iwork or ms office?

[Malachi]

What should I get?
Going to pick up my macbook this week.

 

[James]

iWork is very good if you want to do presentations and almost a desktop publishing. However, if you need to maintain full compatability with the pc world which uses mostly Word, then get Word as you will run across Word docs that iWork will probably not handle.

Neooffice and Open Office will give you good compatability with Word and are both fine office programs, and free, still if you need complete compatability then MsWord is really your only choice. For the 90% who don't need the full compatability then Neo office, Open Office, and iWork do very nicely at far less cost.

 

[schweb]

What should I get?
Going to pick up my macbook this week.

You need to give a little more detail on what type of environment you'll need to use it in. At this point I'd say Office. While Keynote is really good, Pages leaves alot to be desired. I'm hoping that iWork 07 features an overhaul of Pages.

I have both, I tend to use Office alot more because I just find Pages frustrating and Keynote's PowerPoint compatibility is just so-so.

Open Office won't run natively in OSX, you have to install X11. And to me, both OpenOffice and NeoOffice look like a throwback from 1985 from a UI perspective, but that could just be me.


BTW, try searching the forum, this has been discussed a ton and you'll find great information. That's always the best place to start.

 

[Kar98]

I'm sorry, out in the real world, MS Office is standard.

 

[rcltrh]

You also won't have a spreadsheet program (Excel) if you don't go with Office. Possibly not that important for some, but vital for others. I love Office:Mac and prefer it to iWork and have used both quite a bit. I definitely prefer Entourage to the separate programs of mail, calendar, and address book.

 

[eric]

check out neo office.

free and pretty much all of the functionality of office (standard).

 

[Malachi]

Ok let me go into a little more detail then.
I am getting the mac for school to make my notes legible
I was thinking the ms office because my wife will want to use the laptop as well
and will not be as ready to adapt to the mac environment as I will.
I have seen the presentation software with the iwork and it looks awesome. I may buy the other software down the road just not sure what to get now.

 

[DrQuincy]

When I was a Windows user I ended up using OpenOffice over MS Office purely for the PDF export option. I'll admit I'm not an advanced user but OpenOffice and now NeoOffice does everything I'd ever need. I'd found the OpenOffice to MS Office compatability to be pretty good. The best thing you can do is trial NeoOffice (since it's free) and see how well it works for you.

Oh, and if you're worried about ease of use - how you ever used Office 2007? Very badly designed in my opinion.

 

[caribiner23]

Ok let me go into a little more detail then.
I am getting the mac for school to make my notes legible
I was thinking the ms office because my wife will want to use the laptop as well
and will not be as ready to adapt to the mac environment as I will.
I have seen the presentation software with the iwork and it looks awesome. I may buy the other software down the road just not sure what to get now.

In that case, Microsoft Office is your best bet.

I agree that Keynote (the presentation software with iWork) is awesome, but as pointed out above iWork doesn't include a spreadsheet program, and Pages leaves a lot to be desired if Apple wants it to be taken as a serious word processor. If you want to make the transition from Windows easier, Office is the way to go.

Good luck!

 

[schweb]

Just get MS Office. There's actually a note-taking mode in Word on the Mac that is pretty cool.

 

[Kar98]

Oh, and if you're worried about ease of use - how you ever used Office 2007? Very badly designed in my opinion.

Outlook 2007 is an improvement, but I could do without the screwed up menus in Word 2007.

 

[Malachi]

The most resent office I have is xp so I don't have much to compare it to as far as new stuff.

 

[Ximalli]

I suggest getting Open Office for the Mac. It's free and you can save files as Microsoft .doc format and the file will work perfectly in any Word application.