Today I went for another marathon session at the apple store. Before I bought my Mac, I had visited a couple of sessions at the Apple store before and was intrigued by the option to have a complete productivity package at a low price and with all the features Microsoft Office offers.
So when I bought my Mac book, I immediately bought iWork with it. The problems started to occur when I had to write my first report for school, as I could not find the features that i was used to from Word, allowing me to re-start the numbering of pages, adjust the table of content, and others.
As my trial version for Microsoft office is running out soon, I wanted to take the opportunity of the workshop and see if I had probably not found these features.
What I had to find out, was that the people giving the workshops do not really know a lot about the products. They do not have the in depth knowledge that is required to answer my questions. At the same time, I have to say that pages and numbers are not really competing with Word and Excel when it comes to productivity. Keynotes is something else. It is quite different from Powerpoint and has some effects that make it very attractive.
My overall conclusion is that Microsoft Office is length ahead from iWork. In terms of performance, features, and usability it can not compete with the industry standard.
Furthermore, I suggest to Apple to invest more training into their flagship store staff and their knowledge about the applications. This sort of responsibility comes from being a hardware and software producer who push their products excessively through marketing.
