Help from Mac users

[aich75013]

I bought my wife a Macbook Pro for Christmas.
The sales person at Best Buy recommended Office instead of iWork for compatibility with Word/Excel documents.

I was wondering how those that use a Mac feel about this.
Are there really any compatibility issues?
I bought Office, but wonder if iWorks is a better program.

[Superbad]

I like iWork. They are similar and unless you need it for work, I recommend using the apple products as they are way cheaper than buying the latest Microsoft office package. I have not had any issues with compatibilty.

[aich75013]

She doesn't use it for any kind of work, but is involved with the PTA and a bunch of school relating stuff where she occassionally gets documents from people in .doc or .docx format.
My thoughts were similar in that iWork may work better with a Mac since it is an Apple product. My intention was to buy it until the salesperson told me different.

[tenbaseg]

I went with the MS Office package when I picked up my first macbook. I don't use it a ton but the little I have, I found that it's not an exact copy of the Windows version. I find the differences frustrating. I don't have experience with iWork to compare, but I thought I'd offer my opinion on the Office package.

[loki]

office for mac is ****. if you're going to use office dual boot and run windows if not iwork is perfectly fine. it's kinda like microsoft went out of their way to make the mac version of office a huge steaming pile of crap. if I haven't make it clear, save your money or if you have to use office, dual boot. also iwork easily produces windows compatible documents so you don't lose out on anything. My wife uses iwork all the time and has never had a problem.

[loki]

I just spoke to my wife about this and apperently office for mac sucks so much that she opens .doc documents in google and then copies them into iwork to save/edit them.

seriously, skip office for mac

[ir13]

i havent had a single problem with office on my MBP, used iWork but was so used to office, i just switched to it.

[bazookajoe]

iWork opens and saves all Office documents, so IMO it's just a matter of which interface you prefer.

[dunng]

Mac Office 2011 is great. Depending what she is working on there can be some compatibility issues (layout / formatting) between iWork and Office...

[Doctorossi]

Forget both of 'em.

NeoOffice, baby! Excellent compatibility and... free is a very good price!

[Blueface]

I went with the Office product but in my case, the decision was easy.
I was able to get it for $20 via my company.

[cmitch]

I'd go with iWork. While Pages can be frustrating to learn (smart tool pointer), it is miles ahead of Office Suite now. When iWork first came out, it was wrought with bugs but it's smoothed out quite a bit in the latest version. If you save as a .doc file, you can have some formatting issues and some attributes in Word are not recognized by Pages. Same with Keynote and Numbers.

[aich75013]

Originally Posted by Blueface

I went with the Office product but in my case, the decision was easy.
I was able to get it for $20 via my company.

My company used to do the same, but stopped the program about 6 months ago.
I have two windows versions that I purchased at that price.
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