Just saw a review that said Keynote totally blows PowerPoint away. I love Pages first because of the clarity of the text display and the ability to enlarge it to different sizes and still retain that fantastic Apple resolution. What do you plan to use Office/iWork for? Student, business or what?
OPINION> iWork has a better interface which makes it easier to use. Also cheaper.
iWork and Office do the SAME THINGS. So either one will work, but iWork just tends to blend more seamlessly with the Mac and it's other Apps.
That said, Word is ultimately more powerful than Pages, but... is it power that you would EVER use?? I doubt there are 1% of the users that ever need the few extra features/abilities that Word offers over Pages.
I have used Word/Office since 1990, and was considered expert. I had Office 2004 on this MBP until a month ago; some changes and Word would no longer launch. So I removed Office totally. When I bought this MBP in February I bought iWork 08, using Pages for a newsletter and Keynote for new presentations. Excellent tools.
For compatibility with MS Office, I use NeoOffice and/or OpenOffice 3.0 (Aqua). Earlier this week I finished a project using NeoOffice that had been done on MS Word in previous years. Except for a little getting used to how styles were applied/changed, it was effortless.
For major academic work I use Mellel, and sometimes Nisus Writer Pro, since both handle RTL languages extremely well. Both are superb writing tools.
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Yes, I know I have too many writing tools... (did I mention I use Papyrus and Ragtime?)
Pages is incredible. Mail is incredible (not much reason to care about Entourage). KeyNote is incredible. Access is not available for Mac. Publisher is not available for Mac. Numbers falls far short of Excel.
If you absolutely need full Office compatibility with, say, an employer, you should get Office. If you are a regular Excel user and enjoy things like the ability to freeze panes, you will find that Numbers does not come close to comparing to Excel just yet (it also gets really slow when working with large spreadsheets). Numbers offers some really exceptional innovative features and is much more beautiful, but it shows that it is a first generation product. The good news is that Apple has demonstrated their ability to evolve iWork apps, and Numbers could be a real competitor to Excel even in the next version, if Apple worked hard enough at it.
But if this is just casual at home use, you really don't need Office.
Personally I would recommend using the trial version of iWork before making a decision. I have both as I used Office before iWork came out. Changed the toolbars around for both Word & Excel to my liking and they were OK.
I believe that you can do most things with iWork, and then download a trial version of Bento (FileMakers consumer database) and play with that one - it's been interesting for me and I actually bought a Family Pack.
In other words, don't pay out money until you know what you want. If iWork & Bento work for you then you can put the money you saved on more RAM.
Just my two cents on the matter. I saw that you said you teach at a college, and that you will be using which ever software you pick for notes, lectures, presentations, etc. Assuming that not every student in your classes will own a Mac, and also assuming that you may want to put up files for them to download / access from a webpage, etc, would it not be safest to go with Office? As a college student, I would love to use Pages but find that most of my classes make use of / require Office. Office's .doc is the only format that any of my professors would except a paper in other than an actual hard copy.
Just my two cents on the matter. I saw that you said you teach at a college, and that you will be using which ever software you pick for notes, lectures, presentations, etc. Assuming that not every student in your classes will own a Mac, and also assuming that you may want to put up files for them to download / access from a webpage, etc, would it not be safest to go with Office? As a college student, I would love to use Pages but find that most of my classes make use of / require Office. Office's .doc is the only format that any of my professors would except a paper in other than an actual hard copy.
Pages will save documents as .doc ... fully compatible with M$ Word... or as .pdf which is fully compatible with EVERYthing.
Comments
When you buy your Mac you'll get free demo of both.
otter
iWork and Office do the SAME THINGS. So either one will work, but iWork just tends to blend more seamlessly with the Mac and it's other Apps.
That said, Word is ultimately more powerful than Pages, but... is it power that you would EVER use?? I doubt there are 1% of the users that ever need the few extra features/abilities that Word offers over Pages.
For compatibility with MS Office, I use NeoOffice and/or OpenOffice 3.0 (Aqua). Earlier this week I finished a project using NeoOffice that had been done on MS Word in previous years. Except for a little getting used to how styles were applied/changed, it was effortless.
For major academic work I use Mellel, and sometimes Nisus Writer Pro, since both handle RTL languages extremely well. Both are superb writing tools.
====
Yes, I know I have too many writing tools... (did I mention I use Papyrus and Ragtime?)
If you absolutely need full Office compatibility with, say, an employer, you should get Office. If you are a regular Excel user and enjoy things like the ability to freeze panes, you will find that Numbers does not come close to comparing to Excel just yet (it also gets really slow when working with large spreadsheets). Numbers offers some really exceptional innovative features and is much more beautiful, but it shows that it is a first generation product. The good news is that Apple has demonstrated their ability to evolve iWork apps, and Numbers could be a real competitor to Excel even in the next version, if Apple worked hard enough at it.
But if this is just casual at home use, you really don't need Office.
I believe that you can do most things with iWork, and then download a trial version of Bento (FileMakers consumer database) and play with that one - it's been interesting for me and I actually bought a Family Pack.
In other words, don't pay out money until you know what you want. If iWork & Bento work for you then you can put the money you saved on more RAM.
Just my two cents on the matter. I saw that you said you teach at a college, and that you will be using which ever software you pick for notes, lectures, presentations, etc. Assuming that not every student in your classes will own a Mac, and also assuming that you may want to put up files for them to download / access from a webpage, etc, would it not be safest to go with Office? As a college student, I would love to use Pages but find that most of my classes make use of / require Office. Office's .doc is the only format that any of my professors would except a paper in other than an actual hard copy.
Pages will save documents as .doc ... fully compatible with M$ Word... or as .pdf which is fully compatible with EVERYthing.