iWork

[Kaslo]

Hey everyone, today I was playing around with iWork (Mac version of Office) and I was wondering if anyone has purchased it and what their opinion on it was?

From what I see it was basically office but with better templates. Some of the Flyer/Poster Templates were really neat. Seemed like iWeb in document format.

[Mayareira]

Its ok, Pages is comparable to Word and Keynote is better than Powerpoint.
Numbers isn't getting anywhere close to Excel though :/

I bought it since it was pretty cheap, used it for a while then ended up buying Mac MS Office 2008...I am simply way too used to MS Office.

Still using Keynote over Powerpoint but that's it.

[Darus Grey]

Numbers isn't really trying to be excel...Excel at this point is almost it's own OS.

It dumbs down many of things excel is commonly used for, to make them easier for students and such. I personally use it a lot for doing charts and graphs, it's good for what it's meant to do.

Keynote is awesome.

Pages is a great replacement to word.

If my school didn't give us Office for windows or Mac included in our tuition, I would take iWork over Office for Mac, if only cause it's 1/2-1/4 the price.

[Mayareira]

Erm, there is no "trying to be Excel" here. Numbers is the spreadsheet application of Apple and Excel is the spreadsheet application of Microsoft.

Other than the "pretty" templates Numbers doesn't really dumb down anything. Its harder to work with than Excel(even for students, etc. Once you get used to Excel its much simpler to use than Numbers) and overall much less efficient/useful. You won't notice that if your work is limited by simple graphs as even certain free/open source software does that well.

Besides, in professional world its always an asset to be familiar with MS Excel.

That said, yeah. iWork is a very good alternative to MS Office if you aren't going to be involved deply with spreadsheets.

[Venga]

I was told by someone in the apple store yesterday that iwork is better than office and is alot cheaper, around £30 cheaper. I was going to download the free trial too, when i installed snow leopard.

Ive used office for the last 12 years or so, so ill have soemthing to compare.

[octopus]

One thing you may want to keep in mind is that if someone created a word document and send it to you, and then you want to open it in Pages... Sometimes the formatting will seem out of wack

[Darus Grey]

I'm pretty sure there's programs you can download that will *read* MS word/excel documents accurately for OSX, if you don't have Office for mac. Just like you can get Word/Excel viewer for Windows to read them.

[Kaslo]

Well I have Office 08 for mac, mainly because my school offers it for $10. Though, I am kinda tempted by iWork, I downloaded the trial to check it out.