Difference Between Office 2011 MAC and Apple iWork

Office 2011 MAC vs Apple iWork

Office 2011 MAC and iWork are both office suites that are designed to be used on Apple’s Mac computers and laptops. The Office 2011 MAC is developed by Microsoft while iWork is developed by Apple especially for the Macintosh OS. Both the suites have similar applications.

Office 2011 MAC

Office 2011 MAC is an office suite developed by Microsoft. This suite includes applications such as Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint and Word. Although it has lesser number of applications as compared to Microsoft Office for Windows but still it has all the commonly used applications.

This office suite also contains the ribbon interface that is similar in all the applications of the suite. The ribbon interface saves a lot of time of the users who are familiar to it. Using the ribbon menu, the users no longer need to scroll through palettes and dig through ribbons rather tabs are used in ribbons in order to display commands that are relevant to the operation.

Another feature that has been added to Office 2011 Mac is the use of templates. Now, the users don’t need to start their documents from scratch rather they can use the built-in template galleries for Excel, PowerPoint and Word. Users can choose from calendar layouts, photo catalogues, attractive newsletters and resumes. Users just need to enter the information without bothering about any kind of editing.

Media browser allows users to browse iMovie projects, video, images, iTunes music and iPhoto libraries through a centralized location from where the users can grab anything into Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Word.

Other new features included in Office 2011 Outlook application is the conversation view. This allows users to view entire email or message by collapsing email threads. Other applications such as Excel, Word and PowerPoint have new editing tools for individuals who want to include media in presentations and documents. This eliminates the need of third party application for editing purposes. Various other features allow users to create more engaging presentations rather than simple bullet points.

iWork

iWork is an office suite designed for the Mac operating system. It is developed by Apple and includes the commonly used office applications similar to Microsoft Office. For graphical presentation there is an application called Keynote, for spreadsheets there is Numbers and for word processing there is Pages. This office suite is specially designed for the Macintosh OS and it utilizes the features of the Mac computer. The first version of iWork was released in 2005 and the most recent version is the iWork 2009.

iWork’s word processing application called Keynote includes the most standard features such as drag and drop, outline mode, change tracking and choice of fonts. Many formatting tools and graphic are included in the page layout feature of this application that includes the ability to add tables, 3D charts, graphics and images. Users can rotate photos, resize, remove backgrounds and add picture frames from the images.

Pages also allow the ability to open Microsoft Word files and users can save the documents in RTF, text or Word files. By using Mac OS X Mail, users can easily email Word, PDF or Pages files directly.

The spreadsheets application has a built-in flexible as well as free-form canvas that allow users to move charts, tables, text and graphics anywhere on the page. There is an independent layout for each table and users can create as many tables as they want. There is a media browser in Numbers that allows users to open photos or movies just by a single click.