iWork vs Microsoft Office

Ingenious TROLL

Ingenious TROLL

Ingenious TROLL

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Hey guys,

Considering the new rMBP come with iWork free (I am led to believe but stand to be corrected?) is this a good alternative to Microsoft Office, and how does Mail fare against Outlook?

Would appreciate some input from those who have used both; any pros and cons etc.

Cheers :D
 
If your requirements are rather "normal", then all the Apple apps should suffice. Personally find the new Pages to be fantastic though they have missed out some features (luckily they are well aware and will be gradually adding them back in...according to Apple). Despite those missed out features and having to work around them (I don't remember exactly what features unfortunately), I still prefer to use Pages over Word (which I tried and couldn't get on with it - very powerful but more difficult to use as a result).

Use Mail and don't feel the need to replace it with anything else. If you use Gmail, make sure you fully understand how Gmail works, otherwise you could mess up your email threads, but aside from that, I have no gripes with Mail at all.
 
lamboman said:
If your requirements are rather "normal", then all the Apple apps should suffice. Personally find the new Pages to be fantastic though they have missed out some features (luckily they are well aware and will be gradually adding them back in...according to Apple). Despite those missed out features and having to work around them (I don't remember exactly what features unfortunately), I still prefer to use Pages over Word (which I tried and couldn't get on with it - very powerful but more difficult to use as a result).

Use Mail and don't feel the need to replace it with anything else. If you use Gmail, make sure you fully understand how Gmail works, otherwise you could mess up your email threads, but aside from that, I have no gripes with Mail at all.
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Well I would use it for word documents. It is as good as Word in the respect of spell checker and grammar?
 
If you want to type words and have them appear on a white page, pages will suffice... For anything more complex you're going to need Word.

If you want to do sums in a table, numbers will suffice... For anything more complex you're going to need Excel.

And last but not least...

Ah **** it... just use Keynote for your presentations.
 
I find pages to be a cross over between Word and Publisher. Works absolutely fine for doing what you would do in word or publisher.

Numbers is no competition to excel, pure and simple, I'll give Microsoft that. For real basic stuff it will be fine, for anything else you will need excel.

Keynote is where iWork shines, far superior to PowerPoint in every way.
 
Ingenious TROLL said:
Well I would use it for word documents. It is as good as Word in the respect of spell checker and grammar?
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I've found Word in Windows at least to have huge problems differentiating between American and British English, despite the language being set to British. Pages uses OS X's built in spell checker, which doesn't get it wrong.

sbi5ar said:
If you want to type words and have them appear on a white page, pages will suffice... For anything more complex you're going to need Word.

If you want to do sums in a table, numbers will suffice... For anything more complex you're going to need Excel.

And last but not least...

Ah **** it... just use Keynote for your presentations.
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This makes Pages sound as if it is comparable to Wordpad or something. I haven't used Numbers (and can't imagine it being better than Excel), but think of Pages as all the essentials of Word with a fresh interface focused around them, as opposed to Word, which is so powerful that finding the basics can be a tad difficult.

Styles are the perfect example of this IMO. Word was horrible for this IMO, whereas Pages makes this easy-peasy, purely because it just has what most people need, nothing more, nothing less.

kitkat9933 said:
I find pages to be a cross over between Word and Publisher. Works absolutely fine for doing what you would do in word or publisher.

Numbers is no competition to excel, pure and simple, I'll give Microsoft that. For real basic stuff it will be fine, for anything else you will need excel.

Keynote is where iWork shines, far superior to PowerPoint in every way.
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Sums it up nicely.

Final thing, Google the Pages '09 demo method to get the current iWork for free. Won't mention anything more, but it technically isn't breaking the rules as it is a perfectly legal way of doing it.
 
Spitfir3 said:
The new iWork is comical - use Office, although it is tediously slow.
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What's comical about it (aside from the removal of a few features that they shouldn't have, which was a stupid omission)? The interface is cleaner than the old version, it has most of the features that they majority of users will ever need, and it costs nothing for those who are purchasing new Macs from here on.

Office on the Mac loads up slowly but for the short time I used it it seemed to be OK. The Windows version is better though, and is the one I'd buy now if I absolutely had to (just use Fusion).
 
Personally I feel pages is as good a day to day word processor as word and a better option for light desktop publishing (it flows text round images better by default, it's options for layout seem more conducive to making it do what you want) the main issue is that it doesn't understand word files all that well if you work with people who use word.

Numbers is passable, excel is in a different class but it's in a different class because it has highly advanced features, 99% of users numbers will do the job fine.

Keynote is excellent...

I strongly prefer Mail/Calendar to Outlook personally, the search functionality wins it for me...
 
I've very much gone off Microsoft, so hoping I get on well with iWork as I would like to stick wholly with Apple. Have had some very good experiences with Apple customers service, and quite the contrary with Microsoft.

The most annoying thing will be that most businesses opt for Microsoft, and documents may not always be compatible which would prove annoying.
 
I am doing all of my day to day stuff in Google Docs, and have been for at least a year now. I find that I'm relying less and less on advanced features such as Word-specific formatting, and all the spreadsheets I make are very simple with formulas perhaps allowing data to be updated in one place and that change being reflected in charts, other cells, performing calculations to see how much time elapsed between two dates, tracking warranty days left of assets etc. For me the ease of collaboration more than makes up for any missing features.

I've also seen less and less issues of people sending Word files around and expecting you to edit them and send them back over, if formatting is important it goes as a PDF. Collaboration is a thing that exists within an organisation and it doesn't matter what the software platform is as long as everybody uses the same one. Collaboration between companies is more web-based now using things like Confluence.
 
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Ingenious TROLL said:
The most annoying thing will be that most businesses opt for Microsoft, and documents may not always be compatible which would prove annoying.
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Just save your documents as pdf or .doc then from Pages, you won't hit any compatibility issues then.

The new version of Pages is fantastic, most of the features which people reference as missing, 98% of users won't even notice.

Keynote is best in class.

Not really needed to use Numbers much, but for my basic needs it works as well as a spreadsheet app needs to.

Can't really complain for free, can you?
 
Turbo-G said:
Just save your documents as pdf or .doc then from Pages, you won't hit any compatibility issues then.

The new version of Pages is fantastic, most of the features which people reference as missing, 98% of users won't even notice.

Keynote is best in class.

Not really needed to use Numbers much, but for my basic needs it works as well as a spreadsheet app needs to.

Can't really complain for free, can you?
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That's a very apt comment to be fair! I'll give it a whirl. Delivery was due today but I've had to go into work so will miss it now :mad: should be re-delivered on Monday.
 
Worth mentioning that some of the issues are to do with the manipulation of objects, eg. images, which you quite possibly will come across if you're going to be doing Publisher-type stuff. Aside from that, it's fantastic IMO.
 
Office is incredibly powerful but so unintuitive it makes my ears bleed sometimes.

For basic word processing/spreadsheets iWorks is fine but for business or anything complicated you don't have much choice but to use Office.
 
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