I agree with the general consensus that iwork is better at presenting ideas. I used keynote at uni in a marketing presentation and it was extremely well received. No tired transitions etc nice charts and themes. Using the remote I got with my macbook helped make my presentation glossy. I just typed my resume in pages and when I changed it to word it didn't work great - some headings have capital letters and some do not. I solved this by exporting to a pdf which is great, smaller file and it looks how I meant it to while I know it will work on any system.

I find iWorks better over MS Office.

MSOffice is still kinda slow and weird for my liking.

If I do need some more serious Office stuff, I'll switch to OpenOffice, that new Beta2 on Mac runs quite well indeed.

Don't use either. But I miss the drawing program in AppleWorks. Just when I got the hang of it, they went and discontinued it and made it incompatible with Leopard. I have lots of drawings I did with that that I now cannot directly access since I upgraded to Leopard, so I have to keep an old external drive with 10.3.9 on it that I have to boot into to read them (and more importantly work on them).

Anybody have any suggestions how I can access those Appleworks (.cwk) files in Leopard?

And any suggestion for a replacement drawing program? Preferably free.

Thanks.

I use AppleWorks all day, every day, under Leopard. So does everyone else in the office. What is stopping you from using it?

Oh, and I find Office 2008 an abomination. Seems like Word 6.0 all over again. How can so many good coders produce such a pile of steaming bat guano? iWork is much better.

So all I have to do is transfer it over from the old drive?

You would be better off reinstalling it. Do you have the OS X native installer?

They are threatening to bring it back and do it properly. Time will tell.

I hope they fix a whole lot more things first though. Being able to save the window state of xls files would be a nice start. Office 2008 really is an abomination. It makes my new Mac Pro feel like a Plus. I don't understand how they could ship it like it is and still not fix it after so many updates. I wish I'd pirated it.

Don't know what that is.

Do you mean reinstalling it from the original 10.3 discs?

I mean reinstalling it from whatever disks it came on. This may have been your 10.3 disks, though I was not aware that Apple ever bundled it with the OS. Maybe they did on consumer machines for a while?

Pretty sure it came with the system install disks.

I'll give a go tomorrow.

Thanks for your help.

I tried Open Office....didn't like it. I guess I was really stuck with Microsoft Office. I bought 2004 version and barely used it. Only to create a few cover letters and do one spreadsheet.

Now with a new MBA and with Leopard, I tossed up between Mac Office 2008 or iWorks '08. Since I will need to relearn the GUI, I went the cheaper AND better (aka. simplistic) option of Apple's iWorks '08. THE one program that CONSISTENTLY crashed on Tiger for me was opening Word. It would either open nicely, or crash upon opening. And I was sick of it. It was like a virus to my beautiful Mac OSX system.

To be honest, I haven't played with it much. Only created more cover letters (my real estate agents LOVES me) and imported an Excel file into Numbers.

So far, I really like the basic layout and some easy features - and haven't noticed much of a difference. Will have to play around with it more to unlock it's capability.

Hi guys,

I don't yet have a mac, but i'm looking at a MBP in the fall and am doing my research.

Does Windows Office not run well in Parallels? Why not do that?

That would work.

I personally prefer iWork though. It's really good these days. I do still use Excel sometimes though.

I tried installing Appleworks off the original 10.3.3 disks, but it didn't want to do it. Then tried dragging and dropping an existing copy (version 6.2.9) into the apps folder, and it seems to work fine.

Problem fixed. Thanks for suggestions, especially one person behind the scenes.

I recently downloaded the trial version of iWorks '08 and have only used Pages so far. Being an Office (specifically Word) user for many years during my scholastic life I kinda felt like Pages was underwhelming. I understand that the trial version of iWork '08 is actually the full version but only limited to 30 days of full usage, but I cannot seem to do in Pages what I can do in Word. It's quite basic actually. It lacks depth. I recently read a thread on these boards and another forum which did a comparison between iWork & Office. Both came to the conclusion that if you're looking for presentation; go for iWorks. If you're looking for depth; go for Office. I think I would agree with that on both fronts. I've seen Keynote in action and I was mightily impressed. IMHO it's light years ahead of Powerpoint. But I must mention that I hardly use presentation software like Powerpoint and Keynote as I'm mainly using word processors. But yeah, Keynote looked AMAZING in action.

ATM I don't have Office on my Mac but I do have Office '07 Ultimate on my old PC so I'm working on that old computer till I get Office for Mac. I d/l'ed iWorks purely for Pages as a stop gap, but, as I said earlier, it's underwhelming.