iwork or ms office.

[tails]

Does anyone use keynote instead of powerpoint, the reason I ask is that I use mac 99% of the time although I have nothing against windows!

[Endoas]

Depends on the situation.  It helps if you can be more specific.  Are you talking about Keynote vs Powerpoint in a classroom situation, for university or company presentations, or just in general?

In general though I loved using Keynote...before Mac OS Lion came.  First you get a pop-up asking to deny / allow internet connections (sigh).  I refuse to disable the firewall because of that.

Next you have to "unlock" old presentations and "duplicate" them in order to make changes.  This is a MAJOR FAIL on Apple's part.  Whatever happened to just trusting the user to use the "save as" feature?  It's a habit most of us have already developed (Office and iWork users).

C'mon Apple.  If it's not broken, then don't fix it.  I purchased Office Mac when it was on sale at Amazon and never looked back.

[Random]

From what I have read on Reddit and other such sites, for what it is worth it seems the new MS Office for Mac is vastly improved over the previous release.

[lotte world]

You could run OpenOffice.  It's free and unrestricted.

[Random]

Also LibreOffice (a fork of the OpenOffice project) is getting a lot more development and TLC at present. If going the OSS route, might want to look into it.

[tails]

I have used open office in the past, I feel if everyone produces lesson plans in office I should as well, but iwork just looks prettier!

[C.Dennis]

If we're spitballing ideas here, I'll throw mine up...

Keynote presentations might be a bit more "slick" and thus hold attention better than the far more business-oriented Powerpoint (pictures than aren't rectangular?! Whatchu talkin 'bout?). So that might be a bonus, if you prefer a slick, smooth presentation look.

However, as you mentioned, the games and content here are produced in Powerpoint, so you'd need to have at least Office 2007 to take advantage of the ready-made resources here (I am thinking of Daejon's amazing games and TONS of hard work in particular).

There is a way to move Keynote presentations to Powerpoint (and likely a less-functional PPT to Keynote) however you lose most of the Apple-specific transitions and all the effects (essentially you're moving pictures and text and that's about it).

Food for thought :)

[Zeegs]

I really enjoy using the iWork apps, but a lot depends on what exactly it is you want to do. The other think to note is that even though Powerpoint on Mac has been improving it lacks what I view as one of the most essential parts of PPT, the ability to make triggers. Both PPT on Mac and Keynote are much better at removing backgrounds from images than the pc version of PPT. That's a feature I use a lot. At work I use the Korean version of PPT 2007 and GIMP (free photoshop alternative) to clean up images.

If you create a PPT on the PC that uses triggers the mac version can usually display it, but you can not make them from scratch. Keynote is great for using multi media. It handles video very well and all the text looks great, I believe it incorporates some anti-aliasing. I prefer how keynote is able to move and scale images. I've done some awesome motion storybooks with it.

Without the ability to make triggers there aren't too many situations where I want to use the Mac version of PPT to make something. I usually use the PCs at school with PPT 2007, or use keynote if I'm working on something that I want to be visually great but not as interactive.

[taeyang]

I have been using the iWork suite pretty much exclusively for the last three years. admittedly, I have had much use for it because I've been out of school, but now that I'm taking grad courses I am using it more.

I like pages because it's quite simple, although I find a lot of the options to be weirdly labelled and hidden in different menus. one thing I cannot rave about enough is the added function of "documents in the cloud" with iCloud, iOS and mountain lion. I can start a document on my mac, save it to iCloud, and then seamlessly pick it up with pages on my iPad or iPhone. it blows my mine!!!

apologies for sounding like a walking copy editor, but 13 year old me would flip out if he knew something like this was only a few years away.