[GulfCoast]

Here's another sale affected, at least for now. I was a longtime Mac Office user for my home business but have recently moved to iWork and so far am perfectly happy with it. I will certainly look at Office 2008 to see what's new but I don't feel remotely the urgency to upgrade to it that I felt with Office 2004. I know I'm not a typical corporate user, though. I decided to go with iWork because it was more cost-effective for me than Office and I vastly prefer Keynote over PowerPoint. I don't need complicated spreadsheets and Pages is fine for what I do. I don't hate Office. But Microsoft will really have to do something amazing with Office to get me to upgrade.

[hgwells]

In spite of the very positive reports here foregoing the next version of Office for iWork, I don't believe iWork will really become a solid Office replacement for another one or two versions. I do expect it to eventually stand up to all the features in Office at some point though. But there are still many who, perhaps unnecessarily, use some of Office's less used features not yet available in iWork. Numbers looks great but is missing full compatibility with Excel docs. I really like its first rendition. But it will take one or two more versions (hopefully not more) to be a stronger contender as an Office replacement for Office power users.

[NewGuyontheMac]

It's affecting sales where it matters the most... in the homes. Businesses will always be beholden to Microsoft because as long as there's one large lethargic company still doing business documents only in MS's formats, there will be a ton of smaller businesses looking to win contracts using MS's products.
However, at home, where compatibility doesn't matter as much, people have to make a choice and iWork will win on price. As some of these people start their own businesses in the future, they'll already have learned and want to continue to use iWork and another slow eroding of marketshare will begin. I think Apple is more concerned with the HOME market because you can get 500,000 people to buy a Mac a lot easier than you can get a business to replace 500,000 of their systems with Macs. And, in the end, 500,000 new users is 500,000 new users regardless of where they're coming from.

[moose_n_squirrel]

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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

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A tip for Office is to not drag-install it. Run the installer instead. It's not as fast as the temptation of "Mac-like" drag-install but you can exclude components much easier. I have no Entourage daemons running on my Office install because I custom-installed Office, since I prefer Apple Mail.
Same goes for that complaint above about auto-formatting. Turn it off, and you get more of the power of Word without the annoyances.

[NewGuyontheMac]

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I don't believe iWork will really become a solid Office replacement

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At past Macworld's and in interviews I've read, the iWork team is not out to create an Office replacement. If Office is what a user wants, there's already a product out there that offers that... and it's called Office. /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif
They're not intending on matching PowerPoint feature for feature, they're not trying to one-up Word, and they don't want to be the powerhouse of number crunching and they realize that there's a large number of users that fit this profile... at least enough to grow the number of iWork users for the foreseeable future. I think the main downfall of other "Office" suites is that they spend so much time trying to be Microsoft Office that they don't really offer anything compelling other than that compatibility. And even that isn't 100%, so...

[ameilong]

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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.

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Framemaker was not able to do this as well. And it was really, really annoying, millions of complaints all over the web. It is hard for me to believe that nobody at Apple knows about this. And with Framemaker it at least was possible - with some rather cumbersome tricks - to emulate continuous footnotes. Not so with Pages.
Except for this - as long as Apple does not offer the possibility to save a document directly in the Word document format Pages certainly will not replace Word - at least not in a German university environment.
The good thing about this lack of features in Pages is that one finally discovers that Word certainly is not the best piece of software but probably not so bad after all....

[heisetax]

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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?

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Finally someone that sees the whole MS Office, iWork, OpenOffice & NeoOffice thing really is. MS Office 2007 broke too many things for it to be an instant success. My copy came free for attending a MS Office 2007 kick off last January.
Mac Office 2008 will be braking many Mac Office 2004 & earlier items, like no VB support. My copy will cost me the $125 Office 2004 price with a $100 rebate, then a $6.99 upgrade shipping fee to Office 2008. This means that I will have MS Office 2008. That doesn't mean that I will use it though.
MS Office 2004 still wins out as it will be better in a cross platform situation. Also as mentioned it is harder to be cross platform with the Mac version, as MS has left out many MS Office 2007 & 2007 features in the Mac version. At school I could only do the basic work with my Mac version before I had to seitch to the Windows version to do the job. This moving apart of Mac & Windows versions of Office means that NeoOffice & OpenOffice are better in a cross platform work with either Mac Office or Windows Office than the two MS Office products.
NeoOffice seems to be the only program that has a spreadsheet program that can compete ofr my needs in a spreadsheet. Numbers will not do more than 5% of the things I do with a spreadsheet. That means that MS Office wins, but without the $32 price tag for Office 2008 would I be upgrading. That would be a very tough question.
Bill the TaxMan

[Steve_S]

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At past Macworld's and in interviews I've read, the iWork team is not out to create an Office replacement.

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Apple is marketing iWork as a replacement for Appleworks. However, it's the feature set that will determine what it competes with. For the most part, Office is more powerful than iWork. Considering it's size, legacy, years of existence, etc. it should be. However, it's also true that most users of Office suites rarely (if ever) use the more advanced features. Likewise, there will always be a market for the product with the most advanced features, but this is probably more of a niche.

