Mac OS X compatibility with Windows

Right now I am a student and I am planning to buy the new Macbook that comes with Leopard on it when it gets updated. I find that the Mac is very useful and is more suitable for me personally.
But there are some issues that I want to work out first before buying the Mac, as it is a major investment for me and I dont want to buy something jsut to cause myself trouble. The only software i will be buying is the iWork '08, because i will only use it to type out my documents and such.
My issue here is how compatible are the iWork documents with Word ? Can people with Word 2003 read the documents in iWork? or MUST they have Word 2007 in order to read them? I just want to get this clear before i go and buy iWork and figure that i needed to buy Microsoft Word because i need to share my work with my friends (editting for example) so i wont want to get mixed up before buying anything.
Any help would be greatly appreciated and i hope i can join the Mac community sooN!

 

Documents created with Word 2003/2007 can be viewed with Pages (Part of iWork '08). Also if you create a document with pages, you can export it to word. I've had iWork '08 and Office 2007 since both came out, and I've never had incompatibility issues. The only problems are that if for example you go from pages to word, you might have to adjust fonts and their sizes, since some fonts available with pages aren't available with word. Or maybe adjust a table. But really these are things that you can fix in a flash.

I should add, that pages, by default, saves it's documents with a .pages file extension, which word cannot open. Like I said above, you'd have to export it to word with pages export option, which is very easy and painless.

If all you care about is word you will be fine. Excel and numbers are a different story though...

 

Well my main focus is word documents and presentations (powerpoint) so i think ill be fine with iWork. But then i was wondering if the documents on iWork still work on Word 2003 if you export it. I believe it is the same concept as in Word 2007, where you have to "save as 2003 doc" in order to use it in 2003. Thank you for the reply !

 

Is there an option in iWork to save as opendocument format .odt? or openXML format (word 2007 .docx)?

Can u imagine how different the world of document sharing would be to have a common file format so we can share documents to edit across platforms and applications?--I can think of one, opendocument format. (as used in OpenOffice for Mac or NeoOffice, by default)

But, MS and Apple, I believe, will not use this format for some reason.

 

Yep they would work with word 2003, since you can only export .doc files as opposed to 2007's open xml. You're welcome

Nope, no option for that. Within pages, you can only export to pdf, doc, rtf, or txt. And yeah I hear ya. In my opinion, the best way for me to share finalized documents is with pdf, but yeah an universal document format would be better for everyone, not so great for companies like Microsoft and Apple I guess, which is why that an industry standard like that is probably a long way off.

 

For your simple uses a Macbook will be fine. You could also just purchase Microsoft Office for Mac 2004...fully compatible with Office 2003...I think Office 2008 for Mac is due out early next year.

I cant believe Sam has not hit this thread to welcome you to the gated community of the Macintosh

 

^hahaha yeah I was wondering the same.

And fyi, office 2008 is out on January 14th, that is if microsoft's mac bu doesn't delay it again

 

Haha, fine, here's my "welcome to Mac land!" message .

Anyways, iWork '08 works well with Microsoft Office. Most files will be compatible and work fine in Office, and vice versa (Word Docs work fine in Pages, etc.). So unless you get really detailed in page layout, then you won't have to worry about compatibility issues.

And iWork works fine with Office 2003, as well as 2007.

But if you really want full compatibility and not having to worry at all about it, I suggest you stick to Microsoft Office for Mac. The current version is 2004, and the next version is Office for Mac 2008, due out in January 2008. Wait for that one.

 

Personally, I would use MS Office is I was going to be sharing a lot of stuff back and forth. I am sure iWork 08 is very compatible, but I KNOW MS Office is compatible.

 

Well i do know that it would be compatible, but i find the price point a LOT higher than iWork, and i find iWork to be more interesting to work with. I've been working with word for as long as i remember, but it cannot give me nice features like iWork. Although i never used iWork before, i wonder if anyone can give me any heads up or the comparison between the two. I am not saying that Word is bad, but it just isnt as useful for a student as iWork might be. thank you for the replies!

 

I agree, I wish MS Office was not the standard. Unfortunately it is, and for maximum compatibility Office is the best choice. As for price, iWork will run you $70 for a student (I believe) and MS Office 2008 Student Edition will run 149, and maybe cheaper through your school or other offers. So while it is more expensive, the compatibility is certain, whereas there may be some compatibility issues with iWork. For me, I don't want to find out a day or two before something is due that the formatting is fubar because it was being passed between different programs.

Having said that, iWork will most likely work well, just be careful with odd formatting that can cause issues.