[luxmac]

i might not make a lot of friends by writing this but i do consider the fact that there is a mac version of ms office as positif. in fact a product like ms office combined with a mac mini is the ideal start for everyone who wants to switch and is afraid of.

[Chinney]

There has been a lot written around this boards, both con and pro about Office v.X and Office 2004 for the Mac. Lots of people around here use it and will continue to use it, including me. That being said, there are a lot of people who are using it, but...

i) who wish it would work a bit better (there are plenty of little issues with it)
ii) who wish it were not so bloated in price and code
iii) who wish there were more choice in ‘professional’ office software for the Mac.

[Luca]

In light of the iWork suite, Office 2k4 seems overkill. It's slow, bloated, and extremely expensive. The only advantage it has is ubiquity and the fact that it also includes Excel. But if you get a mini, I think you get AppleWorks anyway, which includes a perfectly serviceable spreadshee.

iWork/Pages should be enough for people who can't afford Office, like students who need to be able to view, create, and edit .doc files for classes. Office may be more "professional" or high end, but with iWork out I think its audience is limited.

[Chinney]

Originally Posted by Luca [...] iWork/Pages should be enough for people who can't afford Office, like students who need to be able to view, create, and edit .doc files for classes. Office may be more "professional" or high end, but with iWork out I think its audience is limited.

Luca, does that mean you know that iWork functions natively in .doc? This question was asked last week around these forums, but I did not see a definitive response. For me document “conversion” would not be good enough. Been there – tried that: not good enough. But if iWork ‘works’ natively in .doc, and preserves the complex formatting required in my documents for work, then I’ll give it a try.

[SonOfSylvanus]

Originally Posted by Chinney Luca, does that mean you know that iWork functions natively in .doc? This question was asked last week around theses forums, but I did not see a definitive response.

So far, this is what we know:

How will they look when you open them? Just like they did in your other word processor. Wherever possible, Pages preserves virtually all of the formatting they had. What’s more, if you assigned styles in a Microsoft Word document, Pages will import them along with the text. Now that’s compatibility

http://www.apple.com/uk/iwork/pages/compatibility.html

As for iWork in general, I am really looking forward to *awesome* compatibility with iLife '05 as well as an app that follows the effing rules for Mac apps. I am so tired of non-standard behaviour in MBU apps

I could very well be MS-free once I move my Hotmail to Gmail (and hence can scrap Entourage which recently has been the only way I have been able to access my Hotmail without having to log in to the horror that is hotmail.com) and my word processing to Pages.

Yay!

[Franz Josef]

I use Office 2004 for home and business - it works well but it's big and expensive. If iWork is good, I'd be happy to be free of Redmond.