iWorks - Macs and PC Owners

[Holland73]

I finally going to be buying my first Mac!!! I am going for the MacBook Pro, 13 inch, 2.26 GHz. I will be upgrading the memory to 4GB and hard drive to 250GB.

My computer usage typically revolves around internet surfing, a little photo editing and lots of MS Office usage. Probably even more Office usage, as I am getting ready to go back to Grad School in April.

My BIGGEST concern is the compatibility with iWorks documents & PC owners. I really don't want to have to purchase MS Office.

BUT, if I produce something in any of the iWorks components, such as Pages, Notes, etc, and send it to a PC owner, will they be able to open and read it?

Everyone I know is a PC owner, so this will be a big deal.

Anyone care to share their experiences with this issue? And how they resolved it... if needed?

[Ambystoma]

You can save iWork documents (pages, etc) as office docs. For instance, I send pages stuff saved as .doc via email or whatever to colleagues and it's no big deal. Same with Keynote & Numbers. The only thing is that sometimes in Keynote the fonts may not transfer over if you use one that isn't available on PCs. I've not had a problem with my Numbers spreadsheets being converted to excel sheets--the commands stay just fine. Same thing with opening docs sent from PCs.

[Viola]

Originally Posted by Holland73

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BUT, if I produce something in any of the iWorks components, such as Pages, Notes, etc, and send it to a PC owner, will they be able to open and read it?

It's not likely in all cases. I opened an Excel document in iWorks (Numbers) and had no problems viewing it, but when I saved my changes and sent it back, the people who got it couldn't see it. I finally had to take a screen shot, crop it and send it as a jpeg. My husband said there is a way to save in Windows friendly format, but I looked for that and couldn't find it. However, checking the export function, you can export it as a pdf file, so that should solve the problem, I'm thinking.

I could probably have just printed to a pdf file under print options too--I didn't think of it at the time.

[Holland73]

Just bought/ordered my first MacBook this morning!!!!

Thank you all for your input. It helped me to make my final decision, which was to leave Office in the dust.