[Philton]

I am the only Mac user in my company. I have to use MS office to share files with my colleagues. I have one BIG GRIPE with Mac MS Office against PC MS office.
To date I have not found any BIG issue with the excel part of Mac MS office. I have small gripes but generally they are compatible.
In word and powerpoint vs iworks (or vice versa) I have BIG issues.
I can construct a Keynote or .ppt in the Mac and develop a great looking presentation with more transition effects in .ppt than are in Keynote iworks. Fact. But if I send my Mac version to a colleague on a PC you can guarantee that when you play the .ppt in presentation mode, first those great transition you get in the Mac version, all but disappear.
Secondly, graphs or inserts that you have shrunck to fit the .ppt slide in the Mac version and actually present great in the Mac version, all come out misplaced and words overlaid with one another in the PC version. Not good, I have loads of trouble with this. The way I get round this is download my Mac .ppt file to a USB go to a work PC, load it run the .ppt in presentation mode. The slides that come out with misplaced inserts and text, you can correct if you made the data in the .ppt. If you imported the data then you have to double click it, where you then get the original graph or spreadsheet or whatever document appear, and you simply click it and return to the .ppt and generally that fixes the problem. Then I can reload to my Mac, overwrite the original file, now I can send it to a PC colleague and it will still work great on my Mac and a PC. Yes you are correct, that means my work desk has my Mac on it and a work PC for these and other MS Mac compatible issues. I hate that as I fly the Apple flag often, but still have to cower sometimes to a PC.
What bugs me is they are both MS and they are not 100% compatible.
The same goes for the word on both systems, but you cant double click a section to correct it as you do in .ppt, you have to physically reposition or retype it.
From Pages I can make great documents, with bullets, pictures, graphs etc, but convert it to a .doc on a Mac, you may be OK at this stage, not always. Send this .doc to a PC and your screwed. Nothing lines up, most formatting is misplaced.
So if they could fix this or anyone knows how to fix this I would be a happy bunny.

That's my two cents worth of PC vs Mac MS office and iworks, Actually felt more like 100 cents worth.
Phil

[n781lc]

I really like iWork 08. I have MS Office from a couple of years ago when I bought my first iMac and needed to maintain business contacts even though now retired. I didn't really try iwork 06. But, after reading about the new version I added it and have been using it constantly. I have always (many years) hated MS Word, I much preferred Wordperfect but .. !

Pages is great and can be saved in any format, numbers is just fine and I do a lot of spreadsheet stuff and graphing .. but keynote si much better and easier to use.

What few little glitches there are will get fixed., None are a real problem.

Good luck and I do recommend it.

[major7]

The primary reason I use MS Office is because of Entourage. For my needs, Entourage is a far better program than Mail - despite it's problems with databases crashing - which have supposedly been addressed in the latest version of Office. I don't really use the other programs that intensively - meaning, I use them often, but not to their fullest extent of capabilities. I wish Entourage was sold separately...it isn't is it? Somebody please tell me if it is. I hate having to upgrade a whole office suite because of one program. I've never tried iWork.

[malor]

Funny this (future) article should come out now. I am at exactly this point right now, trying to decide between iWork or Office for my
MacBook. I'm about to start my PhD program and the college says MS Office is "required". I'm guessing it's because they want a standard format to exchange papers with the professors, and not because of some specific feature set they want to use. I use MS Office on my work (Windows) laptop but I want to do all my school work on my MacBook if possible. I want to support Apple and exclusively use iWork but I worry about the compatibility back and forth. I presume the majority of my writing will be using standard research referencing, paragraphing, bullets, et al, and so I would guess I can do all my work in iWork and everything should export just fine to be read in Word. I have similar expectations of Numbers/Excel but I do worry about some comments I've read on the web about Numbers graphing capabilities (I predict I'll be doing at least some basic statistical analysis in my papers). I have no intention of using Entourage as all my personal e-mail is done via webmail interface. I will probably use Keynote, but guessing
that will get significantly lighter attention than Word/Pages or Numbers/Excel. As a last resort I "could" do all my writing in Pages, then export to Word on my work machine and update any formatting anomalies there...but I really don't want to do double work. I did try some basic functionality during the 30-day trials of the included software and as far as I could see (tables, colors, basic formatting, etc) everything was compatible...but I'm just not convinced I pushed the envelope enough to make a firm decision. Any user comments to my dilemma would be appreciated.

