i think you nailed it.

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What does compatibility means. 99% of my customers mail around word documents that you can easily made in TextEdit. That would be as easy to export from Pages. Same with Numbers here. And as a sysadmin I have forbidden to mail Word dokuments if its not absolutly necessary. I remind on fast save and viruses.
So I began to switch 2 compyny totally to iWorks cause of the costs, the ease of use, installation and workflow.
I think the days would be not only hard but desastrous fpr Mac BU. I doubt that the actaul version sells this good by the lots of sopecial events the made up for it.

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Of course if you want even better compatibility with MS Office, AND something just as powerful as Excel, AND something that handles the latest MS document format, you can just get NeoOffice for FREE!

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Woah... to the commenter above I don't mean to be rude... but as a sysadmin. some spelling and grammar should be kinda necessary. It was actually hard to even understand what your post said.

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The dropping of macros support eliminates our office's upgrade to the new version. We have written many document templates that rely on macros. If we have to reconstruct how we generate those reports, we will research all options. Microsoft/MacBU is continuing the fine tradition at Microsoft of simply not "getting it".

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I, too, am impressed with how well the new iWorks addresses the basic need for productivity applications -- Keynote, in particular, should really have MS Office for the Mac on the defensive.

That said, the one place where Office for Mac is still light years ahead of Apple's efforts is in mail/contacts/calendar. Entourage, IMHO, is the best application of its kind running on ANY platform. Weirdly, it is better and easier to use than Outlook for Windows, and Apple's Mail, Address Book and iCal programs are sadly wimpy in comparison.

If Entourage continues to be as good in Office 2008 as it is in 2004, I will upgrade just for it (Office is the very last PPC software on my Mac). Only if Microsoft bungles the new Entourage (always a possibility) and Apple vastly improves Mail/Address Book/iCal, would I be likely to switch.

One last note: The guys at the MacBU at Microsoft deserve some credit for their efforts to create authentic Mac software in a clueless corporate culture. Entourage is a good example of how they get it right. I hope they continue to be around in the future.

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I only used Pages occasionally before iWork '08 but have used Pages '08 since its introduction some weeks ago. I work in a company where 99% of the people use Windows and Microsoft Office. To be compatible I have to use track changes/comments etc. on a daily basis and Pages' 08 does a good job. I am glad I do not have to use Office that often. But compatibility is still an issue. I.e. it is possible to export documents in Word format but it is not possible to send a document as a Word document by email, directly from Pages. Most of us who work in Microsoft affected companies use this function in MS Word all the time. It seems as if Apple wanted to present a good alternative for Pages without giving MS Word too much credential as the main Word processor on the market.

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Sad to say that there are still lots of people who think that you must have Office to read .doc files. (I know some.)

But I still think that the future will be less Office-centric. If I can work with iWork, Google Apps, and OpenOffice.org (in Ubuntu), I feel no need for Office on my computers.

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@4

hmm... not the most intelligent comment! Check out the surname Austin, how is your Swedish? (Or Norwegian, Danish, Finnish or Icelandic, apologies to Jorg).

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I feel like if iWork could have figured out a way to translate Office macros for use in Numbers and Pages, they would make a lot of people very very happy.

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So MS will be delivering a new version of MS Office in early 2008.

Are we to assume that this will be the last version of MS Office to come? With Numbers is still new but the the ability to evolve quickly and adapt to Windows versions of MS Office ahould not be an issue for Apple, expecially since MS is planning to use more ML based formatting.

The only drawback is MS going out of their way to make Numbers as incompatible as possible by using proprietary formats.

Only time will tell, but one thing is for certain, iWork will griw while Office for Mac will dwindle.

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iWork 08 is an amazing program. As for compatability why not download Neo Office for free or better yet wait a few more months for the Open Office Mac Version to be completed. I do not understand why anyone would pay for Microsoft Office that is not a hardcore business user. It makes no sense. On PC open office is a perfectly good alternative for 97% of users. Diddo for Neo Office on the Mac.

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Office:Mac is becoming increasingly irrelevant with each passing day.

Yes, the whole tenet of Office:Mac's existence was compatibility, but MacBU pretty much threw that out of the water when they announced that the next version of Office wouldn't support VBA. In doing so, and with Apple releasing the new iWork, they split the market into two:

1. Those people who don't need macros, don't need all of Excel's macros and some of the more esoteric formatting features in Word. This is quite probably the majority of Office users out there, both on the Mac and Windows (remember when Microsoft did that study on Excel usage a few years back, and discovered that the vast majority of people just used Excel like an overblown calculator, leading to AutoSum being added?). These folks have the pick: they could use OpenOffice, NeoOffice or iWork without any real difficulty except for learning the new interfaces.

2. People who have used Office on Windows somewhat more to its potential: VBA macros abound, incredibly complex Excel formulae, lots of Word-driven forms, and so on. Office for Windows isn't going to go away any time soon, but MacBU have already dumped them. The only ways they're going to get support on the Mac is either through Neo/OpenOffice (as it continues to strive for complete compatibility—though there's no telling how long it'll take), through Parallels, VMWare and Boot Camp, or by altering the processes they use.

Essentially, MacBU has guaranteed that the people who really *use* Office for the features it provides—which is the minority, but a very significant one—will have to continue buying Windows licenses for everybody who needs to use those documents until a completely compatible non-Microsoft alternative comes about.

