iCal, Mac Mail, iWork vs Office for Mac 2008

I am currently using iCal and Mac Mail to manage my appointments and email.

The hospital I am working at, is providing a copy of Office for Mac 2008 (the version with Entourage instead of Outlook) at a minimal charge to its employees if they want it.

Question: Would I be better off to use the Office product or to purchase the current iWork software from the App store?

The cost isn't really the issue for me. I have never used iWork or Entourage, and I am wondering what the better option is. I currently sync my appointments and email etc with my iPhone and do not want to run into any problems by switching to the Office software.

I would appreciate any insights from those that have used both products.

Thanks.

Scott

After coming from a Windows set-up, I began using Office 2008 and brushed off the iWork software as well as iCal etc. However, after spending a few days with it all, I realised how much quicker and better it was than Office for Mac. I'd suggest go with the Apple software.

It depends on your situation, but broadly speaking I find Pages to be a vastly better word processor than Word, and fully compatible for what I do with it. The desktop-layout portion of Pages has no direct equivalent in Word, so again I find that superior.

Keynote is so completely and totally in every aspect (but one really minor thing) superior to PowerPoint I can't believe anyone still uses PowerPoint except for the "sheep mentality" and dominance of PCs. No serious presenting professional should be caught dead with PP anymore.

Numbers -- well in some ways it's also vastly better than Excel, but in many other ways Excel totally rules over Numbers. I'd say Numbers is the right choice for beautiful presentations of spreadsheet data, but Excel is the better choice for the nitty-gritty work of such types of projects.

So, overall I think iWork rocks, but there ARE situations (particularly those in which a beautiful presentation of your documents doesn't count for much, or people are using Office-exclusive features very heavily) where using Microsoft Office for Mac is the better choice. It's too bad they're only offering you the old version, but if the above descriptors apply to your work situation, Office might be the better choice. I'm glad I don't have those issues so I'm free to use iWork.

As an opposite point of view, I find MS Office vastly superior to iWorks right now. Pages and Numbers are joke compared to Excel and Word. Keynote is definitely nice, but it doesn't outweigh the negatives of the other two apps.

While Pages and Numbers are ok for casual or home users, if you have any serious use of the apps or plan to share back and forth with others using Office, just go for the real thing.

+1 For Office 2008 or 2011. While Pages does have some things about it which are nice (layout work) it does not provide the compatibility with Office that most students and business users need.

chas_m said:

Keynote is so completely and totally in every aspect (but one really minor thing) superior to PowerPoint I can't believe anyone still uses PowerPoint except for the "sheep mentality" and dominance of PCs. No serious presenting professional should be caught dead with PP anymore.

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That's quite the statement to make. I can say without hesitation that PowerPoint has much better compatibility with the OOXML format which, given that Office is the de-facto standard, is quite important. Last time I used Keynote, it struggled with certain parts of the OOXML presentations I threw at it. And let's be honest - presentations rarely require a lot of finesse (it's content that matters in academia for instance).

The notion that no serious "presenting professional" should be using PowerPoint doesn't recognize the aforementioned de-facto standard nature of PowerPoint. In fact, it could be asserted that serious presenters should be using PowerPoint especially if they're sharing their presentations.

I have a couple of problems with Office 2008. First there is no visual basic so a lot of the fancy stuff that businesses use isn't available. Secondly Entourage is not the full suite sync platform that Outlook is. That is - Entourage doesn't sync notes and tasks back to your exchange server.

There is the niggle that the interface and hot keys don't match the windows versions - which could be a big niggle if you are used to the windows version. Of course 2011 has the ribbon which may or may not be agreeable to you.

That being said I have both the Apple apps and Entourage working together. I have since upgraded to Outlook and my company now uses exchange 2007, so both outlook and Apple Mail work well with that. (iCal and address book both sync along with Outlook)

Another plus for Office 2008 and preferably Office 2011.

vansmith said:

The notion that no serious "presenting professional" should be using PowerPoint doesn't recognize the aforementioned de-facto standard nature of PowerPoint. In fact, it could be asserted that serious presenters should be using PowerPoint especially if they're sharing their presentations.

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You're right -- I should amend my statement to "nobody who doesn't want to bore the pants off their audience should still be using Powerpoint."

In some circles, of course, being interesting or beautifully presented doesn't count for much. PowerPoint is and will still be king for those sorts of presentations.

I don't do those sorts of presentations, and the last 20 minutes of any presentation I do is filled with people telling me horror stories of how many awful PowerPoint presentations they've had to sit (or usually, sleep) through and how happy they are that this wasn't one of them, followed by "HOW did you DO all that??"

But I certainly don't mind if the rest of the world doesn't catch on to my competitive edge for a while yet ...

Ok, but what would the opinions be if compared to Office 2011, especially Outlook 2011 vs Mail?

Since I stopped using Entourage for my mail on the imac, I have not had any problems with my mac freezing and needing to do a "press the power button" reboot. I am now hesitant to put programs like Office on my mac which were originally made for Windows but have come out with a mac version.

What do you use at work?

Tom

I am now hesitant to put programs like Office on my mac which were originally made for Windows but have come out with a mac version.

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Excel and Powerpoint both were original Mac programs and later on for Windows. MS was programming for the Mac before Windows - other than DOS which they purchased from Seattle Computing. Just thought I'd let you know....