02-05-2009, 01:19 PM

I am working on a HP laptop at the moment and i have a 2.8 imac in my home office. i am thinking of getting a macbook 13" as everything else in my house is apple !!

I have Office for mac and its not very good ie it just keeps crashing and i used the trial of iwork and it seemed really cool but all of my clients are MS enabled

Please help

02-05-2009, 01:43 PM

i cant function with iWork alone, especially since it doesnt support the latest file formats and the imbedded tools in those formats. iWork is great if you just want to make a snazzy looking book report, a few 3d pie charts, and a presentation that looks like steve jobs'. other than that, especially if you're working in a microsoft environment, i'd stick with office for 100% compatibility.

if you just cant live with office and iWork isnt powerful enough for your needs, you may want to give Open Office a shot if you havent already.

as for your crashing issues, have you tried reinstalling it?

02-05-2009, 02:26 PM

I haven't but i will re install, i do appreciate the comments as its easy to get carried away with the sales stuff but its reality that i need and your advice is sound many thanks

02-05-2009, 04:44 PM

Stick with Office. As oakie alluded to, iWork is more for the creative types; Office gets the job done. Office also supports all Microsoft file formats (which just happen to be the latest versions) and is fully compatible with its Windows counterpart.

02-05-2009, 05:29 PM

on a side note, i just wish Pages could export to .html, and Keynote could export to .swf. they both would work together to be a really powerful, creative, and simple website development package.

it's sad that aside from GarageBand, Apple's suites just arent that great on their own at what they're designed to do. iWeb is nearly useless for creating a website more provocative than a Geocities page, Pages is limited beyond sharing amongst Macs, and Keynote is too flashy for its own good... but if they were to simply allow them to export as web standard files, they would make awesome tools that are truly easy to use.

they could probably supplant Dreamweaver and Quark for all but professional web developers.

02-05-2009, 06:52 PM

I use Office for Mac and Office for Windows in a Parallels virtual machine and have iWork '08. One thing I learned is that iWork's Numbers app won't open password protected Excel files. This is a deal-breaker for me so iWork is relegated to my personal stuff.

MS Office for Windows running in a Parallels (or VMware) virtual machine with Windows XP works very well, so since I got that I can have my Mac and Office of any 'flavor' too.

02-06-2009, 06:55 AM

Thanks for the responses, looks like it will be office 08 version on the macbook then with iwork installed just in case !

Im not sure about windows on a mac (parallels) , i wanted a mac as a mac as its so easy for me to use etc etc etc.

thanks again