The capabilities of Docs, Sheets and slides for various operations are as competent as iWorks or Office but with limited sophistication. It is free, it is online and it can be operated from almost anywhere. The biggest advantage of this package is all that you need is a Google account to access all these applications. All these applications run together in the Google Drive ecosystem. Google Drive is a whole package with individual apps – Docs for word processing, Sheets for spreadsheet functionality and Slides for presentations. Google came with an application suite solution known as Google Drive that lets you create and manage your works online.
If you are a MAC user and your needs are limited to only medium range of functionality then iWork could be the choice for you. Pages As mentioned earlier, iWork does everything that Office does with much more clarity and simplicity. Because iWork has a smaller ecosystem as compared to Office, this might be a big problem in the longer run. There is this danger of a few components of the original documents disapearing during this transition. Unfortunately, this is as difficult as it sounds. It is difficult to open or save an Office document in iWorks without importing or exporting certain functions. The main problem while operating in iWork is the lack of compatibility of the file types.
The biggest advantage of them all is it is free for people owning a MAC device. Keynote is the presentation program of iWork that possesses rich designs, better animations and audio-video integration. The MS Excel equivalent of iWork is Numbers which has similar functionality to Excel put together with complete control over the fonts and design used. Pages is a much cleaner and simpler Word Processor program that has all the layouts and formatting options required to create and maintain documents. The easier menu and formatting options are a boon for people who have just started to learn about these programs. iWork boasts of providing an intuitive user interface that is as simple as it can get. It is an Apple proprietary product that is built to run only in MAC operating system. IWork is Apple’s answer to Microsoft’s office. Weighing up the functionality and the shortcomings, Microsoft’s office is clearly best suited for offices, commercial enterprises and schools that require high-level functionality and want to seamlessly manage their works across mobiles, PCs and tablets.
Also, you need a subscription to use Office 365 in Android and iOS devices. Office 365’s package offers a monthly or yearly subscription.
Although The complete Microsoft Office Package is offered at a discount for student edition the full priced commercial edition is outside many peoples budget. Also, this application program is not free.
However, this closed-source package has certain limitations like poor support for importing many graphics formats, layout problems in Word, lack of support for spreadsheet comparison, no auto-completion in Excel and the absence of work-around for XHTML or HTML conversion in PowerPoint, to name a few. The abundant formatting options in Word, alluring designs in PowerPoint and the robust functionalities of Excel has definitely made office operations much easier. The most used programs in the Office’s arsenal are Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. The Office 365 service is the non-PC, cloud based version of Office and it allows you to operate the application program in phones, tablets and iPads.
It is compatible with both Windows and Mac operating systems.
Microsoft Office is the most popular productivity suite with over 500 million users worldwide. Here we will discuss the four main players in the market by mentioning their top features and the ways in which one is more suitable than the others. Probably, Microsoft’s office has been the winner by and large but it hasn’t stopped its competitors from coming up with programs that are equal and in some cases superior in functionality. From the day of there inception as a tool for office administration, these programs have been refined, restructured and written over and over again to meet the growing demands.