Mac software... and a few questions

[Phooey]

Hi, i am going to swap my Macbook for a new model iMac at work. Currently i have openoffice (recommended by fellow PH'ers), which i only really use to view certain attachments within e-mails occasionally sent to me, and to mock up the odd printed invoice for my business. Just wondered if it was worth buying and installing on the shiny new Mac, 'iwork', or Microsoft office 2008, or just using the free Openoffice again.

Also, do you think a new iMac would navigate and view web pages/internet any quicker than a 2 year old Macbook? The best download speed i can get is 2.4 meg, but sometimes drops to 1-something.

And finally, any benefit in buying the £1249.00 21.5" model, over the basic £999.00 model, i.e. any quicker for general internet usage?

That'll be all for now thanks

[Prak]

your computer rarely has anything to do with download speeds .... More a feature of your internet connection

[Lost soul]

Phooey said:

And finally, any benefit in buying the £1249.00 21.5" model, over the basic £999.00 model, i.e. any quicker for general internet usage?

That'll be all for now thanks

The 21.5 is 995 , the 27" is 1400 or so

[Murph7355]

If you get on with OpenOffice, no need for anything different.

Personally I find it very clunky in use. MS Office is a great piece of software on the Mac IME, so if you want something a bit more slick, that'd be the way to go

[Phooey]

Lost soul said:

Phooey said:

And finally, any benefit in buying the £1249.00 21.5" model, over the basic £999.00 model, i.e. any quicker for general internet usage?

That'll be all for now thanks

The 21.5 is 995 , the 27" is 1400 or so

Sorry, I meant there are two 21.5" models - one at £999, and the other at £1249. The more expensive model must have a bit more kit, just wondered if it was anything worth paying the extra for.

[Phooey]

Murph7355 said:

If you get on with OpenOffice, no need for anything different.

Personally I find it very clunky in use. MS Office is a great piece of software on the Mac IME, so if you want something a bit more slick, that'd be the way to go

Might give MS office a try then

[Lost soul]

Phooey said:

Lost soul said:

Phooey said:

And finally, any benefit in buying the £1249.00 21.5" model, over the basic £999.00 model, i.e. any quicker for general internet usage?

That'll be all for now thanks

The 21.5 is 995 , the 27" is 1400 or so

Sorry, I meant there are two 21.5" models - one at £999, and the other at £1249. The more expensive model must have a bit more kit, just wondered if it was anything worth paying the extra for.

Not sure on the specs on the 21's i have been agonising over getting a 27" imac

If it wa a 21" at 1249 or a 27" at 1450 hmmm for an extra 200 quid i would go 27" all day just for that screen
but then i am soft like that

[Phooey]

Lost soul said:

Phooey said:

Lost soul said:

Phooey said:

And finally, any benefit in buying the £1249.00 21.5" model, over the basic £999.00 model, i.e. any quicker for general internet usage?

That'll be all for now thanks

The 21.5 is 995 , the 27" is 1400 or so

Sorry, I meant there are two 21.5" models - one at £999, and the other at £1249. The more expensive model must have a bit more kit, just wondered if it was anything worth paying the extra for.

Not sure on the specs on the 21's i have been agonising over getting a 27" imac

If it wa a 21" at 1249 or a 27" at 1450 hmmm for an extra 200 quid i would go 27" all day just for that screen
but then i am soft like that

That 27 is BIG, really BIG. I did consider it, but imo it was too big and bright, a bit harsh on the eyes. For movies - perfect, but for me, overkill for 99% Internet usage, and probably no movie use. The 21.5 looks perfect for what I need - I'm used to using a 13" MacBook for work!!! I have a 2 year iMac at home too, not sure of the size, but the smallest at the time, and that is big enough.

Think I am going to buy the basic 21.5 for the workplace

[Lost soul]

Phooey said:

Lost soul said:

Phooey said:

Lost soul said:

Phooey said:

And finally, any benefit in buying the £1249.00 21.5" model, over the basic £999.00 model, i.e. any quicker for general internet usage?

That'll be all for now thanks

The 21.5 is 995 , the 27" is 1400 or so

Sorry, I meant there are two 21.5" models - one at £999, and the other at £1249. The more expensive model must have a bit more kit, just wondered if it was anything worth paying the extra for.

Not sure on the specs on the 21's i have been agonising over getting a 27" imac

If it wa a 21" at 1249 or a 27" at 1450 hmmm for an extra 200 quid i would go 27" all day just for that screen
but then i am soft like that

That 27 is BIG, really BIG. I did consider it, but imo it was too big and bright, a bit harsh on the eyes. For movies - perfect, but for me, overkill for 99% Internet usage,

You have a good point



















But i still want one

[CommanderJameson]

The 27 inch is immense and bright and marvellous.

It's pretty darn quick, too.

I'm not regretting getting mine.

[Lost soul]

CommanderJameson said:

The 27 inch is immense and bright and marvellous.

It's pretty darn quick, too.

I'm not regretting getting mine.

Damn You i was almost talked into saving myself 500 pounds

[poprock]

As mentioned above, the speed of your Mac isn’t going to affect the speed of your net connection.

If that’s a concern, shopping around different broadband providers and their faster packages would be the best place to put your money.

