Question Regarding iWork

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Part of the reason why I upgraded to a Mac rather than getting a less expensive lappy is that I simply do not want to give Microsoft any more of my money. I would have wiped the drive and put my favorite Linux on it, but M$ would still get their Windoze levy and a tick mark for a Vista unit sold. I won't give them that.
To that end, one of the first apps I installed was OpenOffice 3 to do my work-related stuff on. The problem is, there are a lot of small but noticeable differences in the way OOo formats vs. MS Office. If I save a change to my resume in OOo, for example, it looks different, especially in the page layout and margins, than it does if I open the document in MS Word. That's been a problem that has had me crawling back to the old XP install rather than just making changes on the Mac, because I am actively job searching right now, and most of the submissions I have made of my resume have been requested in .doc format.
Getting to my question finally: in addition to not wanting to give M$ any more of my money, I have heard of Office for Mac really causing issues, such as slower system performance, systems hangs, and mostly just being garbage all around. Reviews of iWork seem to be overwhelmingly positive. So, to those of you that have used it, how accurately do small formatting changes translate when moving back-and-forth between Pages and Word?

Thanks for hanging in there through the rant.
 

dtravis7


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I really needed to get used to Iwork, but in the end, I think Pages is a good program, sort of a mix between Word and Publisher.
 
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And the biggest issue with importing Word into Pages is that it will say that xxx font is not available but will advise you in the review on import and then use another. Then u have the choice of export in Word or pdf or rtf and seems to me formatting and changes are consistent as opposed to Offices unexpected surprises.
 
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I really needed to get used to Iwork, but in the end, I think Pages is a good program, sort of a mix between Word and Publisher.

In iWork 09 Pages allows selection of Word Processing or Page Layout, so you get to choose, with Templates for both if needed.
 
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One problem I'm having is that the margins in Word and Pages are the same but different. All my margins are 1" but for some reason when I open the same document in Word it looks very different. I've had to send a document to someone using Word and they see it very disorganized when they open it in Word. Is there a way for my page layout in Pages to look exactly like it does in Word 2007?
 
OP
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I gave the free trial a try and found that the formatting was off a little as well, but iWork did let me delete a hanging blank third page that Word absolutely would not let me get rid for some reason.
I think that unless I specifically receive a request for a .doc file, I'm going to start sending pdf's.
 

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