MS Office v.X vs. iWorks?

future-ex-pc-user

I'm thinking of getting the Office Suite from Microsoft (163? educational price), but I've read in some thread that there would come a new Appleworks Suite. I only need to read and write to MS Word and MS Excel files, I'll probably buy Keynote instead of powerpoint.

Here' s the question:

Is it worth waiting for iWorks(?)? is Appleworks compatible enough to word and excel for normal usage? Is there some other, freeware editor for word and/or excel files?

ghost_user_name

No...



No I mean yes.



Yes that what I mean.



Or No?



Haven´t got a clue and anyone (sans Jobs or someone at Apple who really hates their job so much they want to get fired) who say otherwise is a lying twat.

jbl

There are tradeoffs with everything. It sounds like Office compatibility is pretty important to you. You might try AbiWord and Gnumeric. These are opensource X-Windows programs that offer very good Office compatibility and they are free. The problem is that they require you learn something about X-Windows. Actually, given that you are a pc-user, the X-Windows environment shouldn't be that hard to figure out.



Here are the steps to get you started with X-Windows. You should probably read some of the documentation on the fink.sourceforge.net website but this should work. (Notice that if you don't have a fast internet connection this may take a while).



1 Download Apple's X11 and the X11 SDK from Apple's sight and install them (they are standard .pkgs on standard .dmgs).

2 Download and install Fink from the Fink website (fink.sourceforge.net).

3 create a text file named .cshrc in your home directory with the following line in it

source /sw/bin/init.csh

4 open Terminal (if it is already open you will have to quit and open it again) and type:

sudo apt-get update

it will ask for your password and probably spit out a bunch of other garbage

5 type:

sudo apt-get install system-xfree86

you will get a bunch more garbage and a few questions to which you can safely answer the default

6 type:

fink list

You will get a list of applications you can install

you can then type

sudo apt-get install appName

where appName is whatever you want to install



If you just want AbiWord and Gnumeric...

7 type

sudo apt-get install abiword

you get lots of garbage, maybe have to type a password and answer the default to a few questions.



8 start x11



9 type:

abiword &

into your xterm



10 repeat 7-9 substituting "gnumeric" for "abiword"



That should work although I already have this installed so I can't test it out to make sure I have all the steps. Someone here will yell at me if I missed something.

hobbes

Well, there's your answer! If you're up for an adventure, and learning some new stuff, the above is definitely worth checking out.



IMO (and experience), Appleworks is OK for normal Word and Excel usage. Not fabulous, but it gets the job done. For anything more complicated (e.g. complex footnotes in Word, or anything complex in Excel) it gets sticky, and you'll need either MS Office or the sluggish Java-based ThinkFree Office or X11 + AbiWord, Gnumetric, maybe OpenOffice, etc.



For really basic Word usage, the antiword Service is really worth checking out. This allows TextEdit to read and write .doc files -- for simple documents, it's lovely.



iWorks sounds promising, and I couldn't be more confident that it's in the works (no pun intended), but I sure haven't heard a scrap of reliable information when it'll be released. Could be alongside Panther, could be next year. No clue. And it's not clear yet that it'll be a completely viable competitor to MS Office, at least in its first iteration.

jbl

Let me give a little more rationale to my previous posting. AppleWorks probably does everything you want if you are doing just fairly basic word processing and very basic spreadsheets. If you know someone who owns AppleWorks (or you live near an Apple Store) you might want to check it out and see if it fills your needs. I think you might be better off with AbiWord and Gnumeric mostly because you can check them out for free and they are almost certain to fill your needs if you can get them running and don't mind the un-Aquaness of the interface.

gizzmonic

MS Office is a good for what it does. It's hard to argue with free, but if you're gonna be doing a lot of work between PC/Mac I highly suggest buying MS Office.

drcreations

OK, Here's what I did, and it works beautifully.



1. Make sure you have the latest Java engine

2. Get X11 - Install It - Add it to your login apps

<restart>

3. Go to www.openoffice.org

4. Download Open Office for OSX - Install It

<restart>



5. Since X11 will open at login, find the startopenoffice.org file and run it.



You should get a splash screen which will take about a minute to load.



I have been using this for almost all of my MS word files and excell files.



Good Luck

frank777

Well MS has trimmed the retail price of Office XP. They've been resisting this move for awhile.



Here's the link.



Does anyone know if Office v.X keeps pace with Office XP pricing?



If Apple's really working on an Office-killer...Does this matter?



(I'm assuming the price-point for AppleOffice apps would be $99.00 each, like Keynote.)

netromac

Quote:

Originally posted by Frank777

If Apple's really working on an Office-killer...Does this matter?

Probably, at least in the business world. They will probably continue to use Office for some time, at least until the rumored iWorks can provide a "similar" feature set an seamless integration with office documents.