It's no small wonder people use the phrase “lock-in” in the same sentence as “Microsoft” so readily. MacBU itself may feel it's unfortunate that it's all come about this way, and that they just didn't have the resources to support and develop Office:Mac as a tier-one product as Microsoft does with Office for Windows, but nobody can really say with any certainty that this wasn't some strategy from the guys at the top? Reduce the MacBU's budget and resources until it has no choice but to reduce the feature-set of Office:Mac, ensuring the hardcore users stick with Windows.

(As tempting as it would be to direct ire at the folks at MacBU, it's probably not really fair: I don't doubt for a second that they want to produce the best software they can, but have a limited hand to play with—it's clearly too much to expect the largest and most powerful software company in the world to be able to throw a sane degree of resources at a particular business unit).

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I am planning on ditching Office 2004 for iWork '08 for everything I can.

The only hitch is the one last thing that iWork is missing - an Entourage killer. Say what you will, the combination of Mail.app and an iCal bridge like GroupCal just doesn't cut it.

I'd absolutely love to see Apple license ActiveSync and get their Exchange server support rock solid on both the iPhone and the Mac - I need a good Exchange calendaring and email client for work, and Mail.app's IMAP workaround just doesn't cut it.

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I'm with you. iWork's time has come — I won't upgrade Office for Mac.

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in my dealing with iwork 08. Besides Keynote... the other apps are just plain slow. I tried loading one of the corporate spreadsheets into Numbers. After it took the time to import, it was slower to scroll through than it was in Excel... well actually Excel was extremely fast. Numbers was just unable to handle that many columns and rows. Also keep in mind, that Excel is running at about the speed of a 1GHz G4 and numbers is running at 2.4ghz Core 2 Duo. Also, the interface in Word is much easier to work with. Word also auto corrects spelling errors and has an often wrong, but sometimes helpful grammar checker. The new interface on word for windows is awesome. I really like the no menu bar stuff that is going on in Vista. I almost wish OSX could do that, but the menu bar is more prevalent in OSX and I'm sure the software designers are finding new ways of doing things. I rarely use the menu bar except maybe in Photoshop. I do agree that there are some annoying features in word when it comes to formatting the document. Hopefully those will be worked out by January. Also, what is the big deal that It took Microsoft 2 years to convert to Intel. Their programs run super fast under Rosetta, there was no reason to rush the release just be Native. Also, it means you don't have buy Word as often. Everyone in the Apple word touts apple's quick releases a good thing, and I think most of them are, but it certainly costs more. It took apple 5 years to do the same things that vista did in 5 years, but in that time we had to buy 3 versions of OSX. That is more than Vista Ultimate. I am an avid Mac users, I do like Vista, but there is a reason that I bought a Mac and it is because I like OSX better and I am willing to put up with Apple's "Way" to deal with it. I will most likely be upgrading to the new Office in January... because the only program that is familiar, and has a smarter interface than Office is Keynote.

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The only thing that's missing from iWork is an open, standard format. There's a lot of hard work these days going into OpenDocument and OOXML to make them formats to ensure that documents are readable 10, 20, 50 years from now. I particularly favor OpenDocument since it is more complete and more open than OOXML, but regardless of that fact it would be nice if Apple settled upon using one or the other as the native format in Pages/Keynote/Numbers. To do anything else is counterproductive in the long run.

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I really take issue to your comment about Office running fast in Rosetta. I tried writing a thesis in Word using Endnote (not UB at that point) and every citation I added took about a minute. This was on a 1st generation Intel iMac with 2GB of RAM. Word alone chokes under large documents (I mean over 50 pages of plain text, which isn't too big) even without something like Endnote bogging it down further. I happily switched to Mellel and Bookends (which wasn't UB at the time, but still fast) and found my workflow to be considerably faster and less anger inducing. I had to walk away from my thesis when using Word because I would physically angry. I found it easier and more pleasurable to learn two new programs than suffer through using Word. On the other hand, I authored a graphics-heavy 100+ page conference program in Pages '05 and though did find some occasional sluggishness, it was incredibly useful. I shudder to think what Word would have been like for that application. I will concede that I haven't used Numbers for a huge data set, but I found it very useable for a my 150 column thesis data set.

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Gotta get iWork on the PC to become relevant. I'm sorry but my job constantly requires me to deal with shared docs and prepare powerpoints for others. Frankly, I have a lot of pull in what software is used and simply require iWork on the PC for the best experience. People would use it in a heartbeat, and at $79 it's a no brainer business decision. There's no "either or" with office. Just pick up iwork so your designers can make great presentations and documents that you can run on your PC without out compromise. Other than outlook, there's nothing special about office other than it's ubiquity that requires people to use it.

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Microsoft's MacBU is dying a slow, painful death, and rightfully so. The MacBU was only started to give Microsoft something to point to while they were being accused of anticompetitive practices. Yet, somehow, all Microsoft has ever done with it is try to extend their anticompetitive, proprietary formats into the Mac market.

Internet Explorer for Mac was created to further Microsoft's push into monopolizing the web, then killed to so that Windows would look like the best OS for web browsing. Windows media player for Mac was simply another way to force Microsoft's proprietary "standards" down more throats. The MacBU ended that project, however, when they realized there's no way to shoehorn their Janus DRM into OS X like they do to every Windows PC. MSN for Mac is the only app that the MacBU has written which doesn't seem to have ulterior motives, and we all know what a joke that app is.

Now Apple has put the MacBU to shame by adding complete, interoperable support for Microsoft's new 'open' XML format in iWork '08; something Office for Mac can't even offer until next year. The MacBU doesn't have a product left that isn't obsolete, yet they still rake in the cash from new switchers who, unfortunately, don't know any better.

There is no longer ANY good reason to install Microsoft software on a Mac. Thank God.

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