Office Files with iWork?

Q: I’m thinking about purchasing iWork, but I have all of these old Microsoft Office files, and I sometimes need to share documents with Windows users. Can you edit and view .doc, .xls, and .ppt files with iWork?

A: I’ve genericized this question because it’s a compilation of questions I get from many users. The answer to this question in short is: yes. There are sometimes strange things that go on, though.

Word to Pages

Pages is able to open Word documents (.doc files), but sometimes the formatting can be off. If all you need is the content of a document, this is generally not a huge problem. However, if you need to check layout specifics, you should be aware that sometimes things come out looking a little funny.

Pages to Word

If you write a document in Pages, and need to share with an Office user, this isn’t a problem! Go to File→Export, and select the Word or .doc option (the name might change depending on which version of Pages you’re using). This will save a copy of your file as a .doc file, leaving the Pages version untouched, and allow you to send your cohort a Word file to look over.

This can still result in some strange looking things happening on the other end. I haven’t had many Office users complain about the files I’ve sent, but on the off chance that you really need to preserve layout details you can always send your file as a PDF instead. This is another option under the Export menu. Simply select PDF, save the PDF copy and share that instead.

PowerPoint to Keynote

You can open PowerPoint files in Keynote. There is always the possibility that formatting might look a little strange, or that the two applications won’t share all of the “transitions” and “effects” between the two. If you need to present a PowerPoint presentation, you’ll want to check through it before your presentation to make sure you don’t need to change any aesthetic details before using Keynote, but the content should carry over.

Keynote to PowerPoint

As with Pages, sharing a Keynote presentation to PowerPoint is as simple as Exporting to a .ppt file from the File menu. Like all of the other switches, you may lose some template details, colors, or effects but PowerPoint users will be able to open and view the presentation. You also have a lot more export options under Keynote than you do in Pages. Not only can you export to a PowerPoint file, as of iWork ‘08 you can also export your presentation to a PDF, a collection of images of each slide, a Flash presentation, an HTML presentation that you can upload and allow people to view online, a QuickTime movie, or even an iPod presentation. iWork ‘06 had similar options: QuickTime, PowerPoint, PDF, Images, Flash, iDVD movie, or HTML.

Excel to Numbers

iWork ‘08 heralded a new piece to the Office puzzle with the introduction of Numbers. This application is capable of opening .xls files. However, this is the newest part of iWork and hasn’t seen nearly as much use. Excel is one thing that Microsoft has (excuse the pun) excelled at over the years, so a newer application may not give you as much stability or as many features. With this in mind, I’ve found Numbers to be quite useful and without problems so far, but I haven’t tested it very thoroughly since I’m not an Excel guru.

Numbers to Excel

As always, Numbers gives you several options for exporting (PDF, Excel or Comma separated Value documents). The same translation warnings apply as they did to the rest of the iWork suite, but the exports should get the data where it needs to be.

One thing I have discovered about Numbers that has been very useful - it has templates that make spreadsheets useful to the less numerically inclined. Budget planners, mortgage calculators, comparison charts, etc are all presented in slick, well-designed charts and print-out formats that make the spreadsheets interactive and easy to figure out and fun to use.

Numbers has been more than capable of meeting my less technical household needs, like budgets. It even handles dinner parties from guest list to recipe (scaled based on how many guests you have) to shopping list (automatically calculated based on your recipes and guest count) all in a single file and interfaces with other applications like Address Book very nicely. I have also been impressed with the way it warns me with a list of problems it encounters when opening an Excel file - things like “axes needed to be recalculated; your graph may look different.” It’s nice to have the software warn you that things might look strange when you open the file. Hey, with that atmosphere I might start using spreadsheets more after all.