Update: This is now the official thread for debate on this very hotly contested issue.

Post your thoughts and point of view and have at it, but please keep it civilised - flaming, abuse and personal attacks will not be tolerated.

I find Keynote & Pages good for most everyday tasks, it'll be Numbers lacking scripting/Macros which can be a deal breaker to those of us who are number crunching for work and school projects. (I would note AppleWorks supported scripting)

Personally I believe MS Office is better since transfering documents to my ThinkPad running Office for Windows is near flawless. Pages like AppleWorks doesn't do well for exporting complex formated documents and such to MS Word. Mac Word isn't perfect it has some "issues" with embedded images not showing on Windows version of Word so you have to always copy the original images just incase that issue happens. (Word 2008 for Mac is supposed to have fixed this glitch, it'll be something I plan on testing on the release version)

With all that said, if someone works in a Mac only/home environment iWork would be a perfect choice to many for ease of use & cost. For those of us who deal with Windows users(work/education), some of us are forced into MS Office for compatibility reasons -I deal with stupid Winders users who send Powerpoint files instead of PDFing them, one reason why iWork & OpenOffice would never work in my situation.

(I've been using MS Office since Win95 days and Sun's StarOffice on Solaris v8-10 if you're wondering about my background)

Have been a Mac user since Clarisworks days, starting with a LC (low cost) model with 8MB RAM and a 160MB HDD.

MS Office has always been first choice for me, better Clip Art, wider accepatnce for reports etc., and of course as mentioned opening those PowerPoint presentations just ain't possible. Just because it is MS does not mean it is all bad.

I write for a living; I use Pages for every document or file I create myself, and export the files to Word if needed. I use Word when editing documents, but only if that document was created in Word (saves time and there's less chance of formatting changing in the translation). Like cliches, I avoid Clip Art like the plague - there's nothing like an MS image in a document to say "I used Word/PowerPoint and I couldn't be bothered sourcing my own images"! Pages has enough flexibility and enough features for what I need; Word is only on my machine to ensure maximum compatibility with clients' files and systems. Ditto PP. I have not tried Numbers yet, so can't comment on how it stacks up vs Excel.

I was always trying to make Word do things that were more visually 'creative' than how it's capabilities first seemed. Playing with fill colours, downloading heaps of fonts etc. (never, never used clip-art though...ughhh).

Pages has answered all my prayers really. I can easily use it for a regular document, or I can make up flyers to sell stuff on uni notice boards. I used Pages recently to write up a journal for a writing class. I did it like a magazine with different topics on each page. It looked really great, took barely any time and I was really proud I was able to do it. It would've been hell to attempt in Word.

I love Excel and was a trainer in Excel a few years ago. I now love numbers, but perhaps not as much.

Keynote I rarely use and wish I had more reason to. It simply doesn't compare with Powerpoint. I'm sure most uses of iWork would agree.

I have no Microsoft software on my Mac since Leopard.

i am a recent convert to Pages, I have largely replaced my usage of MS Word with Pages and find it is quite sufficient for my needs.

as for numbers, i am afraid its just not in the same league, Excel is one of the best apps going, i use it at work extensively in a laboratory environment and it is an incredibly powerful and flexible piece of software. the things you can achieve with Excel integrating across large networks and multiple applications with macros is nothing short of amazing.

keynote is miles in front of PP and although i dont make many presentations would definitely be the app of choice for me.

so i still have M$ office, and i think i will have both Works & Office for the forseeable future.

I vote for iWork, but I do have a copy of Office on my Mac just in case I need Macros in Excel... but apart from that, very little use for Office.

QuickLook does most of my reading
Otherwise, I run Office 2007 inside a virtual machine.

Pages and Keynotes are superior to Office.

But as a financial analyst, i find Excel is still the app of choice. Sadly, Numbers are just not up to the mark at this stage for professional work.

I've been a mac user since ages ago, and i think for word processing clarisworks 2 whipped word 5. Word 03 (hain't used 07 yet) for pc and word 04 (hain't used 08 yet) for mac still has the same illogical "features" as earlier versions, but it's well outpaced claris now.

I've no respect for pages or keynote whatsoever.

Numbers I've never used but I use excel every day and I use it to a fair bit of its full potential, so i ain't gonna even bother looking at numbers.

I hate microsoft, windows, office, etc, but until something better comes along for the mac i will be using office (the pc version mind you) for all my word processing, slideshow and spreadsheet needs. I don't think iwork (or for that matter office for mac) are anywhere near "something better" yet. I'll look forward to comparing office 03, office 04, office 07 and office 08, but i doubt iwork will still come into it.

