Microsoft Office vs. iWork Review: Which is Better?

Yep! You can get Microsoft Office on your iOS device. It’s right out there in the App Store. But then, there’s also Apple iWork, the company’s famous productivity suite.

On the one hand, we have the world’s most-used office suite. On the other hand, we have an Apple product that has undergone years of improvement.

So, which one is better for you on the phone? Microsoft Office or iWork?

Overall Features

Both Office and iWork are great productivity suites. They both have spreadsheet, word processing, presentation apps.

As a rule of thumb, iWork is better for people who work with charts a lot, while Office does a better job with presentations and documents. However, iWork is free but not Office, which alone may tip the scale to iWork for a lot of users.

In the department of images, special effects, fonts, and shapes, MS Office takes the cake. It also makes for easier syncing with desktop PCs.

On the other hand, chart reading is much easier on iWork, seeing as how the feature is built-in while the Office app requires the download of Excel.

Compatibility

Naturally, both MS Office and iWork are iOS-compatible. However, Office requires iOS 7.0 or newer but the barrier goes up to iOS 12 for iWork.

Then, there’s Windows compatibility. Although iWork has a PC version, it’s still nowhere near as functional as with Mac. However, this goes both ways since MS Office works better on PCs.

Word vs. Pages

Everyone has heard of MS Word. For years on end, it’s been the top processor. However, at least on iOS, Apple’s Pages has eclipsed Word.

Word and Pages boast identical features and are very similar overall. With both of these apps, you get text formatting, footnotes, custom headers, footers, bulleting, numbered lists, images, pictures, paragraphs, tables, etc.

However, there’s a huge feature that’s found in Pages but not Word – adding charts to documents. Not only that, but Pages allows you to edit the data for the charts at any point.

Pages also allows you to easily share the docs using the Open In feature. You can open a Pages file in any app that supports the format. So, yes, you can open a Pages document in Evernote. But even more interestingly, you could open it in Word.

PowerPoint vs. Keynote

Each of the two has its ups and downs, PowerPoint, for instance, is great for creating a presentation, while Keynote does a better job of presenting it.

When it comes to effects, fonts, and similar visual details, PowerPoint is the winner in terms of flashiness, which may or may not be important to you.

With that said, there’s a significant downside in PowerPoint that has to do with charts. Most people create a chart in Excel first and then copy it to PowerPoint. With Keynote, you won’t have to worry about this as it is perfectly capable of creating professional charts.

As mentioned, Keynote truly excels in the actual presentation. Thanks to the iPad’s video-out option, you can have presenter notes appear on an iPad while showing the slides in full-screen. PowerPoint relies on screen mirroring to accomplish the same.

Which One Is Better

Well, if you’re an iOS user, iWork is likely a better option than Office. Although there are many advantages in both camps, iWork comes free for all iOS users. If you’re working on iOS, go ahead and download iWork. You’ll love it like as not.

Have you tried either productivity suites? Maybe you’ve used them both? Feel free to add your impressions to the comment section below. We’d appreciate your two cents.