Comments on: Office 2008: Goodbye iWork?

By: Laoinjo

Laoinjo — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:17:57 +0000

If you are working in a multicorp environment the only thing that really matters is file format compatibility. OpenOffice is ruled out because it produces a different result than MS Office, the same goes for iwork. For me the question is:

Is the MS office for Mac compatible enough with windows MS office?

Can I finally stop using virtual box – XP – MS Office and run Mac MS Office instead?

I am working as a Linux/Unix technician and I hate MS by default. But as long I want to get any contracts at all I have to be 100% MS Office compatible, that is reality. I have read hundreds of reviews but none has answered the vital question. In the end of the day, will the produced documents show up exactly the same if my costumer open them in Windows whateverversion MS Office? Regardless if I use doc, docx, xls or xlsx?

By: Mike

Mike — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 20:47:06 +0000

I just got a MacBook Pro for work, with Office 2008 installed. It SUCKS! Working on a document today (in .doc format… I have to circulate it to people who don’t work in .docx yet…), and no less than SIX TIMES, Word had to shutdown “unexpectedly” and recover the document… into .docx format no less. I was a Use Case document I was reviewing. I had to save after every single change I made to avoid a crash that would lose my work… the autosaves weren’t enough to capture everything. NeoOffice eh? Worth a look…

By: Maria

Maria — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 02:54:49 +0000

I just de-installed Office 2008 on my computer and re-installed Office 2004. I hated the changes to the user interface! It was cumbersome and not user-friendly. Entourage did not allow synchronization to my PDA except through ical. It royally messed my calendar on Entourage. I finally ditched Entourage completely and am using iCal and Address Book.

It is ok to make it compatible with the open xml format, but why make dramatic changes to the user interface?

From a very unhappy Office 2008 user

PS I am now considering switching to iWorks

By: iWork Website | My Place: Alvira Khan

iWork Website | My Place: Alvira Khan — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 22:41:47 +0000

[...] This article provides an interesting prespective regarding Office 2008 and iWork. iWork Website [...]

By: Alvira Khan

Alvira Khan — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 22:11:55 +0000

The article provides an interesting perspective.

Alvira Khan
Florida Atlantic University
FAU Alumna

By: zlatan24

zlatan24 — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 09:12:11 +0000

I heard about not bad application-pst file reader, can read corrupted files of PST and OST format and save emails, works with all supported versions of Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Windows, supports data extraction as separate files in *.eml, *.vcf and *.txt format, they will be placed to any folder upon your choice, the size of every single output PST file will not exceed 1Gb, can work with very large files,is so easy, that even inexperienced users can easily work with this program.

By: Zhenlei Cai

Zhenlei Cai — Mon, 05 May 2008 23:08:56 +0000

I don’t want to be screwed again by M$. Bought Office 2004 3 years ago, the same key won’t install once I changed hard drive. Spent $10 and got a new key from M$, that key again failed to work when I need to reinstall due to upgrading to Leopard. Called M$ this morning they disconnected me while transfering to their “Install Support” department. F M$!

By: FreeRange

FreeRange — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 19:31:34 +0000

What are you people talking about, Office 2008 for the Mac SUCKS!!!!!! Spellcheck doesn’t work in my PPT, and th bullet points in Word still have the same bug they’ve always had – one bullet will go bold and you can’t get it to change even though you’ve un-bolded everything, you know the one. How the h_ll can this bug still be in there after all these years and versions – this bloatwear still sucks the big one!!!!

By: Martin

Martin — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 13:56:43 +0000

Unfortunately, people at work (university) needs MS Office installed. Granted, they could use neoOffice instead, but these people are a stagnant bunch. However, I install iWork 08 at all the new macs anyway, since the cost is miniscule – we pay approx 11 euro for iWork, but 110 euro for office 2008. No-one in their right mind could say that it is 10 times better, though. I’m hoping that some users will find the benefits in using Keynote over PP over time.

By: jonmex

jonmex — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 18:37:01 +0000

I will remain Microsoft free on my Mac systems.
iWork 08 is fine and easier (for me) to use than all MS OFFICE apps.

By: Terrin

Terrin — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 03:22:32 +0000

I use Office for the Mac for one reason. Compatibility. With Office 2008, Microsoft broke compatibility by taking away support for Macros. This kills the essential purpose of Office for the Mac, to maintain compatibility across platforms. Macs will now have a hard time making inroads into the corporate world. If you are only looking for an application that is Mac like, surely there are better options then Office. Macs users would be better served to have Microsoft merely port the Windows version of Office to the Mac. Being Mac like is less important then feature parity.

