Info-Mac: iWorking with Windows

iWorking with Windows

Exporting iWork documents to Office format is usually the last thing you want to do.

By Dan Palka 01/30/08 | Back to Articles | Email the Author | Article Comments & Discussion

Once upon a time, Microsoft Office was essentially the only productivity choice for the Mac OS. Now, more and more Mac users are giving Apple's iWork suite a try. With graphics capabilities that put Office to shame, and a $79 price tag, it's just about the best software deal around.

The biggest concern raised by users and potential buyers is how to share beautiful iWork documents with PC users. Pages, Keynote, and Numbers, the three apps that comprise the iWork suite, all have the ability to export documents into Word, PowerPoint, and Excel formats respectively. But take that with a grain of salt, because as you'll see, it isn't your only option, and is almost never your best option.

Pages

To share your files with Windows users, Pages allows you to export files (as best it can) to Word, PDF, Rich Text (RTF) and Plain Text file formats. For basic word processing documents, such as reports and essays, Pages exports to Word pretty well. Trouble arises, however, if your Pages document is more graphically oriented.

Below is a sample Pages document in Pages, Word for Windows, and Adobe Reader for Windows:

Exporting to Word and opening on a PC has unacceptable results. Because most Macs and PCs have different fonts installed, all the fonts are substituted. Images are wrapped improperly, misaligned, or missing. Text boxes are not rotated or aligned correctly either, and it is basically a big mess.

On the other hand, exporting to PDF produces nearly an exact replica of the Pages document, right down to the correct fonts (which are embedded into the PDF). The only downside to this is that most people will have the Reader, not the full version of Acrobat, so it will be read-only (not editable by the viewer). I've yet to have a situation where this was an issue, but I could imagine some people may find it to be.

Keynote

Keynote's export options include PowerPoint, QuickTime, Flash, and a series of Images. Most people will want their PC using audiences to view their presentations as a presentation. Here again, the more fancy Keynote features you use, the less compatibility with PowerPoint you have.

Here is my sample Keynote presentation playing in Keynote, PowerPoint for Windows, as an embeded flash animation in a web page on Windows, and QuickTime for Winodws:

Opening our presentation in PowerPoint causes all of our transitions and builds to be lost, or converted to lower quality PowerPoint transitions. Similarly, object build animations are lost, or converted to lesser quality. On one slide, images just piled up on each other instead of flowing in and out one at a time. Timing also seems to be completely off, and despite having QuickTime 7 installed on this PC, an embedded QuickTime movie refused to play. Add that to the standard list of Pages to Word problems (fonts, alignment) and you have a the recipe for a really lousy presentation.

Exporting to Flash had better results with fonts, but transitions and builds were still either missing or wrong, and the embedded movie was simply replaced by a thumbnail image. The presentation waits for your click to preceed from one slide to the next, but it isn't apparent how to view the presentation full screen - by default it opens in a web browser. Not exactly the ideal way to view a presentation. It is also read-only, just like exporting Pages to PDF.

By far the best results were with QuickTime. Fonts, image alignments and placement, transitions, build animations - everything played on the PC exactly as it would have on a Mac running Keynote. In addition to playing in a QuickTime window (as pictured), you can also go full screen by pressing Control+F. The embedded video of course played fine, and overall everything looked great. It even pauses after each slide and waits for your click to proceed to the next. The downside to this method is file size. Exporting to QuickTime means rendering everything to a video file, and my presentation was over 60 MB in size - not ideal for email or internet download, but just fine for CD-ROM distribution. Additionally, I noticed that transitions were a bit jerky compared with native Keynote transitions on a Mac, but overall still better than cheesy PowerPoint transitions. Finally, as with Pages to PDF and Keynote to Flash, Keynote to QuickTime results in a read-only file.

Numbers

Numbers allows you to export your documents to Excel, PDF, and CSV (not covered here since it's text only). As with Pages and Keynote, yummy Numbers documents have trouble exporting to the Office format. The difference here is how stunningly bad the results are. Exporting Pages to Word, even with it's problems, still somewhat resembled our original document if you squinted your eyes. With Numbers to Excel, you won't even recognize it.

Below is my sample Numbers document in Numbers, Excel for Windows, and Adobe Reader for Windows:

The Excel version of our rather nice Numbers document is a complete disaster. Each component of our tidy document has been seperated into several different pages and a big "this file was exported from Numbers '08" is stamped at the top of the document. Forget about the fonts and any formatting - it's all been destroyed in the conversion. Yuck!

Of course, our Numbers document looks perfectly fine as a PDF, graph and all. If you spend a lot of time making your Numbers document look perfect, then the only way to go is with PDF.

Conclusion

The best way to preserve the effort you put into making your iWork documents look their best is by not exporting them to Word, PowerPoint, or Excel formats. For Pages and Numbers, stick with PDF. For Keynote, stick with QuickTime. Not only does this assure that your documents will display correctly on PCs, but they will display using freely downloadable software from Adobe and Apple - perfect for those people who have not spent hundreds on Microsoft Office. Your PC viewers will not be able to edit the documents, but if you know ahead of time that this is a requirement, you can avoid making overly complex iWork documents from the beginning.

Another option would be to make sure all your friends and/or colleagues are using Macs with the latest version of iWork installed. That way, you'll never have to convert anything and can work with the native iWork formats at all times. Of course, this is an unrealistic dream, and compromises have to be made. Hopefully as time goes on, iWork will become more popular and you'll find yourself exporting less and less.

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