Poll Result: iWork wins hands down!

by Milind Alvares
Monday January 26, 2009

Poll Result: iWork wins hands down!

by Milind Alvares on January 26, 2009

Recently, Microsoft posted some statistics claiming that over 77% Mac users in the US use some flavour of Office. We wanted to know how real this figure was. Turns out, Microsoft is only half right. One one hand, they are right in that many people have Office installed, but they are wrong in that more than 75% ~~Mac users~~ of our readers use iWork.

iwork-chart1

We got a total of 420 votes, 182 of which said they use iWork, but also have Office installed. 144 said they use iWork exclusively. Office users on the other hand comprised of 69 users, with an additional 25 who weren’t even aware of iWork. The large number of iWork users have Office installed, count in Microsoft’s favour, but only for so long…

I should like to note that there are a lot of people who are ‘forced’ to use Office because of their day jobs. We forgot to include that option, but they exist!

Thank you for voting.

Tagged as: iwork, mac, microsoft office, office, poll

Reader Comments

iWork vs Office: A Comparison | Ed Parry: March 13, 2009 at 9:14 pm
Productivity on your Mac: 5 Alternative Word Processors | Smoking Apples: April 29, 2009 at 7:06 pm

Reader Comments

Jim Delaney January 27, 2009 at 1:18 am: Um…don’t you mean that 75% of your readers (or those that respond to your polls) use iWork? I’m a graduate student, and most students in my Department have Macs. I don’t know of any who use iWork. I also don’t know of any who read Apple related blogs. Coincidence?
Milind Alvares January 27, 2009 at 1:23 am goobimama.blogspot.com: I meant to add that in, forgot. Fixed it now, thanks!
John January 27, 2009 at 2:09 am: I’m in that last category. I have to have office (installed in XP in Parallels) for absolute compatibility with others in the company (mostly for political reasons). However, I never author anything in Office. If I create documents I use iWork and distribute them as pdf documents.
Omar January 27, 2009 at 2:12 am: iWork out of choice, but I do have office installed on my iMac (in case purposes).
DBX January 27, 2009 at 5:16 am: People are also forced to use Office due to the occasional brain-dead feature omission in iWork. The two most glaring — no split-screen view in Numbers, and you have to use either footnotes or endnotes (you can’t use both in combination) in Pages.

No such issues with Keynote, though. Hopefully Numbers and Pages will catch up.

Right now, I’m in the position of using Office 2004 (with the Visual Basic support and split screen) for spreadsheet and the occasional shared word-processing document, Mellel for my own writing in combination with Bookends, and Keynote out of iWork for my presentations. A melange indeed, complicated further by the fact that Mellel only has rtf file output, not doc as well, but the integration with Bookends is worth the hassle. I’m waiting to see which one of NeoOffice, MS Office 2010 or 2011 and iWork cross the finish line first for having it all together. Hopefully NeoOffice as it would be nice to have the problem solved without an expensive software upgrade.
Jocca January 27, 2009 at 7:18 am: I am retired now and I do not need to use Office anymore. I used to have to run Office on my Macs at work and I have to say that the PPT version for the Mac was better than the one for window, but even that just does not get close to Keynote.
jsk January 27, 2009 at 9:22 am: I too have Office installed, but use iWork exclusively (for what I’d use Office for). I haven’t authored anything in Office since the first release of iWork.

• PowerPoint is sad compared to Keynote. (Pallets to define the theme for the entire presentation at the root level of the pallet, but the specifics for individual slides defined elsewhere or deeper? Really?!?)
• I come from an engineering background, not accounting; so, Excel has NEVER been worth a darn. (I’ve been a Mac user since 1987 and Excel has ALWAYS been a second rate spreadsheet app. Unfortunately, better spreadsheet apps (Wingz, Trapeze, etc.) were ground under when MS created “Office” so, it had been the only choice for a number of years.)
• Word used to be a great word processing app up to v5.1, but turned into junk when MS decided to “standardize” on the inferior Windoze version (wa-hoo, buttons on a tool bar for new, open, save, cut copy and paste, what a useful use of screen real-estate!!) starting with v6 (don’t forget, Word started out on the Mac in 1984).

I’m not sure why more people don’t use Numbers. Seriously, do we really need to keep the what, 16th century, monolithic ledger sheet as the basis of our 21st century spreadsheet apps?!?

As for the criticisms of Pages, I can see academic type’s point, but I can’t anyone else having any need for Word. Personally, I use InDesign for serious work, TextWrangler for all my programming/web work, and email for almost everything else (do people really write paper memos anymore?). I happily use Pages for what very little remains (which isn’t much or very often).

Office is only on my hard disk to open stuff people send me that iWork can’t open or to open legacy files that I haven’t opened and updated in years.
Wikinerd January 27, 2009 at 6:22 pm: iWork is great, but they do need to fix Numbers. Especially the data plotting/graphing functions
Neil Anderson January 28, 2009 at 9:57 am cyclelogicpress.com: iWork 09 rocks!