I run a small business with less than ten employees and manage all scheduling, wage calcs, tax, wage notifications, sales budgeting, sales forecasting, deliveries, etc. from Numbers.

Most complaints about Numbers are Excel people just trying to get it to work the Excel way. Pretty dumb thing to do. Numbers cries out for multiple tables per blank worksheet canvass and multiple worksheets. Each table should be quite small. Everything fits together as you would with low level database entity relationship modelling.

Apparently Excel has more functions, so the missing ones may be show stoppers for some. Likewise graphing it seems.

Excel has Macros. No company I ever worked for allowed Macros so never developed a Macro habit... Macro = virus. Again, lack of this may be a show stopper.

A habit of people in Excel is to set aside an area within the same worksheet for a table of data which is used throughout other cells. We'd use a sepaate table in Numbers.

In Excel we carefully define only that part of the massive worksheet we intend to print / the print area per page. Thus lots of columns used for intermediate calculations don't get printed as they are outside of the page bounds, for example. Again, we would setup a special worksheet as a print view in Numbers.

Print views WITHIN a worksheet is not a strong point of Numbers. As I run as near paperless as possible it is not a problem for me. A wage sheet is a single page - a no brainer for Numbers or Excel.

Date calculations are apparently a problem in Numbers but I never found Excel to be satisfactory either. I have always, since my Excel days, used separate cells for hours and minutes and still do in Numbers. So I don't notice the often complained about Numbers date/time function problems.

My save file is only a few MB and it takes a couple of minutes to open. Apart from that Numbers rocks.

Remember: In Numbers break everything into small chunks.

I love iWork, and as a high school student it is one of the most important things that I have on my Mac. It's a powerful tool from my point of view. (I don't have the latest version though, so I can't comment on Numbers yet)

Pages is perfect for all my writing needs. I can quickly whip together a whole assignment and maintain a level of consistency throughout by using the Styles tab. From that, I love the way my Table of Contents also updates itself. It's also very easy to make your documents looks sleek, modern and professional, and I'm sure that accounts for some of the increases in my school grades. Presentation is the key

Keynote. Ohhh Keynote. I absolutely love it. My classes love it. My teachers love it. I always take my Mac to school for presentations. The "WOW" factor is priceless. The application allows me to design the best presentations in the class. The effects and transitions are not distracting either, unlike some of the Microsoft ones. Also, no annoying clapping sounds, of that bloody car that 'zooms past' everything the class-clown changes to the next slide...

I have to use Excel for my accounting subjects, but I'm fine with that as I believe Excel is an excellent program. It has been around for a lot longer than Numbers, so naturally it's going to have the upper hand. Once Numbers and Excel are compatible with each other, I will be happy to use Numbers instead.

We use iWork as the basis for the office admin of my company. The key things we like about it are:

Price - It's very very good value.

Styles in Pages - We have a batch of templates with preset styles that keep all our documents consistent. Word is more powerful but I've never bothered to learn how to set it up. Pages didn't require me to learn.

Works perfectly with iLife.

Can very rapidly develop reports and graphic heavy documents.

We don't use Numbers so heavily yet, but we do use it instead of Excel. It also has a lot of the benefits I mentioned for Pages.

I have only just got i Work, and I must say I am very impressed with it. One thing I really do like about i Work is how well the templates are to work with and how quick it is to just get to know how to use the tools. I also love how i Photo interacts with it, and this makes it quick and powerful.

I am a long time Office user (Actually used Perfect Office before that!) and in the short time I have used I work I am mighty impressed. Yes Office will do more in some respects but not as efficient. I really do think i Work will become a competitor to MS Office, and I think they (Apple) are trying to do this no matter what they say. Of cause what really makes iWork so attractive is it's price and what you get for that.

To sum up my point of view of the 2 in a work environment:

MS Office is still the benchmark for capability, but iWork is chasing it and fast.

If each table is supposed to be quite small then Numbers aren't meant to be a sophisticated spreadsheet.

For simple spreadsheets , I use Numbers. But when it comes to a typical financial model (such as a M&A model) that runs at least 40 x 40 cells per sheet with multiple scenarios, Numbers just can't do it. Or if it can, it normally takes longer. For example, simple things in Excel like Format | Paste Transpose - you'll need to write an index command in Numbers.

Take a look through the Apple support forum for Numbers and you'll find that the overwhelming opinion is Numbers are for mickey mouse purposes. It simply just doesn't have the horsepower.