Office 2011 Mac vs Apple iWork

Office 2011 and Apple iWork are the two top choices when looking for productivity suites for the Mac. The iWork is from the maker of the Mac while Office 2011 is from Microsoft, Apple’s biggest competitor, and is available in its full-featured form in Microsoft’s own Windows platform. The biggest difference between the two is price as Office 2011 costs a lot more than Apple iWork. You can expect to pay anywhere between two to four times what you would pay for iWork.

From the huge gap in price you do get some advantages when purchasing Office 2011 rather than Apple iWork. For starters, you get four applications rather than three on iWork. iWork has Pages, Keynote, and Numbers which are respective equivalents of Office 2011’s Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. What Office 2011 has that iWork doesn’t have is Outlook, an email application. It is not available in all versions, though, but it is only the cheapest one where you do not get Outlook. Outlook can retrieve and send emails as long as you have your Microsoft Exchange account.

When it comes to working with documents, Office 2011 has an edge due to the huge number of people using Microsoft Office regardless of whether it’s on a Mac or on a Windows PC. Sharing documents from an Office application to another ensures that the document is rendered correctly. Because not a lot of people have Macs, and even fewer still use iWork, iWork documents need to be converted before they can be shared with most colleagues. Even then, there is no assurance that your files would come out right. If you only use iWork to create printed documents, then the argument becomes moot.

If you fancy bringing your documents around in a tablet, iWork is a better match for you. There’s a version of iWork for the iPad which you can use for viewing and editing your iWork documents. It is just for the iPad, though, as no other tablet use iOS. On the other hand, there is no Office version for the iPad or for any tablet for that matter.

Summary:

1.Office 2011 is more expensive than iWork.
2.Office 2011 includes an email program while iWork does not.
3.You get better compatibility with Office 2011 than with iWork.
4.iWork is available for the iPad while Office 2011 is not.

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