Microsoft Office vs iWork: Energy impact?

[Apple Knowledge Navigator]

I run a startup business and I'm considering a switch from Apple's iWork apps to Office, mostly for compatibility.

But I'm concerned about the affect on battery life as these are much 'heavier' apps. Does anyone have any experience of battery life draining or negative impacts from using Office?

Many thanks

 

[dukebound85]

i wouldn't worry about it

 

[Billrey]

Microsoft Office is bad for the environment.

 

[izzy0242mr]

I run a startup business and I'm considering a switch from Apple's iWork apps to Office, mostly for compatibility.

But I'm concerned about the affect on battery life as these are much 'heavier' apps. Does anyone have any experience of battery life draining or negative impacts from using Office?

Many thanks

I haven't done an intense comparison, using iWork vs using Office, but I know that Office tends to lag and freeze a LOT on my computers (2011 MBP, 2015 rMBP), whereas iWork never has issues for me. I rely on a few Office apps for work and school so I do switch between them a lot, but I believe anecdotally I notice better battery life when I'm solely using iWork apps than when I'm solely using Office apps.

 

[SalisburySam]

On my 2017 iMac under Mojave 10.14.6, I use both the iWork suite of Pages/Numbers/Keynote and the Microsoft equivalents in the Office suite of Word/Excel/Powerpoint. I can’t speak to the battery life differences since the iMac is plugged in, but the work I have to do is so much greater in Office. The Office apps do many, many more things than the iWork ones, and those are things I just don’t need. I can save iWork docs in formats compatible to Office and that seems to work well. Worst case: use *.pdf. About the only thing I find I can do faster and more easily in Office than iWork is a mail-merge. Office still makes it hugely cumbersome, for me anyway, but I don’t think I’ve even gotten it to work in iWork, or if it even does it.

And when I say Office, I exclude OneNote, Outlook, Teams, whatever, just Word/Excel/Powerpoint. I do think the new unified version of these 3 is helpful.

One way to save battery is to either turn off (not a good idea) or relocate auto save. If you have to connect every few minutes to a server somewhere online, it will use more battery than storing locally and auto saving to your local device.

 

[macsound1]

Using MS Office vs iWork is about buy-in and usability.

If you have tons of internal documents that can be saved in their native iWork format, you'll increase productivity because of the less bloated nature of iWork as an app, but increase usability of the app being more modern.

If you spend lots of time emailing documents to external people, you'll end up saving your pages files as .docx anyway, so you won't benefit from the added functionality of iWork and will spend additional time exporting one format and saving another format.

Personally, the documents I make in Pages I consider along the lines of photoshop or indesign files. I'm using this "specialized app" for the features it has and none of them are ever sent along for anyone else to edit.

In addition, exported iWork documents have lots of interoperability with other applications which MS Office doesn't. For example, PDF exported Keynote files are 100% editable in Adobe Illustrator, which is amazing!