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They're not intending on matching PowerPoint feature for feature,

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Powerpoint is probably the one bad example here as Keynote is generally considered to be at least on par and probably better. Keynote is the anchor for the iWork suite. I'd agree that Pages and Numbers are less full featured, but I wouldn't necessarily agree they aren't better suited for consumers.
The main selling points for Office was document compatibility. Since Office 2008 is neutered without VB Script Microsoft shot itself in the foot. Combine this with the free NeoOffice and you don't end up with a compelling reason to go out and buy Microsoft Office. This conclusion is inevitable I believe, but Microsoft is actively driving people to that conclusion with their decision to drop VB script in their Mac product.

[bigpics]

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Office 2008 is going to be a successful product and its going to take the air out of iWorks tires," said Swenson.

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It's "it's" not "its"
--Proofreader Pete
As for iWork v Office, I'm a long-time non-fan of Word and while I mastered Photoshop and a scriptable DOS relational DB program, and can do highly complicated tables in WordPerfect (still the most controllable and rational word processor ever), I've never been able to make heads or tails of Excel. It just throws me and feels completely opaque.
So when I needed to start using a spreadsheet for my new small biz, I tried the 30 day trial of iWork and started to try and create SS's in both Excel and Numbers. Result: a purchase of iWork. Not a love affair, and still a major learning curve for me at least, but at least I have a sense of how to do some simple things and am learning others. A read of the excellent Road to Office article on Excel v. Numbers explains why better than I can. (I'd still rather use WordPefect tables which always display WYSIWYG and to which you can apply any word processing format tools as easily as to regular text, but no import or export, even to Word, puts the kibosh on that route.)
As for Pages, it perfectly imports the doc types I most often create in Word (on both Mac and PC) and would replace Word for Mac for me except for one thing: Pages will save Word docs as .docs that open fine in the Word World, but you're forced, as per the FOUNDER'S WAY, to go through a several click step of exporting each document EACH TIME you save it, and when you open a .doc, it shows up with a .pages default extension (although no saved copy of that doc appears to exist unless saved).
A simple preferences choice to save files as .docs (and/or in Office's new document format) as a default choice, or at least a choice of save formats IN the save box would seal the deal for my using Pages as my regular word processor. I mean another proprietary file format is not exactly my (if any regular user's) top priority in the digital tower of Babel, and I resave my work often enough that this export annoyance keeps me in Word.
Back on my PC, I've set WordPerfect to automatically use the .doc format and seldom have to resort to Word, except to open complicated Word docs. But that's not the Apple Way, so I don't expect them to listen to me. Still, for what it's worth, that's why I'm not working in Pages.

[Albert_Solene]

I can't see why I'd update from 2004, which I've stopped using completely since I bought the new iWork.
Also, I've been systematically advising switchers to get iWork, and the price difference is more than enough to make that the attractive option. Then if they need something in their old version of MS Office, they can always boot into the Windows side.

[macFanDave]

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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.

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Jeez, you brought back some bad memories that I thought I had successfully repressed for years!!! When I turned in my thesis, formatted in Word, the ruler lady said I missed a margin by 1/32"! My life flashed before me and I thought I was going to die, but the ruler lady let it slide. My sigh of relief broke windows in the building.
You are right. When it comes to rarely used, arcane functions, Word has it all over Pages. But when Pages will do, dealing with Word means having to get past all those functions to do your work.

[NewGuyontheMac]

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Powerpoint is probably the one bad example here as Keynote is generally considered to be at least on par and probably better.

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The reason why I picked on Keynote was specifically because it was the most mature and most well liked. Even with it's advances, there are certain things that PowerPoint can do that Keynote can't. It boils down to Keynote being excellent for giving presentations in person, not so hot and bundling those and shipping them out to people. Unless you've got Keynote on both ends and even then, PowerPoint is better in a lot of cases. People holding out for Apple to adopt all of those things Microsoft kept adding to PowerPoint not to make it a better presentation tool, but just so they can say they added features to PowerPoint, probably won't get added to Keynote. I'd say the same is true for the rest of the apps. Whatever Apple adds will be great, easy to use, and not a 100% replacement for Office, BUT excellent for many many users.

[cperalt1]

One of the things that most users don't realize is that the move to not include VB in Office 2008 is actually forward thinking. MS on the windows side was set to kill VB in Office 2007 and replace it with VSTO. Due to the outcry from Business office users that depend on VB they decided to stave the demise of VB by one more version so the Mac Office team took the pragmatic view, port the VB virtual machine which will die with the next version or focus on releasing a version now and include VSTO support when it is necesarry to do so. At least that is my understanding of the situation since we are being told to move away from using VB in my corporate environment because of this.

[pcharles]

Although I like iWork 08, and find it has some useful feature for page layout, it still has a long way to go before it can challenge even much older versions of Office for technical and scientific work. For businesses, however, I think it would be amazing. A couple of major problems for me:
1. No integration with Endnote or Reference Manager
2. No equation editor
3. No integration with third party editors although there are copy and paste work arounds.
4. No scientific graphing functions - what idiot forgot line fits in a spreadsheet?
5. Still not really compatible with office, which is a problem for collaboration.
There are also a lot of personal productivity problems I have with iWork that make it feel more clumsy to work with than the Office suite I am used to. Its little things like manually configuring toolbars, setting autocorrect to subscript part of chemical equations and so on that I miss in iWork.