iWork productivity tips: How to get things done
If you have a Mac, you have probably checked out iWork as a cost effective alternative to Microsoft Office. Personally, I think iWork beats the pants off Office for ease of use, features and appearance. It has become my software of choice for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations.
If you too love iWork, you’ve probably noticed that while it is compatible with Microsoft’s Office, Office doesn’t like to play nice in the compatibility sandbox all the time. This means that you, the Apple user, may have to do a little compensating. Here are a few tips to help you make iWork work better for you over all and better with Office when needed.
Learn to love the PDF file format
I find that exporting most documents that are complete and need no edits as PDFs is the most efficient way to handle fonts and other possible inconsistencies. Both Microsoft Word and Adobe Reader, as well as other programs, can read PDF formatted documents with ease. Not only that, they hold their formatting for on screen reading and printing, eliminating the need too have compatible fonts. You can make any Pages document, Numbers spreadsheet or Keynote slide into a PDF by going to the File menu in tool bar and selecting Export, then PDF.
Working around Microsoft’s proprietary Open XML format for sharing
Microsoft loves to try and force people into using its products. One of the many ways it does this with its Microsoft Office suite is the Open XML format. You see these as .docx, .pptx .xlsx, etc file extensions. While iWorks can read Open XML documents quire well, it won’t export back into this exclusive format. IT only exports to former standards everyone can see and use like .doc and .xls. This can cause some obvious formatting issues when sharing documents for collaboration or multi author projects.
If you want Microsoft programs to be able to read what you’ve written in iWork, you’ll have to export the files in a Microsoft compatible format. These are .doc, .ppt and .xls Of course, iWork can read any Microsoft program without any extra messing around with file formats, but that is the beauty of Apple. They usually go out of their way to make life easier. This option is in the File menu in the tool bar under Export then Word, Excel or Power Point.
Can You Share File between iWork and Microsoft Office?
Yes, you can, but not without a few issues. When you look at a Word document in Pages, for example, you may see font differences, quirky line spaces and the occasional issue with Word Art formats. Most of these can be fixed. The text inspector in Pages, for example, will solve the line spacing issue if you make sure your spacing measurements are in pixels. The issues with embedded spread sheets and charts from Numbers aren’t as easy to solve – you may just have to compare both versions side by side at first to make sure they are the same.
One of the reasons for the oddities in embedded files between programs is Microsoft’s inconsistencies with Macros. Some newer versions of the program utilize macros in different ways (and some not at all. This is the underlying issue behind the style inconsistencies, and not an easy one to fix. For now we just have to work around them. If you have tips and tricks I missed that help you fix the style issues, put them in the comments – I’d love to hear more!
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