iWork vs. Office
April 22, 2008 · Print This Article
Macworld just wrote a great series comparing Apple’s iWork ’08 to Microsoft Office 2008, trying to discern whether or not Apple’s entry into the world of office suites could replace the reigning king.
For my part, I use both. For word processing, it’s Pages all the way. (If I’m doing a lot of sharing, then I’ll switch over to Word. But I create all my word processing docs in Pages to begin.)
Ditto for presentations and Keynote. This is the one app where I think Apple is far superior.
However, its the spreadsheet work that keeps me hanging on to the Microsoft product. If I’m just working on something for me (or something that needs only to be shared via pdf), then I use Numbers. For what I do, it has a far superior interface.
That said, if I’m sharing with other Office users, I use Excel. The exporting to Excel format in Numbers does not translate into useable Excel documents.
Here’s the Macworld series:
In the last one, several people comment about Export vs. Save As. For me, I don’t mind the Export function. It better fits my workflow. But I see how others might not like it as well.
Keynote is great! I’ve had very good luck with it. Pages does an ok job for short documents or simple desktop publishing. I don’t think I’d use it to write a book though. I haven’t been as impressed with Numbers. It looks good, but it always breaks when I do anything nontrivial with it.
Of course Keynote is 10 times better now than when it was first released, so given some time, Numbers may get lot better.
I wouldn’t use Pages for writing a book either, but I wouldn’t use Word either.
I use Scrivener for any writing project past a simple blog post, which I write in TextMate.