Iwork versus mic. Office

you plan to do with Office.

Pages is capable of opening/saving as Word documents
Numbers ditto for Excel documents &
Keynote will do the same for PowerPoint presentations.

Keynote is arguably better than PowerPoint.

What is the drawback with iWork, as you see it?

P

No one can tell you what's best for you except you. Here's what I'd suggest. Install iWork and try using it. Any files you create on iWork can also be saved as Office compatible files so you'll not lose any work if you don't like it. If the small differences in the interface makes it too annoying switching back and forth, by all means buy a copy of Office for Mac. But beware, if you wind up liking iWork better.... well there's no iWork for PC.

This is just my opinion, but having both loaded onto my iMac (iWork '09 and Office for Mac: 200 I find I like each for different things.

For example, I prefer Pages for simple letter writing or creating specialty documents (like brochures, cards, etc.), but I always turn to Word for heavy-duty work processing capabilities, in particular mail merge.

Number is fine, but coming from an accounting background there is no replacement for Excel. It is the best spreadsheet program out there. Period. If you need that sort of thing I can't recommend Excel too highly.

Ultimately I'm certain you can work with either iWork or Office. Or the various free options like Google Docs, OpenOffice or NeoOffice.

Oh, one thing I do really like about Pages is how you can Save As documents as PDFs. I have found this to be very handy when I know I'm going to need to share a document with another party. They do not have to have installed anything other than Adobe Reader.

I have both office and iWork on my iMac, but with the new App store on Snow Leopard, it is easier to buy just the programme, i.e Keynotes that you use.

I love keynotes and Pages is okay but for doing more complex graphs and other functions Numbers seriously lets it self down, the reason I went out and bought Office.

So on my Macbook Air I didn't originally buy iWorks but I have Office as mine has three licensees with it. i have now bought Keynotes through the App store as at

I like Keynote very much. I use PowerPoint (on a PC) at work and much prefer Keynote at home. I find it easier to create attractive presentations with nice transitions. Keynote also has a number of useful export formats. Pages works well, especially, the layout mode. I use MS Word so much at work that I am more comfortable using that for word processing on my Mac. Numbers has some very interesting capabilities that Excel lacks, in terms of easily creating attractive pages that contain multiple spreadsheets or graphs. I am not sure that those capabilities are tremendously valuable in the real world, though. In the end, I would have stuck with iWork, until my employer connected me with a copy of MS Office for almost no money. (They let all employees buy Office very cheaply so that we can do work on our home computers.) I think you will be happy with either one once you spend a little time with it.

Dave