iWork vs MS Office

[wbreitman]

A question for those in Waccoland who've switched from PCs to Macs over the past few years.

After some 25+ years with PCs [even though my initial foray into computing was on one of the original Macs], I am going to switch to the IMac ... after a couple of year's consistent prodding by my kids and grandkids.

My question is: will iWork be sufficient, or will I need to install MS Office fo the Mac as well? Not only do I have some 25 years worth of documents [Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.] from various levels of Office, but most of the folks with whom I interact continue to use PCs, and we e-mail documents, spreadsheets, and presentations regularly. Will these folks be able to read iWork documents? Should I 'cover myself' by getting Office Mac, or is this superfluous?

Thanks for any experience.

W

[cotatikid]

Perhaps a free application called "open office" might work for you, it does for me. I tried to include the URL but it seems that you are going to have to google it... Add (dot) org to the apps name...