[MW Forums]

Apple's iWork has made gains, according to market-research firm NPD Group. But look for Microsoft Office to maintain its hold on the productivity suite market when the new version ships in January. more

[snowyowl]

Now, I like iWork. I have even removed MS Oriface apps from my Dock and set all existing and future Word docs to open in Pages. Numbers opened up a PC generated spreadsheet for me the other day with no problems. The day for removing MSO altogether in near, in my little corner of the world.
So, when do I get iWork for my iPhone? Just wondering.

[leicaman]

The Black Friday sale of Office, where you get the top version of Office 2008 for essentially $50, pretty much made it a no-brainer for me. I was thinking of just using it at work and dropping it at home altogether. But in the end, I couldn't pass up that price.
Now, more than $300? Forget it. iWork 08 and Office 2008 will both be on my Mac at home and work.

[goswim]

I know it's certainly not hurting MS... but I replaced Office with iWork. I could never stand the automatic formatting that Word assumes I want. iWork and Google Docs have made it very easy to dump Office for our needs.

[tomtom]

I will not be upgrading from 2004 in a hurry.
The whole MS Office scenario on the Windows platform is a mess in terms of deployment and uptake at the moment

[tmedia1]

I also went for the MS Office Black Friday Deal, too good of a deal to pass. I've used iWork and I like it, but I must have as near 100% cross compatibility as possible that Office provides and Entourage is much better than Mail IMHO.

[MGP]

We just replaced MS Office with iWork 08, company wide, here. Since Office for Mac no longer supports VB Scripts we found it totally unusable. Cross platform my arse. Try sharing an Excel spreadsheet with VB Scripts back and forth with Windows users.

[Nobody]

iWork won't affect the sales, but windows and mac versions of office drifting further apart will.
The point where OpenOffice and NeoOffice interact better with the "real" windows office, than
Mac Office does, is getting close.
Is StarOffice still coming?

[macFanDave]

But that statement is just a lie.
I have iWork '08 and have no plans to upgrade my Office '04 to '08. iWork did indeed affect at least one sale of Office!
The effect may be small or negligble or slight, but it is wrong to say that it does not exist.
For me, that's a good thing. I really liked the original versions of Word and Excel (on the Mac. Yeah, Windows fans, the apps that really put your OS on the map are just ports of Mac apps!) from the eighties, but have grown to loathe them as feature bloat has made them both unusable.

[ender2k]

Here's another sale iWork affected. I have Office '04 won't upgrade to '08.
Use iWork exclusively now. Although I use NeoOffice to open the occasional odd document I get from Freshmen...

[iGav]

The arrival of Numbers meant the end of office on my Mac for good - I didn't liek the way entourage daemon's kept eating up my processor cycles despite the fact H have never ever used it on my intel machine
What would be good would be to see a bit more integration between Bento and iWork and I'll be more than happy

[biggerfoot]

My Graduate College declined my Pages 08 formatted 351 page dissertation.
The two major problems focused on how Pages formats footnotes and paragraphs.
Pages does not allow you to use continuous footnotes. This forces Pages to leave huge spaces at the bottom of the page if you have long or numerous footnotes.
Also, for some reason, it requires two lines on the next page if the paragraph ends. This also causes an awkward space on the preceding page.
For publishing, I can see why it was declined...the huge spaces at the bottom of numerous pages looked horrible!
When I called for support, I was told that there are no formatting options in Pages 08 that would address my concerns.
As a result, I had to reformat my project in Word and it passed the "ruler lady" on its first try.

[trip1ex]

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The Black Friday sale of Office, where you get the top version of Office 2008 for essentially $50, pretty much made it a no-brainer for me. I was thinking of just using it at work and dropping it at home altogether. But in the end, I couldn't pass up that price.
Now, more than $300? Forget it. iWork 08 and Office 2008 will both be on my Mac at home and work.

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Yeah I bought Office 2k4 for $125 on BF minus the $100 rebate MS was offering for a grand total of $25 AR. I can upgrade to OFfice 2k8 for $7 when it's released. You can't beat that.
To top it off I emailed Amazon when (a week after ordering) I noticed it hadn't shipped even though it was in stock. I got a stock answer of course so I emailed them again with the same question and they shipped it and gave me a $15 Amazon gift card for my troubles.
I actually wasn't going to upgrade at all. I was going to pick up iWork one of these days and just use my old version of Office, but $32? It's a no brainer. I need to get iWork still though.

[Steve_S]

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iWork won't affect the sales

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It already has. In the past, I didn't view the purchase of iWork or Office as mutually exclusive. However, many (including myself) are realize they don't need Office anymore. In the rare case of compatibility issues, etc. there is NeoOffice.

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but windows and mac versions of office drifting further apart will.

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That was the final strike for me. I do have advanced spreadsheets that I use for work. Microsoft is shooting itself in the foot by not providing VB Script compatibility.

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The point where OpenOffice and NeoOffice interact better with the "real" windows office, than
Mac Office does, is getting close.

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It's more than just "close". iWork covers the basics, the advanced things were handled in VB Script and that's no longer an option on Microsoft's Mac product. For me, it's iWork for most things and NeoOffice for the occasional VB Script spreadsheet. For me, I can't justify the purchase. Maybe for $50 I'd buy it just to have, but nothing more than that.