Will having both iWork and Microsoft Office on my mbp slow it down too much?

[carmidy]

When I bought my mbp 13" the guy talked me into iWork. To my surprise after a couple days of cursing I found out I really do like iWork a lot. The only problem is my school prefers Microsoft Office programs. I understand you can change the file extensions in iWork and such. But the problem I'm running into is that I need to use certain add-ins for excel (particularly Data Solver) that aren't available for Numbers.

So, back to the original question. If I have both Microsoft Office AND Apple's iWork on my mbp 13", will it slow it down a lot?

 

[2056]

i don't see why it would slow your mbp down. i have both installed and did not notice an increase or decrease in performance.

 

[dwhynman]

It won't slow it down at all. I don't know what you are going for school for, but if your school uses windows computers beware of campatability issues. Office projects will look different when opened in iWork and visa versa. Charts and images will be off a little. This will also happen between office for Mac and office for windows. As a student the best option I found was to install windows on my Mac and install office on the windows side. That way didnt have any comparability problems. Good luck

 

[davidlv]

Why would it? Just having 2 similar applications installed has nothing to do with the speed of your MBP. Even having them both open and running at the same time should be OK. Your question should probably be more basic, like; "What will slow down my MBP?"
And some of the answers: full HD (at least keep 20% free), low on RAM (page outs, see the activity Monitor in /Applications/Utilities), and then there are the "usual suspects" such as Flash, gremlins, full tides, celestial bodies, ghosts and other paranormal stuff.
I guess you get the picture, there is really not much that will slow down your MBP, low RAM is almost always the cause.
In fact, the "user" is almost always the slowest part of the production cycle.

 

[Eddyisgreat]

I have Pages (not keynote or numbers), Office 2011 and Office 2010 all on my machine. It won't slow you down. Feel free to use whatever works.

 

[blownsphinctr]

This is a case of the OP not understanding how computers work. Just because two software suites are similar in function doesn't mean they will compete for resources. You're fine...there will be no slowdown.

 

[GGJstudios]

If I have both Microsoft Office AND Apple's iWork on my mbp 13", will it slow it down a lot?

Simply having applications installed on your Mac has no effect on system performance. What affects performance is what apps are actually running at any given time. You could have 1,000 apps installed on your Mac and they wouldn't slow your system at all, unless they were running.

 

[swingerofbirch]

This question made me chuckle, imagining that they are to engage in a civil war with each other.

I use both with no problems. Once I got Office 2010 I thought I would stop using iWork, but iWork is so much more intuitive to me, when it comes to tables, headers, charts, document properties like margins, pretty much everything. The only thing I don't like is that it doesn't use some core services like other OS X apps do, like auto-save in case it crashes doesn't seem to be present at all--yet it is in TextEdit. And I can never get Dictionary to work from Pages, and it's hidden under some other menu rather than being the main contextual menu like it is in all other OS X apps. I suppose Office contains more advanced things in it, but I don't know what they are. It's also much easier for me to page layout and control whether objects wrap or not in Pages. I didn't realize how much I liked iWork until I tried Office—and I'm using the latest and greatest Office.

 

[JKK photography]

It won't slow down your Mac one bit.

Do it; I have. Performance is the same.

The number/type of applications installed on your Mac will have no hit on performance whatsoever.