iWork or MS Office?

Joined
Jan 28, 2007
Messages
14
Reaction score
0
Points
1
My wife just got a new teaching position so it seems like the perfect time to try out the Macintosh platform. I'm ordering her a Macbook Core2Duo, and trying to decide between buying a copy of Office 2004 for Students/Teachers ($149) or having iWork preinstalled ($49). As an Art History teacher she relies heavily on presentation software. All of my wife's work up to now has been created in Office. Will she be able to open all of her .ppt files in Keynote? Also, if she creates a presentation in Keynote, can she save it as a .ppt so that it can be opened with PowerPoint? I'd love for her to be able to use Keynote but if it's going to cause issues then I'll stick with PowerPoint and pony up for the Office suite.

Any thoughts?
 
Joined
Sep 30, 2006
Messages
805
Reaction score
28
Points
28
Location
Kansas
Your Mac's Specs
Black MacBook Black 2GB iPod Nano & Black 80GB iPod Classic B&W G3 G4's - PowerMac & Cube
I love iWork for making presentations and pamphlets and such. But to be honest, I am just in a habit of using Word for word documents. Don't get me wrong, Pages is totally capable of making just as good a word document as Word. If I had it to do over again, I would priobably just stick with iWork. It is so much better than Office. It only has two programs vs. Microsoft's 4, but it's about as powerful. The only weakness is a program comprable to Excel. You can work around that, but it's a definite weakness. After seeing the examples of what iWork puts out, Office's work just looks tacky. All the templates that you will work with in iWork look professional. My call- iWork all the way, and it's 1/3 the price.
 
Joined
Oct 17, 2006
Messages
2,572
Reaction score
173
Points
63
Location
Southern California
Your Mac's Specs
Macky the 21.5'' iMac 2.7ghz i5 8GB, Mr. Pink 64GB iPhone 6, iPad Jr. 16GB Air 2, 13'' MBAir 1.6Ghz
I also think you should go with iWork. I've made some great looking charts for a class using Pages. I'm also used to using Word so I also use Neooffice. It's a free program similar to Word, it also has some other ones to make spreadsheets and presentions. Once iWork 07 comes out, I'm planning to use a combo of (primarily) iWork and Neooffice.
 
Joined
Dec 17, 2006
Messages
1,035
Reaction score
57
Points
48
Location
The beautiful Northwest
Your Mac's Specs
imac 20" 216 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 1GBSDRAM, 250 GB hd, Airport Extreme, Bluetooth 2.0
iwork is awesome and soooo easy to learn and use. It produces beautiful projects with the many templates. Someone else will have to answer your questions about transferring files from pp but I'm thinking it can be done. Good luck with your choice.
 

Shop Amazon


Shop for your Apple, Mac, iPhone and other computer products on Amazon.
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon and affiliated sites.
Top