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Re: MIcrosoft Office vs. iWork

It is true Pages has fewer features as a word processor than Word (but more as a page layout application). Numbers is probably best described as simply having many different features than Excel (i.e. lacking many Excel has, but possessing many that Excel does not).

However, Keynote pointedly out-powers PowerPoint. The complexity of animations available in Keynote, for example, runs circles around PowerPoint's offerings. I've encountered people who do a lot of presentations (i.e. educators, business and sales people) that have bought Macs just so they could have access to Keynote.

Two other office suite options are OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice. Both are free and opensource. OpenOffice.org is cross-platform. NeoOffice is a Mac specific port/fork of OpenOffice.org. It is usually a few versions behind OpenOffice.org (currently at 3.0.x while OpenOffice.org is at 3.1.x), but has a longer history of running natively on OSX and includes a few features OpenOffice.org does snot.

Thanks for the great suggestions. One thought on Quicken: as a beta tester for the FinancialLife product that was to be a Mac-specific replacement for 2007, it was pretty, and pretty non-functional when the beta testing ended. Not sure what this is going to look like nor when it will be available. As a very long-time Windows Quicken user, I was disappointed at the 2007 Mac version, and didn't want to run Windows on my Mac. As a result, I purchased Iggsoftware's iBank product about 7 months ago and have had good results. Upsides: functionality is there, leverages Mac interface, was compatible with Snow Leopard with a point release the same day as the OS, the developers do appear to listen to the user forum wish lists, and best of all, there is a thriving set of user forums with interactions from the developers who are extremely helpful. Downsides to current version 3.5.2: no online bill-paying function, and the reporting feature takes a bit of getting used to, especially trying to specify certain time intervals for reports. I am not put off by either limitation, but the blogs show these are important to some users.

Thanks for the suggestions.
For all the Software I will find always a solution, but what about for the hardware?

I would like to convert my desktop PC windows 7 for a desktop MAC, is this possible?

For those who want an email program more powerful than Mail but not as buggy or complicated as Entourage (at least, I found it so, and I've been using both PCs and Macs for years), check PostBox out. I haven't managed to get the calendaring piece to work properly yet, but the mail substitute is suprior.