iwork vs MS Office for the Mac

Dreaming_debtfree_dreams

Hi everyone

I'm planning to get a MacBook soon as my laptop's finally conked out and I'm returning to university in September. After the various problems I had with Windows, I was running my laptop on Ubuntu for a few months before it gave up the ghost, prefered it to Windows but found it a bit too diy for my tastes. Have therefore been won over by the Mac's claim that "it just works".

I'm still undecided about what to do regarding a a word processing programme. I can get iwork cheap when I buy my Mac but I don't know how well it will cope with me editing essays on both my Mac and the PC's in uni. I was considering giving Open Office a go for the Mac, or whether to be better the devil you know and get MS Office for Mac.

Am also likely to need to do presentations and spreadsheets, how easily does iwork cope with pc editing on these as well?

Would appreciate to hear your thoughts on my quandry.

Thanks

DDFD

Marty_J

iWork can open MS Office documents, as can Open Office, so there need not be any compatibility issues. Office for Mac can of course open PC Office documents too.

Pages is more of a desktop publishing program than a word processor in the style of MS Word, and you can make very beautiful documents with it. If your word processing is restricted to typing letters and the like, you could do just as well with Open Office.

As for the presentation programs, I'd have to say that Keynote is superior to Powerpoint, but I'm sure there are those who would disagree.

As for spreadsheets, I have Numbers on my Mac, but I've never really had cause to use it. I had a bit of a play around with it when I first got iWork, and as you'd expect from Apple, everything looks very pretty, but I'm guessing Excel has more features. As always, it depends what you're likely to want to do with it.

If you're buying with the education discount, you should be able to get a discount on either iWork or Office for Mac. There are also trial version available for both:

http://www.apple.com/uk/iwork/download-trial/

http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/Office2008/trial-download.mspx

So you can always try them out and purchase whatever one works best for you.

Another option would be to try out Google Docs, which would make sharing documents across multiple computers and platforms very easy indeed.

David0998

I use MS office on my mac. I got it for £30 off my uni. You should speak to the uni see if your has any offer like that.

I have had no problems with office. I used it to do my dissertation all ran sweet. You can download a trial of both of them give them a go when you get your macbook.

BikerEd

I use OpenOffice on the Mac. It is superb and I don't have any features missing.

fox2319

I use NeoOffice for the Mac. It's based on openoffice but has a bit more Mac customisation.

BTW - It's free and you can set it to save things as MS Office formats by default if you prefer

timbim_2

Excel has VBA. That puts it far and away ahead of any other spreadsheet without question in my mind.

Marty_J

timbim wrote: »

Excel has VBA.

As far as I know, the latest version on the Mac does not, which makes it rather a moot point.

Mac OS X has AppleScript and Automator though, which can be used for some of the same things.