Review of Microsoft Office and iWork

Both Microsoft Office and iWork are common office software packages that being used widespread. What's the difference between these two kinds of software packages? Which one is the better choice? After reading this article, you will have a thorough understanding.

No matter you are a home user or a businessman, you will often use word documents, spreadsheets, and presentations on a regular basis. On a worldwide basis, Microsoft Office (MS Office) and iWork are the two most popular office software packages. In this article, we will compare these two packages and tell you the pros and cons of each package.

Overview of Microsoft Office and iWork

MS Office package has three apps, namely Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. These three apps enable users to create word documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. In Apple iWork, the apps corresponding to the above functions have different names, namely Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. 

MS Office was first released on August 1, 1988, and benefited from Microsoft's huge customer base, it quickly became the most popular office software package in the world. 

Keynote was the oldest app of iWork. It was released as a standalone application in 2003. In 2005 and 2007, Apple successively launched Pages and Numbers as the iWork bundle.

Price

Apart from the operating system, price usually is the key factor when users choosing between MS Office and Apple iWork. You might get MS Office for free from your university or workplace. But if you are a personal user, you need to pay $69.99 a year for Microsoft 365. When iWork was first introduced, it was a paid software package, now it is free for everyone.

Compatibility

Nowadays, both MS Office and iWork are iOS-compatible. You can download Word, Excel, and PowerPoint from Apple App Store to open and edit a received MS Office document. 

While on Windows PC, even though iWork has a PC version, it still cannot be used as smoothly as on a Mac. So to some extent, MS Office is more compatible than iWork.

Microsoft Word vs Pages

Word and Pages have the same features and are very similar in general. Using these two applications, you can get text formats, footnotes, custom headers, footers, bullets, numbered lists, images, pictures, paragraphs, tables, etc. 

Both tools are easy to use, but Word does go deeper in some formatting options. For example, although both applications enable you to change the color of text, Word has special effects that can be applied to text, such as 3D and shadows. Word also has more image format options, such as projection, reflection, and other effects.

Microsoft Excel vs Numbers

There is not much difference between Word and Pages in basic functions, but Excel is way more advanced than Numbers. Although these two applications are suitable for daily budgeting and planning, Excel is more suitable for academic or professional use, contains a wider range of functions, and provides more powerful mathematical capabilities than Numbers. What's more, a large number of statistical analysis models of enterprises and Excel applications written in VBA are highly dependent on Excel.

Microsoft PowerPoint vs Keynote

As the first introduced iWork bundle, Keynote excels PowerPoint in many aspects. The most prominent one is its presenting feature. It can help you present your document in an extremely smooth style. PowerPoint has its own advantage, when it comes to creating a presentation, PowerPoint can provide users with more effects, fonts, and similar visual details.

Which One is Better?

To decide which one to choose, you can first consider your operating system. If you are a Mac user, iWork is your better choice. If you are a Windows user, then Microsoft Office might suits you better. However, as we mentioned above, if you need to perform statistical analysis, no matter you are a Mac or Windows user, it is best to download and purchase Microsoft Excel.

Bonus Tip: Recover Lost or Deleted Microsoft Office/iWork Documents

If you don't have a backup of your MS Office or iWork documents, but lost the documents by accident. What can you do? Here, we'd like to introduce a delicate data recovery tool - EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard. It is designed for users to recover data lost due to accidental deletion, formatting, virus attack, or OS crash. It works well on both Windows and Mac computers. So no matter you're using the MS Office or iWork, you still have a chance to find them back.

You can download EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard from the button below, and check our guide to see how to recover lost files.

Step 1. Select location and click "Scan"

Choose the drive or a specific folder on Desktop or somewhere else where you lost the excel files, and click the "Scan" button.

Step 2. Locate your excel files

To quickly find the Excel files from the scan results, click the "Documents" option in the left panel. Choose "Excel", and click "Preview" to check if the Excel files are the wanted ones.

Step 3. Recover Excel files

Finally, select the desired Excel files and click the "Recover" button. Then, select a folder to save the Excel files to another location.