AppleWorks vs. iWork vs. MS-Office for Macs

In My Humble Opinion
1

The more I use my PowerBook, the more I like Macs. As you know by my questions in GQ, I’ve even picked up a 450mHz iMac G3 PowerPC ‘Indigo’ as a ‘guest’ computer and have installed OS X 10.3.9 Panther on it.

The one thing I don’t like on my PowerBook is the lack of a word processor. I has a trial version of iWork on it. Unfortunately I opened it and then got distracted, so I never got round to trying it and the trial period is over. So here are my options:
[ul][li]MS-Office for Macs. I’m familiar with Word, and I’m re-learning Excel. But MS-Office for Macs costs $400. Ouch. (There’s a ‘student’ version that has Word, Excel and PowerPoint for $150.) And I’ve read that Office is unstable on Macs.[/li][li]iWork seems to be the latest suite from Apple. I’ve read some reviews, and some people complain about backward-compatibility with earlier versions of KeyMaster (or Key-Something – I’m on the PC now). Other people complain that Pages is not as powerful as Word. But I’m not a Word ‘Power User’. I just use it for résumés and scripts and such. The suite is said to support Word, Excel and PowerPoint formats. iWork only costs $79.[/li][li]AppleWorks. In some reviews of iWork, people have said they prefer AppleWork to the newer suite. AppleWorks is also said to support Word, Excel and PowerPoint formats. The guy I bought the iMac AirPort card from says he’ll burn a copy of AppleWorks and send it with the card; so it will cost me nothing.[/ul][/li]Excel and PowerPoint are tools that I need when I finally find a job back in the Corporate World. But if I can make Excel-format and PowerPoint files using the Apple product, and they work reliably when run using those programmes on PCs, then I think (hope) that would be acceptable to a potential employer. Word documents must also be transportable, since my résumés are often sent in Word format. For casual use, I just need something I can use for writing.

What are your opinions?

2

I’d use whatever program you already know how to use. I am a student so I got my version of Office for cheap. It doesn’t seem to be unstable, however, this week is spring break for me so I haven’t used it too much yet.

3

I don’t have a problem with stability with Office for Mac, and the student discount is a good deal. Pages is a nice program, but a) it isn’t really a word processor, more of a lite desktop publishing program, and b) it’s dog-ass slow; I can only imagine how it would run on your system. I haven’t used Appleworks in ages, but it’s being slowly neglected to death, and I don’t know how many people still consider it a fully viable option.

I will now step aside and allow someone else to offer the customary recommendation for OpenOffice. :slight_smile:

4

I’m not a student, so I won’t be eligible for the student discount. There’s a Student and Teacher edition at the Apple store. I assume it’s a trimmed version of the more expensive version. The iMac is a ‘guest’ computer. As such, it will be in the guest room. The PC will remain in the front room, and will be the machine I’ll use for a lot of stuff. The PowerBook will be used when I’m lounging on the couch. The PowerBook G4 has a 1.5gHz processor.

5

Appleworks 6 came free with my iBook, and I tried for a brief period to use it as my primary presentation software.

It is deeply, deeply primitive. Despite Apple’s reputation for visual wizardry, everything I made with it came out looking like kindergarteny crap. Unlike PowerPoint, where you can blend any color to any other color, any direction you want, Appleworks has an extremely limited selection of gradients. No animations. No transparency.

Files I tried to write in PowerPoint format for other people usually didn’t open properly. Several times when I tried to open PowerPoint and Word documents from other people, it either barfed outright, or, worse, some elements didn’t render properly. For example, I found that a table in a Word doc I got from a colleague only the first column filled in. I assumed that it meant that only the first column had been done, and spent a long time doing the research and calculations to fill out the rest of the table, and you guessed it, it had been a complete waste of my time because my colleague sent the complete table. Appleworks just didn’t display it correctly.

Appleworks also seems like a total dead-end. You’re going to have to switch to iWorks or M$ in the future anyhow.

6

as a card carrying micro$oft-hater, this is very, very hard for me to say (choking down bile…)
Mac Office is actually a really nice program, stable, reasonably fast, and the file-formats are completely cross-platform transparent, it honestly doesn’t look or feel like a m$ app, it feels like a native Mac app, if you need Office for compatibility with corporate, Office is worth it…

AppleWorks is a decent, simple productivity suite, nothing special, just a basic, solid program, if compatibility with Office documents (it has limited compatibility, can open/save in Word and Excel formats) is important, i’d lean more towards Office, honestly (dear Og, i HATE reccomending m$ software…)

from what little hands-on time i have had with iWork, i hate it, very non-intuitive, Pages is more a page-layout app (like a stripped down PageMaker/Quark X-Press) than a word processor, and Keynote, well, i’ve never really used that app, i have no need for a presentation app

i don’t use spreadsheets, so i have no need of Excel, and for word processing, all i need is a spell checker, so i use TextEdit for all my word-processing needs, it’s a simple text-procesor with spell-checker, exactly what i need…

if i was in your situation, i’d just use TextEdit until i need the features in Office

7

Hello!

