MacBook Pro + Microsoft Office?

Student Lounge College Life
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<p>I was ordering MacBook Pro when I saw that one of the optional add-ons is iWork, a suite with word processor and a presentation program. Does this mean that the laptop does not already come with Word, Excel, and Powerpoint? If so, that means I have to choose between iWork and Microsoft Office. Has anyone had any experience with iWork? From what I've seen on the Apple site, it looks really cool but I'm not sure if all the extra layout features are worth doing without a spreadsheet program (iWork has none). I don't really use Excel, but don't Econ majors use them? I might decide to major in Econ...</p>

<p>Wow, lots of questions. I obviously have no idea about any of this stuff. </p>

<p>Oh, and is anyone else interested in getting a MacBook?</p>

2

<p>No Microsoft Office. Get Office. iWork is crap.</p>

<p>And, why a MacBook Pro? They are brand new, which means they will have bugs, and they run extremely slow on non-native software -- which virtually everything.</p>

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<p>i have an apple computer, the Powerbook G4, and i think you should get Microsoft office.</p>

4

<p>get the Office for Mac, it's great. Word's notebook feature is wonderful for taking notes in class.</p>

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<p>The editing interfaces of both Pages and Keynote are a lot more intuitive and comfortable. Basic things like moving objects around, using text wrap etc... are incredibly cumbersome with Office (and I've done it). Setting text margins, paragraph spacing is simplified and actually works reliably (I've had too many experiences where you keep changing a setting and it never does what you want). Overall both Pages and Keynote are Word and Powerpoint without the bloat. The built-in layouts are also excellent; for things like lab write-ups, reports etc... Pages is very effective.</p>

<p>That said, if you have to make a choice and you need Excel; then, well, you need Excel. Pages and Keynote both run on the same engine, and have charts (3D and 2D, scatterplot, bar graph etc...) and tables with equation tool. A full equation program isn't included, but for my purposes they work quite well. Since the MacBook Pro comes with an iWork trial, I would just give it a shot, and then see how you like it. The ease of use might win you over, but it also might just be too uncomfortable for you. Try both.</p>

<p>[url=<a href="http://s88199767.onlinehome.us/iwork.gif%5DHere%5B/url"&gt;http://s88199767.onlinehome.us/iwork.gif]Here[/url&lt;/a&gt;] are a few pages of a lab write-up I did in a day. I started with a nice, attractive template, and then changed the template settings to fit the specific criteria (12px Times New Roman, 1.5 line-spacing, and put the text in grayscale). It shows some things like alpha text-wrapping (around the basketball/orange) and the charts and whatnot. Overall the lab is 17 pages, and I wouldn't haven't have attempted it with Word (it would be scaled down and a lot more basic).</p>

<p>Oh, and I think it's fair to mention that I used the equation editor in Word to create the equations. I saved them with a word file, and opened them in Pages (which also shows how good the compatibility is). If you're looking to create lots of high quality equations, then, short of LaTeX, Office would be worth it.</p>

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<p>Mac's do not come with Office and you have to pay extra to get Office for Mac. Recommend you get "I have a monopoly on this" Bill Gates Office. Even if IWorks is fine, you will face the repeated problem that any document you create that you want to send elctronically to anyone else has to be opened and used by that someone else and 98% of the people you send any document to will have Office not IWroks.</p>

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<p>If you're going for inexpensive, get OpenOffice (a free MS-Office compatible/MS-office clone package by an offshot of Sun) from <a href="http://www.openoffice.org%5B/url%5D"&gt;www.openoffice.org&lt;/a>
It has alternatives for each of the programs in the Microsoft Office suite and they all work quite nicely. It's available for Windows XP/2000/NT/9x, Mac OS X, and Linux.</p>

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<p>thanks for the input, everyone. </p>

<p>syn, I read that you can save stuff in .doc and .pdf formats in iWork. Is that true?</p>

<p>and Quincux, I don't really need to use nonnative apps. I'll mostly be using itunes, iphoto, safari, and stuff like that. anyway, according to cnet companies have already commited to coming out with software that's more compatible with the macbook. I will wait a while and see if there are any serious bugs or anything before I buy one though</p>

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<p>Pages imports and exports .docs and .ppts smoothly. Whenever I need to send something, I just export it as a .doc.</p>

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<p>Office for Mac imo is very usable and check with your university because they may have a deal with Apple which could mean free or significantly discounted softward. For example, I have MS Office for Mac compleely FREE because my school has a liscensing agreement. CHeck with your schol's tech people. Also, I got MS Office for XP for free since I have both Mac and PC. My school is expensive but the software benefits are really good.</p>

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<p>If they offer Office at an academic price (which they should), get it just for Excel. It's the only program worth using in there, and that's only because Apple has yet to make a spreadsheet of their own other than AppleWorks, which is just a slightly modified version of Claris Resolve.</p>

<p>Office's interface makes you think you're in 1997. iWork (Pages and Keynote) is more elegant and more modern. It's like comparing a Chevy (Office) to an Acura (iWork).</p>

<p>Pages has much better templates (I did my resume on it), works nicer, and has all the little elegance cues you expect from Apple apps.</p>

<p>Keynote puts PowerPoint to shame. Anyone who uses PowerPoint over keynote is basically asking for an inferior presentation. The templates are fresh and new (unlike PowerPoint's decade old standbys), the interface is so gorgeous that if it were a girl I would so ask it out, and the finished products look stunning. Put a Keynote in a class full of PowerPoints and it will be noticed.</p>

<p>Also, AppleWorks is worth a look. The database feature is basically a lite version of FileMaker (which is so much better than that akward beast called MS Access that doesn't even come for Mac), and the MacDraw-style drawing feature always comes in handy (as does the Paint program, which is better than MS Paint on Windows). The price is right too--it's a nice snag even though the code itself is practically unchanged since 2001. Some Macs have this one preinstalled, making the deal even sweeter.</p>

<p>As far as compatibility, I know Pages reads Word files. PowerPoint and Keynote SHOULD be interchangeable along the same logic, but I have yet to try it. I also know that AppleWorks will read and write Excel files (it has a spreadsheet but it's not powerful enough for my tastes...although the interface is pretty nice).</p>

<p>Just for your information: My needs are rather strange. I run a lot of spreadsheets for my personal records, and some of them are pretty complex. I write a lot of stuff, and have done word processing forever--I wrote my first story on the computer, not with a pencil (this was back in 1991). However, I didn't use basic WP programs much until I got pages (it's good for layout) because outside of novels and the occasional school paper, I don't write a lot of letters and whatnot. As far as presentations, I don't give a whole lot of them (most of my stuff is movies), but I integrate movie material into almost every presentation I make, and Keynote does it better.</p>

<p>Whenever Apple adds a spreadsheet to iWork, I will be one really happy man...</p>

<p>For now, I recommend iWork over Office, but definitely get Excel until they add a spreadsheet to iWork. And don't forget AppleWorks if you use database or draw.</p>

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<p>I've had the MacBok Pro for several months now and it's worked great for me.<br>
Somebody said that since it's new, it will have several bugs: I haven't yet found one (knock on wood). I bought the Microsoft Office programs to go with it (Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Entourage)- to me they're worth the money because I'm much more familiar with them than mac software, but they run much better on my laptop than they did on my dell pc.</p>