my main WP. Word has many more high end features which I just do not need.

I certainly won't buy any more copies for my Macs.
 
I use iWork for everything that I do for myself / home. I use Office for Mac for everything around the office for compatibility.

I prefer iWork over Office although Excel is better.
 
I use office primarily because it is what my school uses. I have pages and used it before, but after awhile I got sick and tired of exporting and formatting over and over again. Same thing with powerpoint and keynote. I like keynote, but my school uses nothing but powerpoint.
 
iAppleseed said:
We all know Microsoft Office is crap..
Click to expand...
Not true. While some may not like MS Office and it certainly has its weaknesses, it is still the standard by which other office apps are measured. For advanced users, no spreadsheet app matches Excel, and for compatibility with Windows users sharing documents, MS Office for Mac is the best choice. If you prefer iWork, use it. But don't think that everyone shares your views. And remember, MS Office was first a Mac product, before it was a Windows product.
 
I have both - I prefer Pages for simple documents, but if you have documents that are hundreds of pages long and contain tracked changes, comments, footnotes, etc then Pages is no use at all
 
iAppleseed said:
Why do people buy Microsoft Office for Mac when there's a better, shinier iWork?
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Why do people assume that what they prefer is what everyone else prefers?

Here's a handy rule of thumb for you: the word "better" is always highly subjective and it's definitely not the only highly subjective word out there.

iAppleseed said:
We all know Microsoft Office is crap
Click to expand...
No, we don't. All we do know is that you seem to assume this based on your opinion on the matter. Is your assertion that people knowingly buy crap? If so, it's up to you to support your claim, not us.

Don't just simply assume that your take is universal no matter what the topic.
 
Market Saturation

I believe the Majority of this trend is caused by saturation. People have used office in School and work for as long as they remember. Excel, Word and Powerpoint are synonomous with Spreadsheets, presentations and Documents.

Not to mention, at least in my case, Microsoft practically gives it away.

Since my Company uses Office, I get to purchase a copy of the newest version for $10. Most people won't go through the trouble of switching to something new.

I know I haven't
 
My biggest complaint about Office for the Mac is that it isn't Office. I've used Office programs since Win95/Office95, and have grown in capability and proficiency with each successive iteration of the suite. Finally went Mac about two years ago, bought Office for OS X 2011, what a major kick in the face. Why, could someone please explain, would it be ANY different than Office on Windows? Who thinks this is a good idea? Isn't the idea to blur the lines between the arbitrary detail of which OS you are using and concentrate instead on giving a consistent, seamless user experience in the software suite itself? Seriously, 75% of the controls, menus, widgets, etc. are named differently, have different icons, have different locations, really?!?:confused:

And the programs are slow. In Excel, when you right-click a cell in order to bring up the dialog for cell formatting, prepare to wait 2-3 seconds for it to appear. Enjoy the spinning umbrella in the interim. On severely lower powered Windows machines, the dialog appears instantaneously.

For these reasons, among others, I use OpenOffice on my Mac.
 
iMacFarlane said:
Seriously, 75% of the controls, menus, widgets, etc. are named differently, have different icons, have different locations, really?!?
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What version of Office for Windows are you comparing it to? The ribbon toolbar was introduced in Office 2007 (Windows) and introduced in Office 2011 (Mac).
iMacFarlane said:
And the programs are slow. In Excel, when you right-click a cell in order to bring up the dialog for cell formatting, prepare to wait 2-3 seconds for it to appear. Enjoy the spinning umbrella in the interim.
Click to expand...
That sounds like an issue with your particular Mac, as that isn't common to Office for Mac.
 
I only use the word processor and presentation elements of both packages. I would say Word is better than Pages, but Keynote is far better than Powerpoint.

Office has the advantage of compatibility. I regularly get layout problems when I create a document in Pages, but send it out. It will almost always be viewed in Word, and Pages doesn't fit the same standard in several little ways.

Pages also lacks a few things. I have created lots of dense tables in Word, so need to rotate the text 90 degrees in the label fields to make it readable. Pages lacks this feature.
 
miles01110 said:
iWork is terrible. Even Apple knows it, and it's clearly and deservedly given the backseat to pretty much everything else.
Click to expand...

I couldn't disagree more wit the "terrible" comment. I rather like iWork, especially Keynote. But you are absolutely right about its "backseat" status, just like many other products being sent to the back of the bus in favor of iOS. And while I use Pages from everything from simple word processing to writing research for publication, I use Word for opening up and scoring papers. I simply can't trust Pages to properly translate a student's .docx paper with paragraph indentations, margins, headers, and page numbers set as the student intended; those are all "scrabble' items. OpenOffice actually has a better translation process, IMHO.
 
The major problem with iWork is that Apple has no concern about compatibility.

Want to open a word document? Pages will convert it to its own format.

Want to open a document from the current version of Pages in an older version? You can't (without converting it first).
 
Try writing a legal academic dissertation in Pages. Seriously, try it. In your first paragraph you'll realize Pages is wholly inadequate to handle referencing.

I'd love to be all-Apple on the software side, too, but iWork doesn't cut it.
 
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