iWork vs. Office

hello,

I have my apple for a month already and sometimes still drives me crazy. This time my question is about what you guys would recomend me to get iwork or office for mac. I was thinking probably getting iwork for word processor and presentations and excel from microsoft. What do you think?

BTW... Is iphoto a good photo editor or I should get some one better?, sometimes mess up my pictures.

TKS

A.neye:

alesimons said:

hello,

I have my apple for a month already and sometimes still drives me crazy. This time my question is about what you guys would recomend me to get iwork or office for mac. I was thinking probably getting iwork for word processor and presentations and excel from microsoft. What do you think?

BTW... Is iphoto a good photo editor or I should get some one better?, sometimes mess up my pictures.

TKS

A.neye:

Click to expand...

Take a look at NeoOffice for Mac. It does Word files and Excell files, it's free and does a very good job for the majority. If, however, you handle a lot of Word files that have a lot of code and special formatting you will probably to get Word for Mac to maintain full compatability, but the average person does quite well with NeoOffice.

As far as iPhoto, if your going to do a lot of editing, i would recommend getting something especially for that. iPhoto is alright for a few things but just doesn't do heavy photo editing, in my opinion.

The problem with using 2 different suites is if you want to transfer or link data between programs within a suite. For example, if you have a table from Excel in A Word document that you want to update when you change the Excel file.

This is just one example and most people don't do this kind of work, but something to think about.

The answer is...

Open Office! Tada! www.openoffice.org it is free, does all formats and works on MAC, PC and Linux.

I would use NeoOffice for now. iWork '07 is supposed to include a spreadsheet app.

iWork does not have a serious word processor-- Pages is a nice document layout system, but it's missing a lot of features that Word has.

Also, there's no spreadsheet program in iWork.

If it's down to a choice between iWork and Office, my suggestion is Office.

I'd suggest doing a search on the forums. This topic has been covered many times and you'll find a great deal of useful information.

Yeah this is an age old question but also a very interesting question.

For me its MS Office, its soemthing that I like to use the standard program for, in a work enviroment you want to streamline as much as possible

There aren't usually many problems with OpenOffice or NeoOffice but theres still a scope

If you find yourself on linux, open office is wonderful though

I'd download free alternatives and keep them on your drive just incase. Its nice to have options

Fro a photo editor i've never really gone out of photoshop, its done everything i've wanted to do within reason.

The question is really not that simple to answer. Me personally, I have both - iWorks and MS Office 2004. I use Pages and KeyNote more, but when I need to make an analysis, there is no other chance for me yet.

But generally, MS Office for Mac drives me crazy. Really much. But, so far, there was no other chance to use different office suite.

My recommendation is to buy iWorks and really try to download NeoOffice, which is provided for free and does really excellent work on the iMac.