If you’re only doing relatively basic tasks like web browsing and office type work, I’d recommend the lower-spec Mac and just sticking in as much RAM as you can when purchasing the machine. That will make quite a tidy difference to day-to-day running and make sure it can comfortably play big shiny HD videos etc …

[Riff Raff]

As far as office software goes, have you had a play with iWork? As another poster said OpenOffice can be a bit clunky, and Microstuffed Office is expensive. I'm a big fan of iWork, it's slick, stable and relatively inexpensive. For what you say you will be doing, I'd suggest it fits the bill.

I'm running a 27" iMac at the moment with 8GB of memory, and it's pretty cleat that the limitations for what I use the machine for are not with the kit, but the service provided by my ISP.

[Phooey]

Riff Raff said:

As far as office software goes, have you had a play with iWork? As another poster said OpenOffice can be a bit clunky, and Microstuffed Office is expensive. I'm a big fan of iWork, it's slick, stable and relatively inexpensive. For what you say you will be doing, I'd suggest it fits the bill.

I'm running a 27" iMac at the moment with 8GB of memory, and it's pretty cleat that the limitations for what I use the machine for are not with the kit, but the service provided by my ISP.

Is iWork, Apples response to the MS office software then - i.e. will it do everything that MS does?

[Riff Raff]

Phooey said:

Riff Raff said:

As far as office software goes, have you had a play with iWork? As another poster said OpenOffice can be a bit clunky, and Microstuffed Office is expensive. I'm a big fan of iWork, it's slick, stable and relatively inexpensive. For what you say you will be doing, I'd suggest it fits the bill.

I'm running a 27" iMac at the moment with 8GB of memory, and it's pretty cleat that the limitations for what I use the machine for are not with the kit, but the service provided by my ISP.

Is iWork, Apples response to the MS office software then - i.e. will it do everything that MS does?

Search might be your friend here - I seem to recall this has come up before.

I am NOT a power user, so everything I write here has to be taken in that context. I personally prefer Pages to Word. As a WP program it does everything I want it to. Same with Numbers. Others will tell you that Excel is better has more functionality etc etc, but at the end of the day it builds the spreadsheets I need, and they look quite pretty if you want them to. Keynote is supposed to be pretty good, but I don't use that. For me, the main thing is that being an Apple product, it just 'works' on the iMac. The app is as I said stable, it looks good, and I think it is very competitively priced. It's so competitively priced that I don't mind buying the product again if a major new release comes out. Compare that to Office. I'm still using Office 2003 on my legacy PC (Need that for one paarticular app. that only runs on a PC. OK, I could run Windows on my Mac, but I figure for the expense it isn't worth it, as I already had the PC). Anyway. Have a shufti at previous postings on here, and you will get the power users perspective.

[Phooey]

Riff Raff said:

Phooey said:

Riff Raff said:

As far as office software goes, have you had a play with iWork? As another poster said OpenOffice can be a bit clunky, and Microstuffed Office is expensive. I'm a big fan of iWork, it's slick, stable and relatively inexpensive. For what you say you will be doing, I'd suggest it fits the bill.

I'm running a 27" iMac at the moment with 8GB of memory, and it's pretty cleat that the limitations for what I use the machine for are not with the kit, but the service provided by my ISP.

Is iWork, Apples response to the MS office software then - i.e. will it do everything that MS does?

Search might be your friend here - I seem to recall this has come up before.

I am NOT a power user, so everything I write here has to be taken in that context. I personally prefer Pages to Word. As a WP program it does everything I want it to. Same with Numbers. Others will tell you that Excel is better has more functionality etc etc, but at the end of the day it builds the spreadsheets I need, and they look quite pretty if you want them to. Keynote is supposed to be pretty good, but I don't use that. For me, the main thing is that being an Apple product, it just 'works' on the iMac. The app is as I said stable, it looks good, and I think it is very competitively priced. It's so competitively priced that I don't mind buying the product again if a major new release comes out. Compare that to Office. I'm still using Office 2003 on my legacy PC (Need that for one paarticular app. that only runs on a PC. OK, I could run Windows on my Mac, but I figure for the expense it isn't worth it, as I already had the PC). Anyway. Have a shufti at previous postings on here, and you will get the power users perspective.

I shall do that, thanks mate. I am not experienced in using either of the software packages i mentioned, so i have nothing to compare them with - this may be a good thing, because at least i won't miss any features of the MS office pack if i go for the Apple kit. I have only used Openoffice twice, so as you can see, i only need a basic-ish package, but would quite like to educate myself with one of the paid packages like OS or iWork.

I shall research iWork

[Paul 2000]

I'm another giving a big thumbs up for iWork. The Pages app is not only a good word processing program but it also has a page make-up mode which makes creating good-looking leaflets/flyers/stationery a breeze, with a big selection of professional templates to get you started. With iWork you'll also be able to open all Word/PowerPoint/Excel files and if you want to, for sharing files with Office users, save your Pages files as Word, your Numbers files as Excel and your Keynote files as Powerpoint.

[siscar]

Another vote for iWork, way better than Office on a Mac.

[Dracoro]

I like iWork if I'm creating a document.

I use OpenOffice if someone sends me an office doc.

iWork Pages makes a mess of word docs with tables in it for example - certainly with a load of docs I've received. For this reason alone, have OpenOffice in case, it's free after all.

[Phooey]

Paul 2000 said:

With iWork you'll also be able to open all Word/PowerPoint/Excel files

Excellent. This year i have had an increasing number of e-mails with attachments that i had been unable to open until the good folk of PH recommended openoffice. Also had times when i had tried to open something and just got a message asking me to subscribe to Excel or Word.