[folklore]

I have and I sorta liked it. I liked Sente to replace EndNote too.

The problem is that most of my work is collaborative. Seamless, two-way communication is a must. That means that things like track changes have to work in both directions. Until/unless there's a universal file format that allows for very complex documents, I'm pretty well screwed into using MS Office. I can't even use Keynote instead of Powerpoint for my conference presentations due to compatibility issues surrounding graphics, tables, and charts - and I'd really, really rather use Keynote.

My hope is that the new Office XML formats will be more open and allow for more 3rd party apps to have 100% compatibility with Microsoft's offerings. So far, the opinion on the openness of the format seems split.

[hillstones]

mobiustrip said:

Is this thing built for Intel and OS X?

I was helping out someone with a crashy Office 2004 and it occurred to me that the software was not designed for his Mac. It was designed to run on PPC and OS 9. So it's no wonder that it's crashy. And I guess we may have a reason to drop #7k on an upgrade if Office 2008 is built to run on Intel and OS X. If not, then I can't see much reason to upgrade.

Office 2004 was designed for Mac OS X 10.2.8 or later and PowerPC. Office 2004 does not run in OS 9. If you are using a version of Office for Mac OS 9, you are probably using Office 98 or Office 2001, which would run in the Classic Environment (OS 9) of OS X 10.4 and earlier. If you don't want Office 2008, which is native for Intel and OS X, you would be fine with Office 2004.

[hillstones]

Considering how ugly Office 2008 looks, I will never upgrade. Office 2004 works just fine.

[mandrake]

Folklore,
I feel your pain. In my area of science, Word is the standard for both collaborative writing and submitting mansucripts for publication--so I use it for that; I've moved to pages for my lab manuals and such and am happy with that. I do use Keynote for ALL of my presentations. For professional meetings, I put my effort into making terrific looking slides (background, font choice, shadow) and avoid animations (think modern 35 mm slide approach). I then save each slide/build as a png and drag those into powerpoint. This way I can enjoy making my presentations, have all of the great things I like about keynote, and produce slides that stand out above the average powerpoint slide, but still be compatible with the powerpoint standard for the actual presentation Unless you are constantly editing your slides at the last minute or like the gimicky animations, this approach works great for me.

[folklore]

I hadn't thought of exporting slides to graphics in Keynote and importing them into PowerPoint. Brilliant.

The only problem there is that a good many of my presentations are collaborative too. And my colleagues use PowerPoint on a PC. So I'm still usually stuck on PowerPoint.

This is one of those areas where it's nice to have a defacto standard for compatibility - MS Office - but it absolutely sucks that the file formats aren't actually an open standard. If they were, then any ol' software could open any other software's files.

[BadDude]

I'm sure you know that within Keynote, you can export your Keynote presentation as a PowerPoint presentation, fully editable. If you are careful with your transitions, it usually works quite well. I do this all the time when I need to do the actual presentation on a PC.

[BadDude]

You can also import a PowerPoint presentation that you have worked on collaboratively with your colleagues, when finished, and juice it up in Keynote. I do this too.

[folklore]

BadDude said:

You can also import a PowerPoint presentation that you have worked on collaboratively with your colleagues, when finished, and juice it up in Keynote. I do this too.

I've not had good luck doing that. Graphics, drawings, and charts tend to not be rendered properly in Keynote. That is particularly true for drawings and charts. Unless it's a very simple presentation - just bullet points - importing a PowerPoint file into Keynote usually takes more time than just redoing the entire presentation. This is because I have to clean up the parts that don't import properly.

Since my presentations are scientific - okay, near-scientific, since I'm a social scientist - the information is much more important than the prettiness of it. So it's not worth the time to redo from scratch. If I were doing sales presentations, I might find it worth the time.

I did export a presentation from Keynote into PowerPoint. Once. I was so disappointed with the result that I haven't tried it again.

The good news is that because of my university affiliation, I get Microsoft Office for virtually nothing (usually less than $20) due to a license agreement that includes most faculty and students. And, for everything that it's not, Microsoft Office actually does work relatively well. It's not worth a lot of effort on my part to patch together a kludgey suite of productivity apps just to avoid using a Microsoft product.

[mandrake]

I know about exporting, but I agree with Folklore that the quality suffers in both directions. The data is always the most important, but I add my zing with the look of the slides and avoid animation/transitions. Office 2008 may catch up with Keynote, but the quality of drop shadows and other finishing touches in far better in Keynote, in my opinion. I only use the export to powerpoint when I have to--at society meetings. The rest of the time, fortunately, I can stay in Keynote entirely and run things off my macbook pro.

More to the point that Folklore was making, the real problem is a universal standard for these various types of documents. If that existed, then we could use any program we favored and not have to worry about compatibilty at all.