I used Pages to write a manuscript which includes line drawings at 300 dpi. Sending it via .pdf to the book printer has been a mess. The fonts are wrong, as is character spacing. I’ve had the same problem trying to upload it onto Kindle. Should I get Word or Office? If I can get the free trial of Office, I’d rather do that. But I don’t know enough about Office to understand whether it will give me the functionality of saving the document as a .doc that will recognize the formatting from Pages. My end goal is to be able to get the darn book to the printer and have it look the way it’s supposed to.

I use Pages quite a bit. Frankly, collaboration with a non-Pages using folks is horribly inefficient. Essentially, it’s importing and exporting a document since Pages uses its own file format.

The documents I tend to work on are fairly complicated .doc files. To date, the ONLY program that has handled collaboration with Word users is Word. Open Office barfs on them. The formatting is completely screwed up.

I’ve looked at ways to replace Word — trust me — but while it’s possible for the majority of people to use other solutions, none work for me.

iWork is a premier-class suite of productivity tools. It can read and write to Office formats like a lot of other applications can (OpenOffice, Star Office, NeoOffice, TextEdit) and does a good job at it. It must be said that there are very legal and technical reasons why iWork can’t do “exactly the same thing” as Office, and why would you want it to?

Your comment “only as long as I never, ever need to exchange files or collaborate” is simply rhetoric, and illustrates how little you know about iWork. On the collaboration side, let’s focus on Pages. You can export and import (open) Word documents in Pages, no sweat. You can use the Export option in the File or Share menus, or simply choose that option when you save your document. If your recipient uses Word and you’d like to track changes in the document, just turn-on that feature! Check the Edit menu and select “Track Changes”. These comments and mark-up persist through conversion to .doc and back again.

When not collaborating, there is simply no need to send a Word document to anyone. Once you have finished with your document, share it as a PDF. That way, anyone can read it. In the event that mark-up or collaboration is needed on a PDF, those tools exist in both Preview and Acrobat.

Office is a nice thing to have when making the switch from Windows. Microsoft’s regard for Mac users is extremely low, and the quality of their flagship products for the Mac lack simplicity of iWork.

Does Apple need Office? Does an end-user need Office? No, not at all.

Apple could do it, but would then get in a cat and mouse with MSFT, and MSFT holds most of the cards there with it’s PC monopoly and ability to indroduce compatibility issues for any theoretical Apple .doc .xls derivative. Apple is FINE with Microsoft being an APPLICATION vendor, but should continue to push them back in the OS arena, where they really compete.

I think it’s WONDERFUL that Apple has managed to FORCE MICROSOFT to develop Outlook!

That is beating Microosft at their own MONOPOLY game. The ONLY reason there is suddenly VAPORWARE about a REAL outlook client on the horizon is that Apple has built THEIR OWN version into the OS. Kudos for Apple! The Monopolists then have no choice but to suddenly offer an ‘official’ client (probably that again creates all sorts of problems for Microsoft’s supposed Mac ‘customers’ (more like victims).

Right now, my iPod touch gets far better service from an exchange server than my Macs do. I look forward to that changing, thanks to Apple, not Microsoft. Thank you Apple!

You must not have a whole lot of experience in the corporate world – especially the Windows-heavy corporate world.

I use Pages, Keynote and Numbers at home all the time. Love the simplicity. But I’ve tried to make it work cross-platform. It simply doesn’t.

It’s too time consuming to have to “export” a document every time I want to save it on the server. The Keynote to PowerPoint conversion is virtually unusable – the docs don’t look or act like they do on the Mac when you open them in PPT on Windows. Both Word and Excel offer so many more features that don’t work in Pages it’s not even funny – simple annotations and notes don’t even convert correctly.

iWork was created not to compete with MS Office, but provide a low-cost alternative to switchers and users who don’t need MS Office but want office-style apps. Even if Apple created a PC version of iWork, it would still be a fringe suite of apps.