iWork or Office for Mac

[Defsolutions]

Hey folks -

It has been a while since i posted here - but last night I bought my wife a Macbook for her for our 10 year anniversary. (Yes, I'm tyring to get her to convert to the dark side) I have been tinkering with the Macbook (from work) which we already have Office for Mac installed. But I know the Mac has iWork so does iWork have the save capability to .doc or .xls files so people who have MS Office can look at it. My wife is doing her Masters (Which was ONE reason why I bought her the macbook - I couldnt just buy another darn PC or Windows) We were given a PC with Vista a while back and god I would jsut as quick toss it out the window!) So, question is being - iWork or Office for Mac. She needs to be able to have the flexibility to have people read her papers as well read other people's papers when they are using MS Office. Any suggestions would be appreciated. (The Macbook is on order and should arrive this weekend) so let me know.

Thank you!

 

[mac57]

I would suggest a third option. Get NeoOffice, the Mac port of OpenOffice. It is fully MS-Office compatible and is entirely free. OpenOffice has been around for a long time - it is a mature feature rich product. You should look there before you spend ANY money on an office suite.

 

[Defsolutions]

I currently use Open Office at home. (I am not spending money on Microsoft) But the same time I just need to make sure for my wife's sake (after all I did buy her something she has never had before - that she would have the capability of opening and reading and sending readable files for others.

Thanks for your input! It is greatly appreciated

 

[shahvikram123]

I have used Neoffice/openoffice for the mac and it has serious compatibility issues with .doc files. For example if you have a .doc file with lots of text boxes, graphs, images etc made on windows then the layout will look different when opening with neooffice. For example you may find that the text box is somewhere else on the page...

However for basic stuff its pretty good....

iWork is much better with the page layout issues, they seem to be very minor, like for example just text being a bit off, but on the whole its much cleaner. It is also much more easier to is a lot more elegant than neooffice.

MS Office, would be your ideal choice if you want total compatibility, with windows users.

By the way, Microsoft is releasing MS Office 2008 for mac in January so you might want to wait till then.

Also download the free trial of iwork and MS Office 2004 and 2008(when it comes out) and see which one you prefer

 

[goobimama]

For total compatibility, Office for Mac wins.

But for ease of use and productivity, iWork 08. It does export to .doc and .xls, but if the document is complicated, it might be open out a bit shuffled on MS Word. But there's always the PDF option if the final output doesn't need to be edited...

 

[Defsolutions]

Thats what I kinda thought! THanks for the input guys!