If you are considering switching to Mac or you have recently switched, you may find yourself in the market for a productivity software suite. You could spent outrageous fortunes on Microsoft Office for Mac, but why would you want to do that. Unless you have a really good reason that you MUST stay with Microsoft Office, switch to iWork.
iWork is a great collection of productivity software. It includes Pages, Keynote, and Numbers. For the new Mac owner, that is the equivalent of Word, Powerpoint, and Excel. iWork is available for a single install at the price of $79.00 or for a “Family Pack” which allows it to be installed on four Macs for the price of $99.
iWork can open any Microsoft Office files and can save files as Office files. Recently, my boss upgraded to the Office ‘07 and I was the only employee who could open her files for about one week. Everybody who had Office needed to download a compatibility patch. iWork can even export files to PDF natively. On my PC with Windows XP, I had to use Adobe Professional to do the same.
“I use Outlook to keep track of my appointments” you may say. With the iLife software that comes on your Mac you can do the same. When somebody mails me an email that says, lets say “Saturday” or “Next Saturday” I can click on the word (or a date of they send a date) and the date will show in iCal. If the email includes a time listed with the day or date, iCal will even fill in the time in the appointment. Apple calls this ability “Data Detectors.” Names, addresses and phone numbers all have the same abilities, except they will open in Address Book.
I have used Microsoft Office for many years, even using Outlook to sync to my Windows Mobile PDA phone. I have had no issues with the switch to iWork. I actually prefer Pages and Keynote to Word and Powerpoint 2007. I do not even use Outlook to sync my PDA anymore, more on that in another post.
Have you recently switched to Mac and tried iWork? How do you like it, and is there anything you could not do with it that you need