My wife and I use NeoOffice, a free, natively running version of openoffice. It’s got all the things you mentioned, and everything is transportable (to my knowledge). As a big plus (for me, at least), installing was a snap, and I’m an idiot (WTF X11 is, I’ll never know, and I didn’t have to!).

8

Pages is almost unusably slow on my 1.2 Ghz PowerMac G4, and still quite laggy on my dual 1.42 Ghz G4 at work.

9

I use MS Office for Mac, though price wasn’t a factor because I got it for $7 through my university. It works amazingly well – I have no problems with stability, and like it much better than the Windows version. It doesn’t “feel” like a Microsoft app. It even will display documents with white text on a dark blue background, like the old DOS-based word processors of yore, which alone IMO makes it worthwhile.

10

Well, that’s saying something! :wink:

As far as I can see, Office 2004 for Mac Student and Teacher Edition seems to have full versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Not being sophisticated in such matters, I can’t see why I should spend 300 bones for the Standard Edition.

11

I detest Word and therefore don’t own it *. If you like Word, be assured that the sentiments already expressed here, that Word for Mac is nicer than Word for Windows and is very compatible with the Windows version, are not unusual sentiments at all.

If you have no love for Word, AppleWorks makes a nice word-processor that does not feel like a Word-clone. I’ve never used iWork so I can’t comment on it.

I do use NeoOffice/J strictly as an opening-and-viewing tool to deal with folks who think Word is a neutral standard format and send me Word documents. It does feel like a Word-clone.

  • (except for ancient copies I run in emulated environments: WinWord 6 for Windows 3.11, DOS version of Word for MSDOS, and Word 4 for Macintosh System 6).
12

You may have to provide proof that you are a teacher or student before they will let you buy that version.

Our Mac has AppleWorks. When we need to transfer a document from that program to my work computer (PC) for printing, I have the wife send it over as Rich Text or PDF instead of trying to save as a Word document because it never seems to come out right that way.

If you really need compatibility with Office for Windows, get Office. Or, at least don’t get AppleWorks.

13

BTW, Keynote (part of iWorks), from the audience perspective, is drop-dead gorgeous. Though I have never used it myself, some of my colleagues have said that they enjoy using it.

14

It’s not hard to get if you need it. I don’t believe that they require that you be a full-time student, just that you be a student in general.
1 - Enroll in a community college class. Pay your minimal sort of registration fee.
2 - Buy software.
3 - Drop from the community college class. Get your registration fee refunded.
4 - ???
5 - Profit! (or at least save money)

15

Okay, I’ve ordered Office 2004 Student and Teacher Edition. The form didn’t ask if I am a student or teacher.

Thanks, all, for the reviews. I’ll have Office, with which I’m familiar, and also the (free) AppleWorks.

16

I’ve had no troubles running Office on my Mac Mini, and the files I create with it are easily openable in Office 2K on my 2K gaming box and in Office 2003 on my XP laptop.

As to inherent goodness or badness, I’ve been using Word since the days when I had Word 5.0 for DOS on a low-density floppy disk, so I’m used to the way MS Office programs do things. If you’re used to Office, it’s good. If you’re not, or you have trouble figuring out how it does things, or if the way it does things is a way you don’t like, then it’s not so good.

I do also have NeoOffice/J on this Mac, but I got Office quite soon thereafter so I haven’t used NeoOffice yet. The few times I’ve played with AppleWorks, I haven’t been too impressed, but I may just not be used to it.

Just my two cents.

Oh, I should add sommat regarding PowerPoint. I’ve only recently started using it (as a graduate student in a “squishy science”, PowerPoint is an invaluable resource) but I’ve found it to be quite useful and fun to use. I’ve seen a lot of PowerPoint presentations in my life – some really, really good ones, a lot of okay ones, and some eyebleedingly bad ones. I would suggest buying (or getting from the library) a book or two on PowerPoint to hone your skills. I found <i>Kathy Jacobs On Powerpoint</i> to be chock full of great ideas and pointers on making good presentations for a variety of different needs.

17

Oh lordy, look at my html coding there for all the world to see. Let’s all pretend I put those in square brackets and not pointy ones, and it italicized very prettily.

I blame the drugs.