Published by Deborah on 14 Jul 2005 at 03:58 pm
iWork: An Alternative to Word?
I was forced into buying Microsoft Products because the cheaper word processors (1997-2000) just didn’t cut it. That, and my son’s Cub Scout leader was always sending me correspondence in Word and Excel. The biggest gripe I have with Microsoft is how they rape their customers not only with the price of their products, but the bloat they contain.
I’ve yet to use every feature in Word, which with all it’s bells and whistles, lacks the ability to convert documents into a .pdf file. This forced me to shell out more cash for Adobe Acrobat, which also costs a pretty penny.
Word is good for business documents, but the grammar checker sucks for creative writing. I’ve also tried to implement graphics into ebooks with crappy results.
Today I found a comment on this blog from Randyh, asking me about the compatibility of WordPerfect on Mac OSX. I haven’t used that program in years, and decided to check out the review I’d written way back when. That’s when I found the link to iWork on Amazon.com.
The screenshots impressed me enough to consider buying it. The $79 pricetag is another plus. But before I buy anything, I always research to see how others like the product. The reviews on this page have made me reconsider replacing Word. As it turns out, the export feature of Pages doesn’t work as well as I’d hoped. And, most importantly for me, Pages isn’t a word processing program but a page layout program.
So, I will stick with Word and its quirks until something better comes along.
