Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac Test Drive

[sk8erboy]

Hey folks,
what a lovely morning.

Anyhow, ive come across that with the purchase of an imac.. Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac Test Drive comes included w/ the software bundle. Could someone explain to me what this program, EXACTLY is. It sounds like a demo... this is true, right? Thanks. Oh, ive noticed alot of discussion about Office vrs Apple Works/iWork..
could someone please give me a brief rundown of these 3 programs.
thanks.

SK8r

 

[mkrishnan]

Have you seriously never used MS Office before?

Yes, Office Test Drive is a 1 month (IIRC) functioning demo. You can use it for the month, and then buy if you want to.

AppleWorks is ... more like MS Works than like MS Office. It lets you do a wider variety of things (word processing, spreadsheeting, presentations, illustrations, etc) in one application, and it can read/write Office files, but no specific portion of it is nearly as powerful as the separate apps found in Office, etc. Don't expect it to be that great for doing engineering homework or writing scientific documents or creating professional looking publications. The upside is (besides the fact that it's free), it is relatively easy to use.

iWork is a newer suite by Apple. It *only* contains a word processing-esque program and a presentation program -- it has nothing whatsoever in the spreadsheet arena at this point. The two apps get mixed reviews. Pages is really quite different from other word processors. It has a number of templates that let you get really professional looking results (in a limited number of styles) for more graphically-oriented text documents. It basically sits somewhere in between Word and something like Quark / Pagemaker / etc in functionality -- it isn't really the best for typesetting, and it's also not the best workhorse for office documents, but in the middle it's great. Keynote is a lot like Powerpoint, but it has more professional-looking effects, although some people say it also has more limitations in terms of adjusting the way the slide looks (typical Apple -- better output, as long as you're willing to buy into their stylistic concept).

If you really don't know what Office is, or what it's for, search the web.

 

[sk8erboy]

:'( + im guessing i cant open/read word documents without OFFICE?
+ can i even open word documents with appleworks/iworks????

thanks. again.
sk8R

 

[mkrishnan]

:'( + im guessing i cant open/read word documents without OFFICE?
+ can i even open word documents with appleworks/iworks????

thanks. again.
sk8R

No, you have several options to open/read office documents (except for MS Access...I think you pretty much need Access to read an Access DB):

- Appleworks and iWorks both have limited ability to import. Most stuff should come through fine, but it may not be 100% faithful (image sizes and positions changed slightly, etc), and translating back and forth repeatedly is a bad idea

- OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice/J are both free and offer good Office doc compatibility. I'd guess both are more faithful than iWork or AW because they were more closely intended to be direct replacements for MS Office.