Comments on: Poll Result: iWork wins hands down!

By: Productivity on your Mac: 5 Alternative Word Processors | Smoking Apples

Productivity on your Mac: 5 Alternative Word Processors | Smoking Apples — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:36:07 +0000

[...] course, SA readers know better than to use Word (unless we’re forced to at work) and have settled for Apple’s iWork as [...]

By: iWork vs Office: A Comparison | Ed Parry

iWork vs Office: A Comparison | Ed Parry — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:44:57 +0000

[...] recent poll conducted by SmokingApple’s suggests (from 420 votes) that only 16% of their readers primarily use Microsoft Office. Compared [...]

By: Neil Anderson

Neil Anderson — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 04:27:05 +0000

iWork 09 rocks!

By: Wikinerd

Wikinerd — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 12:52:50 +0000

iWork is great, but they do need to fix Numbers. Especially the data plotting/graphing functions

By: jsk

jsk — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 03:52:49 +0000

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.

By: Jocca

Jocca — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 01:48:13 +0000

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.