iWork or MS Office

i'm a pc user switching to mac. for those who have used both i-works and microsoft office(either hone or business) which do you prefer. does one have any advantage over the other. ease of use.

I prefer iWork. I have both, but I prefer iWork over Office for Mac. It's much quicker, and it is easier to use (it feels like). Not only that, but it's also cheaper I believe. Even if money isn't an issue though, I say iWork.

It really depends. I'm in school and need office for one of my classes. However, I've never had a problem in any of my composition classes using iWork. It does everything I need. I will say that Office has a few features that would be nice if I was a power user of a word processor or excel.

I do keep a number of spreadsheets for personal use with numbers and I love that program.

are they both 100% backward compatible and interchangable with each other?

If u run iWork u gets heaps of choices;

Click for full size

If your still in school, then office may be the better choice, but I use iWork anyway. You can export to almost any format and I like the interface of the iWork applications much better. Pages is a lot easier to use than Office for Mac!

I say iWork 100%! It's much easier to use and I have almost no complaints about it! It's also less expensive.

Man, this is an eye opener....long time mac user but usually worked with office instead of iWork....recently wrote 4 papers for my post grad degree and 116 pages of office later, I freaking hate it. Considering I converted each report to PDF, quartz filtered to email-submit them, the app doesn't matter anymore. I will be using iWork from now on!

w00t!

iWork for the reasons stated above... i love the multiple choices you get with iWork in terms of layouts and designs.

You might also want to check out Neo Office. I use it instead of Office for the Mac. It has versions for Mac and PC. In fact it is on several of our PCs at work.NeoOffice Home

If you creating documents and are using iWork 09 then yes you can save to doc or xls formats. However, if you mostly use iWork to open files made with Word or Excel you may find there could be issues. I have run into a few already and I was just testing it out ...

I use iWork one reason being that it still seems to run faster than office, another being that I only have 512mb ram. iWork uses less of it

Well, I am a teacher and also in school again (not that I want to be). I am also a new Mac user - I opted for iWork (have Office on the PC desktop). iWork was only 40 bucks or so with the new computer. So far, I have had no problems with it. Office files open with iWork, and you can save iWork files to open in Office. I like Keynote better than PowerPoint - just seems snappier. There are a few minor glitches between the two, but nothing that can't be worked around. So save some money and go with iWork IMO. good luck.

As someone said: it all depends If, like me, you are a long-time user of Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, then you will probably find Pages and Numbers less fully-featured and, because of the different interface, with something of a learning curve. Keynote is generally reckoned to be better than Powerpoint, but so far I've only used it once, so can't really judge. In trying to use Pages, I keep getting stuck on figuring out how to do something that is, for me, relatively straightforward in Word (although I hate the new interface for Word). So, I may start something in Pages and then say, Oh the h... with it, and open it in Word to finish.
If, on the other hand, you are starting out all nice and fresh, it really wouldn't matter which you used, unless you were a major user of complex spreadsheets, in which case, Excel still beats Numbers.

I personally use Open Office free may not have 100% of what office or iwork has but pretty close to.

^That's true. The features are mostly the same. I find though that Open Office, being so close to MS Office's interface, is not as easy to use as iWork. iWork on the other hand, employs the functionality of MS Office, but has a more user friendly interface.

I've never used office for Mac, but i've used it for PC. I have iWork for my Mac, and I can't complain about it. It's excellent, and a lot better than office on my old PC. I'd say go for iWork. And it's cheaper!

I have Office for Mac and iWork 09, and I prefer iWork. What I would say though, is that that really is only to do with Pages, since my use of Excel and Numbers is not very advanced. I think Pages is a better Word Processor than Word simply because it doesn't force me to have all the options available to me at one time. I can minimise everything and set it to full screen and just type. Great for someone like me who is easily distracted!

Also, keynote is a little bit easier to use then PowerPoint. For instance, right in front of your nose is the option to play a music file during your presentation. I wouldn't be able to find that in PowerPoint for the likes of me! It starts over on EVERY SLIDE! I had to play the music in iTunes!

Office 2008 full business version for me thanks.