[kellybean]

I can't speak for your school, but I'm an undergraduate and have to upload a lot of my papers to D2L (or Blackboard, programs like that) so that teachers can grade my papers and shoot them right back to me electronically. I don't want to mess with compatibility issues because my grade suffers if they can't open my doc.

I've had circumstances where I've created a powerpoint presentation that I had to run on a prof's computer, because that's the one that was set up to work with the projector. If I had used Keynote, it wouldn't have worked. Granted, I'm in an arts program where most profs use mac, in fact macs are required, but Keynote just isn't at a place where it's loaded on all laptops like Office is. Maybe if demand is great enough, it will be installed as a standard application.

I think I will get iWorks and check it out though. I'll have two computers: my powerbook pro will have Office, and my Air will have iWorks. We'll see which one gets the most use.

[HawaiiBill]

In many ways it has been painful reading this thread. The two most repeated refrains are the errors and problems in programs available from Microsoft -- chiefly Word and PowerPoint -- and Apple mostly in the iAnythng series. The next problem is compatibility. And one writer noted to the surprise of no one that he found incompatibility between two applications with one source, Microsoft!
It has been the case for many years that Microsoft was never going to produce software, whether operating system or application, that performed as advertised. The failings are frequently serious, possibly fixed in an upgrade but frequently never fixed. Users are familiar with the word 'workaround.' and that was its most potent origin.
Early on, by contrast, Apple developed a strong reputation for reliability. In its hardware and operating systems the whole field of graphics was pretty much Apple territory. Adobe was all Apple then and it was clear there was no temptation to put delicate tasks in the hands of the Ruffians of Redmond. Apple worked and shouldn't be exposed to harsh elements.
Sadly, that is no longer the case.

I'm new to Mac -- with a MacBook Pro now a year old. Loved that Tiger. Running Adobe Creative Suite 2 back then and upgraded immediately to Suite 3. Awaited Leopard, bought it for first day arrival. Took my MacBook home and bragged to my Microsoft-savvy wife, "Boy it's good to have new operating system you can install with confidence."

Sure. Now noted that it took Adobe three months to get Acrobat 8 Pro PDF to work. A third corner on a huge Apple/Adobe user block was Epson. ColorBurst RIP is bundled with Epson on their large Photo Stylus Pros. You would have thought that Epson and Adobe and Apple would have discussed Leopard. Wouldn't you?

Apparently not because ColorBurst RIP was only brought around with a full Leopard friendly upgrade in late February or early March, version 5.6.3. That was good news but for most users the combination stopped working totally with Leopard's upgrade 10.5.2
Still doesn't work and users of that comination had to back out of the 10.5.2 "upgrade" and back to plain old Leopard 10.5. I'm not making this up.
Neither is it fantasy that Time Machine has some serious problems, not least of which was a failure by Apple to provide a well-thought-out system for setup to meet various types of need. After three months my 500 gb external hard drive -- bought from Apple Store -- shows only 43gb of empty space...backing up my 160gb MacBook HD.

Hmmm. That's not working. AppleCare doesn't seem to know what to make of that.

Yet in THIS thread no one picks up on growing problems BETWEEN and WITHIN Microsoft and Apple. That problem is not new. In fact it was almost equally important with the need for reliable office-oriented applications when open source suites started showing up.

OpenOffice and StarOffice are out there, folks. They are free for the download with a fully appropriate expression of how glad they wold be to get a donation or, perhaps, an offer to help in future development by providing feadback or suggestions for new functions or fixes.

And they are available for either or both Mac and PC. They produce files that are interchangeable with Microsoft whether in .doc or .ppt or the other applications. That isn't to say they are totally compatible because there are many factors where a .doc file created by Word on one PC can't be opened as precisely the same format on another PC! May not have the font. There is no question that many might come on this thread now and give usmore examples of compatibility imperfections. They need to hurry because those problems get fixed fast by the army of volunteer code masters who 'git er dun.'
So I close with this. Why not try them? As I said, they are free. You may be amazed at how NOT free the MS and iStuff is. That should be some encouragement.
If enough folks go there it will also provide encouragement for Apple to return to the original standard of making their software right BEFORE it is released into the new, larger universe of applications that seem beyond the Apple coder reach. Try harder.
Message was edited by: HawaiiBill
Message was edited by: HawaiiBill

[dots]

Interesting post.

