Do you like iWorks '09?

[Bob Reardon]

I bought a new Mac this week.

Now I am trying to choose between MS Office for Mac and iWorks '09. I am leaning toward iWorks, but I wanted to know if anyone has had problems working with MS office documents or spreadsheets in iWorks.

Thanks.

[Bear Bibeault]

Congrats on your new Mac!

No, I've not had any problems using iWork. But I don't do anything that intense either.

If you are going to be exchanging Office docs back and forth with others (for example, collaboratively exchanging a Word doc with revisions and so on), you might be better off with Office. If it's for your own use, or just to read Office documents created by others, or create Office docs that you'll send along without a lot of collaboration, iWork is great.

[Austin Tashis]

Unfortunately, even if you buy the Mac version of Office, Windows users still manage to find ways of making things incompatible. Lately I've been getting a lot of documents with other documents "embedded" in them, which can't be opened even if you have the application that should open it. Also, tables in Word documents saved in the proprietary Microsoft XML format (as opposed to the proprietary Microsoft binary format) don't display correctly.

Some other apps that you might need as a Mac User in a Windows World are OmniGraffle, which reads and writes Visio files, and OmniPlan, which can import and export MS Project files.

[marc weber]

Austin Tashis wrote:... Lately I've been getting a lot of documents with other documents "embedded" in them, which can't be opened even if you have the application that should open it. Also, tables in Word documents saved in the proprietary Microsoft XML format (as opposed to the proprietary Microsoft binary format) don't display correctly...

Hmmm... Are those documents with other docs embedded actually "master documents"? These are basically "containers" with some sort of pointers to outside documents to pull in. But even in a Windows-only environment, master docs are a nightmare to move around (via email, etc.). We've given up on them at work.

The new XML formats (docx, rtfx, etc.) are supported in Office 2008 for Mac, but have typical MS back-compatibility issues. (Even when saving in a legacy format, don't bet on it working.)

In any case, Bear gives good advice. I reluctantly use Office on my Macs just because I work with Office-intensive people who go to extremes formatting tables in Word. But I opt for iWork whenever I can.