iWork vs Microsoft Office 08

So for college I've decided to get an iMac. Should I get iWork (70$ *edu discount) or Office '08 (159 *edu discount)? Is office worth the money? Does iWork work?

Why not buy the educational version of MS Office 2008? It includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage. Amazon has it for less than $105.00.

Amazon.com: Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Home & Student Edition: Mac OS X: Software

Regards.

In my opinion, you'll be happy with either one. You can save documents as Word docs in Pages so others can read your documents if you give them one of your files. Personally, I like iWork because it's a Mac app. Microsoft Word works OK too but iWork seems somewhat quicker.

Get Office 2008 as suggested. Some college, and university, lecturers just will not co-operate in handling anything other than Office submissions. You will find this pretty common through other posts.

If you do get Office 2008, make sure you change the default saving from .docx to .dec in the Preferences. Not all PC users are up to date with the XML Open update from Miscrosoft.

If you're getting this for school, then I would highly suggest getting Office 2008

Before I buy 2008, haven't there been problems with 2008? On Apples page the office suite gets a ****** review.. Just wondering before I buy it. Thanks.

AudiSportB5S4 said:

Before I buy 2008, haven't there been problems with 2008? On Apples page the office suite gets a ****** review.. Just wondering before I buy it. Thanks.

Click to expand...

Some Mac users tend to be biased against anything Microsoft. Office 2008 is not different than any other version of Office you have used in the past. If you like PC Office, then you'll like Office 2008. If you hate all things Microsoft, then you probably won't like it.

Works very nicely with no freezes or crashes. Make sure all updates are installed from Mactopia ~ currently version 12.1.5.

iWork vs Office 08

Hi,

While normally, I'd suggest you go with the flow and use Office, the latest version of Office 2008 looks and feels much more like iWork than previous versions of Office. More important and frustrating, I just installed Office 2008 on my MacPro and am having all sorts of hangs with Excel. The Office 08 install is relatively new, so I can't comment on how it behaves on other macs, but the way it's operating now is *not acceptable*. I'm working with a relatively small file and am just trying to format a bunch of charts and Excel keeps crashing.

If you can get an older version of Office, do that. Otherwise, I'd go with iWork. The always crashing Excel is pretty worthless.

Brooke

bnsteel said:

Hi,

While normally, I'd suggest you go with the flow and use Office, the latest version of Office 2008 looks and feels much more like iWork than previous versions of Office. More important and frustrating, I just installed Office 2008 on my MacPro and am having all sorts of hangs with Excel. The Office 08 install is relatively new, so I can't comment on how it behaves on other macs, but the way it's operating now is *not acceptable*. I'm working with a relatively small file and am just trying to format a bunch of charts and Excel keeps crashing.

If you can get an older version of Office, do that. Otherwise, I'd go with iWork. The always crashing Excel is pretty worthless.

Brooke

Click to expand...

Do you have the latest versions installed? There have been several software updates.

Help > Check for Updates

Yes, Excel has a hanging problem. Can't comment on Word, but Excel randomly hangs when formatting a charts.

Jaygray said:

Do you have the latest versions installed? There have been several software updates.

Help > Check for Updates

Click to expand...

Yes, I am all updated (version 12.1.5). Excel just hung again! I have an "exotic" video card (NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT) that has caused problems with Java 3D in the past, but I would be surprised if that is the case here. No other programs are behaving badly.

I like iWork

also OpenOffice, which is free and fully compatible with MS-Office
www: OpenOffice.org - The Free and Open Productivity Suite

i had office 2004 but kept crashing so i got iwork 08

I have both and I'm also a student, so here's my experiences:

If it's a paper or document that I'm the only person working on, using Pages (iWork) is never an issue. I just export it as a word document or PDF, make sure the formatting is intact and it's fine.

If I'm collaborating with others, then importing into iWork will be fine mostly, but something minor might get messed up (table formatting changed, image location moved etc). Minor glitches, but if you're going back and forth with multiple document revisions, it's a pain.

Having said that, Office 2008 has been such a huge nightmare to work with (both in terms of speed and in general usability), I try to avoid it whenever possible. This may sound like MS bashing, but it's really not. Office 08 is just so cluttered and inefficient to work with, it's incredible.

Plus Microsoft has acknowledged that their floating Formatting palette (basically the most important toolbox you'll use all the time) is incompatible with Spaces (it gets stuck on a space, so you'll switch to Word and Spaces will go to an empty space with just the formatting palette) and MS isn't going to fix it until the next major version of Office.

Oh and Office 2008 isn't compatible with Visio 2007 documents either. Just in case you need to embed any of those into your documents.

So what I end up doing is using Pages whenever I can, Office 2008 if I'm making quick changes on collaborative documents and Office 2007 running under Parallels whenever I need to work with Visio documents. Thank you microsoft.

If you just need to hand in your own work, go with iWork.

Why not just save the 100 dollars and download open office? Open office is the most compatible, as it is pretty much the only office app used by linux users, its compatible with msoffice, and it works on any current operating system mac os x, windows xp, most linux etc.. I use open office and see no need for msoffice, unless they have got something new and revolutionary in it.

I just switched to a Mac and am so frustrated with Word 2008 I could scream; it crashes several times a day (and yes, it is updated) and doesn't recover the documents! I've been using Pages, but get frustrated with having to "save as" every time I save the same document; I'm now going to try Open Office.

Sigh.

OpenOffice works well, be sure to get the 3.0.1 version that was posted this week.

Also, watch for NeoOffice 3.0 in March. I have been using the Early Access of NeoOffice 3.0. Has all of Org 3.0 plus it is faster and as stable as Org 3.0. And it looks and feels like a Mac. Oh, and for me it handles Hebrew (RTL languages), which Org 3.0 does not handle correctly (at least on the Mac, it works correctly on Windows and Linux).

iWork is very good and enough. but it is lacking for database manager! as Access in MS office, is there any free application for data base for mac?

OpenOffice.org 3.0.x has a database program.