Hi There
The best thing you can do is try them both out for yourself and decide
which you prefer. Personally, after playing around quite a bit with
both, I prefer iWork 9 for a number of reasons. It's stable, something
that Openoffice 3 has not been for me at least on the Mac side. You
can read and edit tables in documents, something that up until now we
haven't been able to do at all on the Mac. Highlighting text works
correctly, since the document doesn't get subdivided into separate
text areas like Openoffice sometimes does. I can read Powerpoints with
Keynote, whereas if I tried this with Openoffice it would go into an
infinite busy loop.
A couple of downsides to iWork are that, while it can read Office open
XML documents (.docx, .xlsx, and .pptx) files, it cannot save in them.
It will, however, save to the normal office formats. There is also no
opendocument support (Openoffice's default format) so if you need that
you'll still need Openoffice installed.
Some of the issues with Openoffice may be due to my setup, as there
are a lot of people who seem to really like it and use it extensively.
But for me it just never worked quite right.
Download them both and try them out. Stick with whichever one you
like. Of course, even if iWork is installed you don't need to remove
Openoffice if you want both of them.
On Jan 7, 2009, at 05:43, E.J. Zufelt wrote:
Good morning,
From a usability and accessibility perspective, is there a reason
to prefer
iWork 9 over OpenOffice 3?
Thanks,
Everett
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