Office 2008 or iWork 2008?

Which would you do and why? Are they compatible? Is the iWork "word" like MS word? Whats the story? Im ordering tonight.

 

If you are doing heavy duty spreadsheets and need complete and perfect compatibility in an office or business environment, use Office 2008. If you are using it for personal use and/or not complicated spreadsheets or only need to make "Word" documents I would recommend iWork. I wish I could use iWork for my needs but in Real Estate Finance, heavy duty spreadsheets and compatibility are required.

 

I use powerpoint and word only. Is the Apple version of ppt compatible with office? or am I going to give myself headaches with iwork?

 

You should run the 30-day trial of iWork 08. I did and found it great and was able to drop office altogether. I can export .doc with Pages and found Keynote to be really user-friendly compared to PP. I haven't worked much with Numbers so I cannot comment on it.

All in all, it's the best $79 I've ever spent.

 

Im working with the trial for now before I spend any cash.

Pages looks pretty good....doesnt look to thinned out from Office, checking out the Keynote as well.

 

not SO impressed with iwork yet....it looks "thin" compared to MS Word and PPT.

 

It took me a while to figure out how to do certain things in Pages coming from Word. For my use I eventually found it easier to achieve the same things. But for someone else, it can be totally different and lacking. It all depends on the individual and their particular use.

The safe bet is office 2008 although I heard the windows version (office 2007) is much better.

 

Heh, the exact reason why it impressed me.

 

You could also try out Neo/Open Office, a free open-source alternative that can save in Microsoft formats if need be.

 

Office for Mac 2004. Or use Fusion / Parallels to use Office for Win 2007 on your Mac.

 

Office. Defacto standard. And I can't risk working on a doc at work in anything else and only to find out that it won't render for whoever is going to decide if we more funding lol.

 

I would say go for office, after all, you want to be productive, you do not want to spend time knowing other interface. Office 2004 is pretty nice, though somebody said that they are slow, but I do not really notice the difference.

 

Why would you buy Office 2004? unless you're on an old ppc mac, there's no reason going for an old version.

Well anywho as someone said before iWork is great if you're not going to be working with heavy duty office documents. Keynote is much more superior than PPT imo with many appealing templates. Pages is more like Word + Publisher and it can get most stuff done. Just make sure that it takes some time to learn, so be patient at first.

 

'04 has VBA support and the Excel Data Analysis Toolpack add-in. However, to be fair, what are the new features in '08? You're right that those new features might be better for some folks; I'm just not aware of any functional enhancements and I can't seem to find a list of advertised functional improvements on the MS website.

 

Office 08 is alright. If you need absolute worry free compatibility than go with Office.

Office doesn't like to play well with Spaces.
Word will crash when you try to merge two .docx files (at least for me).
Definitely slower than Office 07 for W32.

I think I will give iWork 08/09 a run when I have some cash laying around.

 

I got tired of iwork really quick...seems very thin compared to office. Office 08 it is!

 

Tell us what you think about Office 08 after some time using it. I'm still interested in it only because I can get it really cheap although I've been pretty happy with iWork.