iWork users... how easy is it to work with Microsoft Word/Excel documents?

[eseerc]

Good Morning,

Recently, I switched my family to using Apple's iWork suite and iCloud email from Microsoft Office and Outlook.com. We're about two weeks into the change and am thinking I may have made a bad decision. With Office being considered the "industry standard" for productivity, we've encountered a few times needing to convert documents in between the two productivity suites. Most of the time it works ok, but we have had instances of annoying formatting issues when doing so. To be quite honest, the converting has been somewhat annoying thus far.

Has anyone else tried this change? How has it worked out for you over the long term? Any tips/ideas are appreciated..... or perhaps I should bite the bullet and switch back to Office...

 

[Rob Phillips]

I tried to make the switch when I got my latest MacBook Pro and Apple Productivity Apps came preinstalled. The slight formatting issues weren't a big deal but, as you said, Office is the gold standard. Apple Productivity Apps have a long way to go to catch up to Office IMHO. Apple always shoots for a simplistic approach but in this case I think it comes at the expense of features. Not a big deal to novice or casual users but, having grown up on Office and knowing where everything is and how it works, I just couldn't get used to Apple Productivity Apps. I switched back to Office within a week.

 

[eseerc]

I tried to make the switch when I got my latest MacBook Pro and Apple Productivity Apps came preinstalled. The slight formatting issues weren't a big deal but, as you said, Office is the gold standard. Apple Productivity Apps have a long way to go to catch up to Office IMHO. Apple always shoots for a simplistic approach but in this case I think it comes at the expense of features. Not a big deal to novice or casual users but, having grown up on Office and knowing where everything is and how it works, I just couldn't get used to Apple Productivity Apps. I switched back to Office within a week.

Thanks for the reply. What you explained is exactly where I feel I am at. I use a lot of pivot tables in excel and that is the #1 feature I am missing in switching to iWork. I don't mind iWork, but its kinda lonely when I feel like I am the only person on earth using it, ha ha.

My wife has already reverted back to Office and in doing so, I'm afraid we'll be back to OneDrive for cloud needs as well.

 

[Rob Phillips]

Thanks for the reply. What you explained is exactly where I feel I am at. I use a lot of pivot tables in excel and that is the #1 feature I am missing in switching to iWork. I don't mind iWork, but its kinda lonely when I feel like I am the only person on earth using it, ha ha.

My wife has already reverted back to Office and in doing so, I'm afraid we'll be back to OneDrive for cloud needs as well.

Nothing at all wrong with OneDrive. Works great for me and I get 1TB of storage with my Office365 subscription.

 

[eseerc]

Nothing at all wrong with OneDrive. Works great for me and I get 1TB of storage with my Office365 subscription.

I can't get the OneDrive sync app to work properly on my Macbook Air, it consistently shows as "processing files". Other than the download/upload speeds, I don't mind OneDrive.

 

[Rob Phillips]

I can't get the OneDrive sync app to work properly on my Macbook Air, it consistently shows as "processing files". Other than the download/upload speeds, I don't mind OneDrive.

You might want to try removing it and then reinstalling. Works fine with me on El Capitan. I've noticed it's very slow if you simply set OneDrive to backup "all files" on your computer. Try setting it to sync only particular folders and you might have better luck.