However, I went to the two websites and here is what I found:

StarOffice:
System Requirements
Whether you are running Microsoft Windows, Linux, Sun Solaris SPARC, or Sun Solaris x86 Platform Editions, get the full power of StarOffice 8 with just a few very basic requirements.
Linux
Computer and processor Personal computer with a Pentium compatible Processor (Pentium III or Athlon recommended)

OpenOffice:
Platforms
Platforms for which OO.o is available include Microsoft Windows, Linux, Solaris, BSD, OpenVMS, OS/2 and IRIX.[10] The current primary development platforms are Microsoft Windows, Linux and Solaris.
A port for Mac OS X exists for OS X machines which have the X Window System component installed. A port to OS X's native Aqua user interface is in progress, and is scheduled for completion for the 3.0 milestone.[11] NeoOffice is an independent fork of OpenOffice, specially adapted for Mac OS X.

NeoOffice:
NeoOffice is a full-featured set of office applications (including word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing, and database programs) for Mac OS X. Based on the OpenOffice.org office suite, NeoOffice has integrated dozens of native Mac features and can import, edit, and exchange files with other popular office programs such as Microsoft Office.
NeoOffice 2.2.3 includes all of the features in OpenOffice.org 2.2.1 and includes many of the features that Microsoft Office 2008 includes. However, since NeoOffice is funded entirely by the time and money donated by our users, NeoOffice may not support some of the more complex Microsoft Office features or documents. For a more detailed comparison of NeoOffice to Microsoft Office 2008, please read our NeoOffice 2.2.3 Feature Comparison.

Am I missing something?

[griffman]

Be careful with the "full compatibility" claims -- neither open office suite has perfect compatibility with Word and Excel. Good compatibility? You bet. Perfect? Not even close. I can (and have) create documents and spreadsheets that transfer incredibly poorly between iWork, Office, and the open office entrants. It's not hard -- just use some feature that only exists in one, and you'll quickly see how fast compatibility fails.

The short answer is that if you need 100% compatibility with someone using Suite XYZ on platform ABC, then you best be running Suite XYZ on platform ABC. The nice thing about the Mac is that you can do that now, between OS X and Fusion/Parallels for Windows, Linux, and whatever else someone decides to throw at you.

The other big thing about the open office suites is that they still have a ways to go in terms of GUI improvements. As good as I think they are, none are as easy or pleasant to use as iWork or Office.

-rob.

[larockrl]

i am the same. Would love to go to a Mac friendly office suite but again I live in a PC world. Is the programs in iWork compatable with their comparable applications in Office?

[HawaiiBill]

Rob, I didn't mean to promise compatibility between OpenOffice and Word. I would need to go back and examine my post -- and I will -- to ferret that out and clarify it. What my shop needs is total compatability between documents produced on either MY Mac or PC for use on the other. It has to this point always worked that I can open a client's Word or .ppt files with the StarOffice app and then save it as a file that could be brought into my Adobe CS3. There was nothing I could do with MS Office to accomplish that without losing all formatting. Maybe you can teach me what I was doing wrong and how to avoid it.

[MylesTaylor]

I have always used Office and mainly never switched because I already had Office and didn't want to learn how to use a new system. I wish that Apple would come out with a more professional mail program and I'm very disappointed with the latest version of Entourage.

You know, Microsoft has a habit of making their new stuff incompatible with their previous things to force people to upgrade. It's kind of sad to see that my docx are not compatible with the older versions of Office. I suppose some Microsoft stuff had to leak into their Mac department.

[dots]

Do you know that you can save your docx as older versions of MS -- in the Save As dialog box.

[dots]

I discovered this while helping a PC user.

[MylesTaylor]

Yes, I know that I can, it's just annoying. I would like to just be able to save and it be compatible with all versions of Word. It's bad enough getting compatible programs without having to get compatible versions of the same program as well.