Which should I get? I am tempted to say "Apple!" but I might was well as use OpenOffice and live with its limitations if iWork doesn't provide better compatibility with Office.
I was also thinking of Office 2008 (Home/Student Edition), but I am not sure if it is worth it.
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Which should I get? I am tempted to say "Apple!" but I might was well as use OpenOffice and live with its limitations if iWork doesn't provide better compatibility with Office.
I was also thinking of Office 2008 (Home/Student Edition), but I am not sure if it is worth it.
This is not a question that can be answered by a poll. The answer depends on your particular needs. Only you know your particular needs.
Do you need to share files with Office-using professors or colleagues? If you do then, go with Office 2008. Its default formats are Microsoft's new XML-based (Office 2007) formats. It also provides excellent [but not perfect] support for Microsoft's older formats.
If Office-compatibility is not an issue, then your choices are less limited. iWork is an excellent productivity suite, albeit much less powerful than Office. It provides decent compatibility with Office on those occasions when you must deal with Microsoft formats. However, the Keynote presentation app allows you to produce presentations that make PowerPoint presentations look like the scribbles of a child with crayons.
If you need features, then OpenOffice.org surpasses Office because it provides support for Access files. It supports [not perfectly] just about every Office format. Did I say that it is free? Well, it is free! Downside? Its interface is not quite as elegant as the average Mac user is used to. It also requires MacOS X 10.5 or higher.
For MacOS X who don't have 10.5, NeoOffice is a Java-based version of OpenOffice.org. I detect no significant reduction is speed because NeoOffice is Java-based.
I do collaborate with people using Microsoft Office. How good is the compatibility of iWork with Office files? Is it better or worse than OpenOffice? I am familiar with OpenOffice.
Perhaps the best thing to do is try it yourself to see if it meets your needs. Personally, I think Excel is the best spreadsheet while Pages is better than Word. I'd also give the nod to Keynote over PowerPoint but I haven't used it enough to say that with confidence.
http://www.apple.com/iwork/download-trial/
I had MS Office for Mac years ago but since iWork came out I haven't looked back. Pages and Keynote are awesome compared to Word and Powerpoint. Use Numbers a bit and love it, but can't say anything about Excel.
I do collaborate with people using Microsoft Office. How good is the compatibility of iWork with Office files? Is it better or worse than OpenOffice? I am familiar with OpenOffice.
It's alright, but it won't automatically save it back as a word file or open the save dialog in the document's original folder by default. You have to manually search for the original file every time you save. That's more or less the only reason I don't use it every day. '09 is improved compared to '08 in this respect (they finally merged save and export dialogs), but then again, they made it more of a hassle to save as a .pdf.
I do collaborate with people using Microsoft Office. How good is the compatibility of iWork with Office files? Is it better or worse than OpenOffice? I am familiar with OpenOffice.
OpenOffice.org is free. It actually has more features than Office 2008. There is no reason not to install it on your MacOS X 10.5 computer.
iWork is aimed at a different audience. iWork provides decent Office file-compatibility, but it supports a much smaller feature set.
IMHO, however, it is foolish to depend on non-Microsoft applications for Microsoft-compatibility if Microsoft-compatibility is a mission-critical feature.