Apple peeps - iWork genuinely compatible with MS Office?

[TheStoat]

Hello again chaps,

A Mac question this time if that's ok? I'm getting a Macbook AirBiscuit for someone but the only concern is receiving / editing / resending MS Office docs sent by colleagues on Windows. Obviously if you edit a Word doc in Pages then you'll need to save it as a compatible version i.e. don't receive a doc created using Office 95 and then send it back as Office 97 That aside how do people get on with the usual issues like tables looking funny, page formatting not quite right etc? Are these concerns a thing of the past? Any real world experience of this sort of document editing/resaving for Word and Excel would be hugely helpful and much appreciated

Cheers,

Andy

[mmm-five]

The basics translate fine, but you'll find anything more than that will start 'getting lost' in the translation. Even some transfers between the PC & Mac equivalent versions of Office don't work properly.

[Rich H]

I've tried it and not too impressed - documents are readable, but I wouldn't trust iWork to edit and then send back to an Office user. It's a pretty competent standalone package, but if you need compatibility I'd suggest going down the MS Office route, or try the (free) OpenOffice alternative.

[SystemParanoia]

neooffice is comming along nicely ( open office for the mac )

the only other option is to run the windoze version of office through an emulator like wine ( or its mac equivelant )

Edited by SystemParanoia on Wednesday 6th February 20:38

[TheStoat]

Thanks for the feedback chaps. I was hoping against hope that iWork would be up to the job but I guess there are just too many variables Cheers for saving me some time and money though - v. useful advice as ever

[Leithen]

For the price its pretty good value - Pages is possibly the weak link, Keynote excellent, Numbers a breath of fresh air. One of the hidden gems is the way iWork and OSX produces PDFs - no good for collaboration, but excellent for read only dogs.

[spants]

or try office 2008 for mac?
Tony

[Murph7355]

SystemParanoia said:

neooffice is comming along nicely ( open office for the mac )

Have started to have a play with it, but find it very clunky personally. And I'm far from convinced about its MS Office interoperability.

I've had zero issues (apart from some context menus in Excel are a bit quirky) with the Mac version of Office (even though I'm using the original OS X version).

In this area I suspect MS are still very much king (probably their strongest product IMO).