Struggling to get a reliable answer to this one on any Computer Forum.
I'll probably be buying a Macbook Air which I'll also use as my laptop for work. This would allow me to get the computer I want, and be able to offset the purchase price against income tax (in Germany) as a Bring Your Own Device.
The problem is, I exchange a lot of information with clients in Powerpoint, Word and Excel formats. I'd like to get the Apple iWork which has the Apple versions of Microsoft Apps, is nicer to use than the MS Office equivalent, and cheaper than MS Office.
iWork is claimed to offer import/ export with 100% compatibility with MS Products. As I've had compatibility problems with different versions of MS Powerpoint on Windows machines, I'm sceptical that this is the case, or that the MS Office for Mac is 100% compatible with the Windows version.
Anyone had real world experience with transferring files between MS Office and iWork or MS Office Mac and MS Office Windows?
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I guess you are going to use Keynote and Pages in iWorks?
From my experience iWorks will open .doc files and display them OK, but iWorks will try and save them with .pages extensions which I'm sure won't be opened by MS apps.
I was determined to use iWorks as a dyed in the wool Mac person but to be honest in the end it was easier to get Office for Mac and use that (plus as a NHS worker we got it for only £15 a few years ago).
Pages does take a bit of getting used to but it does almost everything Word will do and it has a lot of publishing extras for doing newsletters, posters etc, I never really tried Keynote as I wasn't into doing Powerpoint presentations.
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Does iWorks support the newer Office file formats too? e.g. docx.
I have a Mac but never tried iWorks - I know it's cheap. But I need to be sure I maintain 100% compatibility with MS Office if I choose to edit them on the Mac.
Can you not offset the cost of MS Office for Mac against tax too?
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I have both Office and the latest Pages, Numbers and Keynote.
For straightforward letters and other documents that you author yourself and want to share with PC users then the iWork is fine. Just remember to save in Office formats.
For importing documents from Office they are also fine for general reading. I can't speak too much about Keynote but I find myself having to use Word on Mac to see things like footnotes, annotations and revisions.
Basically if you are needing to send a document back and forth between Office on Mac or PC and the Apple iWork set forget it; just use Office on Mac. That is the only way you will get anything close to 100% compatibility.
For personal and occasional sharing to PC users iWork is preferable. I find it easier to use and get great looking documents than Office now that ribbons are in vogue!
On a sidenote, if you have iWork on a Mac you will find that the integration to iCloud storage that the iPad and iPhone versions use just isn't there yet. This is surprisingly poor for Apple for whom you would have thought that would have been really important. I expect that they just needed to roll out iCloud to IOS devices and are still in the process of doing this integration.
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Ok, thanks for the comprehensive answers guys - just got a load of geek speak on the Computer forums.
I will probably have to go down the MS Office route, as I need compatibility with Windows. Especially reading that the iCloud integration isn't there yet is disappointing. I have an iCloud account so just assumed the iWork applications would work with it - oh well. My present Mac is an 8 year old ibook G4 which is just too old to work with iCloud
I can offset the purchase of MS Office against tax, but I just prefer e.g. Keynote to Powerpoint.
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>> On a sidenote, if you have iWork on a Mac you will find that the
>> integration to iCloud storage that the iPad and iPhone versions use just isn't there yet.
>> This is surprisingly poor for Apple for whom you would have thought that would have
>> been really important. I expect that they just needed to roll out iCloud to IOS
>> devices and are still in the process of doing this integration.
>>
Could it be, that without Steve Jobs at the helm, Apple is once more beginning to stumble?
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>> Could it be, that without Steve Jobs at the helm, Apple is once more beginning
>> to stumble?
The Iphone 4 Antennae debacle wasn't a stumble?
Oh no of course not - it was the users fault. Arrogant prick.
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If the primary reason for it is for work, I'd have thought that the obvious move would be to get one of the new super-skinny alluminium Ultrabooks rather than a Macbook Air and avoid all the inevitable fannying around with compatibility and software versions altogether.
Something like the ASUS UX21E Zenbook 11.6" job, which is getting cracking reviews.
Either that or, if fruit logos on the surface are *that* important to you, bootcamp/parallels and a copy of Win 7.
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Another vote for Ultrabook PCs.
Never used iWork in Mac but used iWork in iPad. Its compatibility with Office documents is not very good for anything other than most basic documents.
If using Mac, try Office for Mac or stick with Windows if you need to work on MS Office documents extensively.
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>> Another vote for Ultrabook PCs.
In practical terms, you are absolutely right. However I like the Apple products and am hoping this will give me a cost effective opportunity of replacing my ibook. There is, of course, an element of man-maths here;-)
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Bagpuss, another option might be (if you have a spare legit copy of Window and Office) is to run that in a virtual environment like VMware Fusion or Parellels Desktop (later already mentioned above).
I sometimes use Fusion and you can run it in Unity mode. This means the Windows application can appear in your dock and appear as windows but you can hide away the fact Windows is running. You can drag and drop, cut and paste etc.
I am not sure how good this would be on a Macbook Air. And if you do get a MB Air make sure you get it with the memory size you are happy with - it cannot be upgraded as the memory is soldered to the system board.
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I just thought of kind of the same thing in that you could Bootcamp your Mac to run both OS's to make use of the MS Office apps.
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>> And if you do get a MB Air make sure you get it with the memory size
>> you are happy with - it cannot be upgraded as the memory is soldered to
>> the system board.
Ouch, didn't know that, thanks for the tip.
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>> Ouch, didn't know that, thanks for the tip.
There have to be compromises to get it this thin. Other Ultrabooks (the MB Air being one) are the same. There's a new Sony Vaio that has this setup too - it too uses Intel Light Peak (aka Thunderbolt) to allow an external GPU to speed things up for graphics intensive applications.
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Compatibility between Mac iWork and MS Office - Rudedog
