Office 08 for mac is a new fancy all in one word processing applications. Iwork 08 is apple’s answer for office. I will compare the two and give the good and bad of both sides.

Office 08 retails for about $130 for the standard student edition. Office 08 is really nice looking, the dock icons are sleek and sexy. You will notice though that it is quite a resource hog, it takes a few seconds to open. It has no compatibility issues with older word or powerpoint files, it even has a compatibility checker that checks the compatibility with older versions of office. The Interface of word is quite different than other versions of offie, your normal toolbars are no longer on top of your word document, instead they are off to the side in a seperate window. This takes some time to get use to and seems kind of hard to find some options, but in time you get use to it and it allows the word document to look nice and clean instead of cluttered with tool bars.

Iwork 08 retails for about $80 but you can usually get it on sale every now and then. This includes Pages(word) Numbers(excel) and Keynote (powerpoint). Iwork 08 is not a resource hog like office is, it opens almost immediately. I encountered a few compatibility issues with iwork with powerpoint, this is because my school has a older version of office, I believe it is office 08. Iwork does have many options that allow people to export their work into a office document, and it also allows you to export a keynote presentation to a quicktime movie.

Overall both of these application bundles are great, one is cheaper than the other, but you may have a few compatibility issues.