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Has anybody ever used the Apple competitor to Microsoft Office?

Apple’s suite of productivity apps, iWork— which includes Pages, Numbers and Keynote (Apple’s versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, respectively) — is free for new iOS 7 devices activated on or after Sept. 1, 2013.

I’d really be interested to see how it stacks up against the latest version of Microsoft Office.

Apple’s Pages doesn’t exactly take a Word document seamlessly. There are formatting and font inconsistencies. I would recommend not thinking iWork as an easy surrogate for Office. I’m an Apple adherent and simply install Office for Mac. This works fine 99% of the time, and Office for Mac has improved in functionality and stability over the past 5 years.

As a longtime Office power user, I find the iWork suite lacking. It's a nice set of programs and will be fine for the home/casual user who create files natively within those apps but anybody used to getting serious work done in Office will be quickly frustrated with the limitations of them. For example, most Excel spreadsheets with pivot tables will simply not open with Numbers.

I ended up getting Office365 which I highly recommend. For $99 a year, you get to install the full Office on up to five devices, be they Mac or Windows.

Has anybody ever used the Apple competitor to Microsoft Office?

I have used it for a few years.

I’d really be interested to see how it stacks up against the latest version of Microsoft Office.

For anything you might want to do in a small business, household use, or even pretty sophisticated financial stuff it is at least the equal of Microsoft Office. For simple things like letters, even with embedded tables and pictures, it is very good. Better than Word for my purposes.

I management my investments myself, and I can export stock tables and screens from both Investor's Business Daily and Value Line, compare them against each other, merge them and pick out duplicates with Numbers or Excel with equal ease.

The big issue is that anything I generate in iWork is not going to translate perfectly into Microsoft Office. Fonts, tables, spacing, tabs, etc. may be off somewhat and might look different than it does on your computer.

If I am only going to use things myself, or share between Mac users, or send out stuff in printed form, or convert files to .pdf before I send them out, this is fine. OTOH if I ever want to send an electronic file to someone who uses Windows, and allow them to further manipulate the file, I have to at least see how it looks in Office before I send it.

The practical implication is that I have to have both iWork and Office, unless I am willing to adhere to the limitations above, I need to check what anything I send out on Office. Since I need to have them both, I use Office to generate almost everything. Not because I want to, but because I don't want to spend the time to check what everything I do in iWork looks like in Office and fix it.