By: Richard

Richard — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 19:51:20 +0000

Anytime you talk Microsoft there are a couple of things you have to keep in mind. First, Microsoft holds the lion’s share of the OS market (by way of Windows) not because they have a superior product, but due to a business decision by Apple, over thirty years ago, not to allow cloning. This lead to a ever escalating level of competition in the IBM base PC market, which in turn lead to steadily declining prices, and quality, the two go hand in hand. The vast majority of personal computers in the world are used essentially as toys, and thus, the cheaper the better and that is all the average consumer looks at, price. Microsoft has maintained their market share, not by delivering a ever improving product, but buy crushing anyone who dares try and compete with them and diligently working to insure there products will interface with as little as possible. This effectively forces people to use their products.
The reality is that Microsoft products, in all their incarnations, are some of the worst on the planet and their customer service is as equally dismal. If you have any doubts about this consider that there is a multimillion-dollar industry, commonly referred to as IT, that exists due to the flaws in Windows and other MS products. The problem is that MS have done such a good job of crushing the competition with lawsuits and money there are few choices available and very few consumers are aware of just how bad MS products are.
Microsoft is the poster child for the corrupt, greedy, socially degenerate, corporation and I for one will do whatever I can to not support it.

By: Eric

Eric — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 23:29:36 +0000

Help

I have just bought a new mac. WOW!

I am looking for a compatible office suite- primarily with Word. Is compatibility an issue between Iworks and Office?

i would like to go completely mac. My needs? Academic and small business and I don’t need many bells and whistles. Can I make this work using iworks? Or do the big bucks need to be spent for office? Again the primary issue is compatibility.

I am aware that microsoft AND apple are about to release new versions of their programs.
Suggestions?

By: Jon

Jon — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 17:03:27 +0000

For home users and some work users, OpenOffice/NeoOffice/iWork may be fine, but for my work (editing a technical magazine) MS Office is essential. I tried Open Office (X11) on my Mac; however, despite great efforts by the developers, OO is not 100% compatible with the many, many Word documents I receive and deal with every day. I found myself alternating between OpenOffice and Pages to try to get my work done, and I still couldn’t do it.

And OpenOffice has three or four bugs — minor, but real — that irk me. For example, when doing a spell check, I tell OO to ignore a certain technical word, but it continues to find it again and again. And, because many people put two spaces between sentences and I require just one space, I have to do a search and replace; but about half the time, OO replaces two spaces with NO spaces!

But now I have Word, and all is fine.

By: mark

mark — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 17:56:41 +0000

We’re an incoming tour operator based in Chile and we use pages on all our Macs. What’s so great about it?
I’ve created templates of all the different products or tailormade tours we present to our clients, with logos, nice color layout, placeholders for photos, etc..
In just a few minutes anyone in the office can personalize the whole tour-presentation by sliding the corresponding photos from the multimedia column, insert new text, format it in a few second, and export an optimized protected pdf file (three choice of export qualities) that we can then send to our future client.
Try that with Word!!!
I’m hoping that the coming Pages 3 will enhance these possibilities. For example, it would be great if we could have a noteholder in which we could store chunks of text that we use very often (list of hotels for example with active links to their respective websites…).
This is a VERY useful product… for us. Cheers to all. Mark

By: EB

EB — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 09:21:00 +0000

when does the new Keynote/iWork arrive? Any

By: Eric

Eric — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 07:44:21 +0000

I can see using Pages and Keynote for getting things done quicker and more simply, as I don’t really run Word the way I used to, and I never really did like PowerPoint much. But I’ve tried over and over again to use anything else but Entourage (it’s about 90% of the way where I want it to be), but I still come back to it again and again. Hopefully this new iteration will get Entourage 95-98% of where I want it (integration of Spotlight, etc.). I assume no app will be exactly as I wish, but Entourage is one of the few that gets close.

By: GUY

GUY — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 11:49:38 +0000

Any word on a beta version?? or even a link for a alpha

Thanks

By: James Lloyd

James Lloyd — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 11:46:52 +0000

You have to be kidding me right? iWork costs almost nothing, is fantastic to use and already does everything many people would want to do… AND it gives amazing results in a very short space of time.

I have both but I’ve stopped using most of Office. I no longer see any point in upgrading or paying for it again.

By: Marcus Tempte

Marcus Tempte — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 14:21:54 +0000

Captain Morgan – I fully agree, there is no point without the PC sharing capabilities; everyone is talking about open standard but it still seems difficult to share the business apps.
I am forced to run parallels with XP and Office in order to still use my PST file, which is a shame.