Not being an frequent iWork user at best I can try to ensure this article is free from both Apple fan boy, and Microsoft Office bias.

Apple forums are littered with complaints. Two that typify the situation are:

Why does Apple get rid of so many useful features in new Pages? iWork 13 (for Mac) has been a huge disappointment and nothing more than a downgrade to match the capabilities of the iOS iWork apps. If Apple simply made performance upgrades to iWork 09 I would have been happy. I hope there is a way to get back to the most up to date version of iWork 09.

Apple has discontinued the (old) Pages in its entirety. You can no longer download it or purchase it, and Apple won’t support it. Apple has simultaneously introduced a completely new and different product, also called (new) Pages, that is designed for different users and different use cases. Despite the name, it is not a successor to (old) Pages, except in the licensing terms, it is completely a completely different species of animal. Those of us who depended on (old) Pages cannot use (new) Pages. We have to save all our (old) Pages files in a widely used format and import them into a new word processor (Word) that supports the (old) formatting.

Pages is not the only target – Numbers, Keynote and iMovie have also suffered mandatory feature reduction with its new found, free, core system app status.

The Apple support community has a list of changes here and is a precursor to 60 pages of vitriol. Jump straight to the last page (page 60 at 30 October) for a comprehensive summary of changes – 87 features removed and about 30 alterations that have caused grief. Earlier versions of iWork files opened in iWork 13 are automatically converted and are reportedly lossy when the iWork 9 manual save option is used.

Why this happened?

New iWork 13 for Mac is completely new code replacing the four-year-old plus version. Some of the missing features are simple omissions but most are necessary to align Mac with iOS code and to implement better touch capabilities - for the iPad - simplification of menus, interfaces, and design.

The problem is that a lot of intellectual property demanded by power users - developed over the years - that made iWork good is gone. Never let a programmer do software engineering! Don’t you love progress?

I understand that durign the update process iWork 9 remains on the hard disk and can be accessed manually but you cant roll back unless yo uuse TIme Machine.

New users will probably not notice the changes – just accept what they are given - after all a free program has as much value as you place on it. Corporate and power users are screwed – ironically, Microsoft Office has more iWork 9 feature support than iWork 13.

And this is the tip of the iceberg - iWork and Office compatibility. Apple's official compatibility list is here and we suspect, it has not been recently upgraded for iWorks 13.

If compatibility is not an issue for you – you never move Word, Excel, and PowerPoint between Pages, Numbers, and Keynote or vice versa - then do not read on.

My reasonable experience in Word to Pages is that there will be potential issues with:

• Fonts – including substitution and wild card characters if the font is not on both devices
• Formatting, Themes, and Styles – simply not looking the same or missing altogether
• WordArt, text effects, vertical text, watermarks, and page background colours not supported.
• Columns - disappearing
• Hyperlinks – bookmarks removed
• Tables – getting out of alignment or page update broken
• Number calculations in Word not supported
• Embedded images can disappear
• Headers and footers functionality not supported
• Page number will change
• Track changes lost
• Table of contents corrupted, citations and bibliography become unmanaged
• Macros, OLE objects are lost

Ditto for Excel

• iWork 9 supports about 170 common functions – less than half of Excel. If the function is not supported the calculated value of the cell is imported – agony in finding and fixing.
• Formatting issues are similar to Word especially where fonts, vertical fonts or formatting is used
• Borders, effects and colours are different
• Forget page breaks – have to set them up all over again
• Graphs are different – usually imported as a line, bar or pie chart
• Password protected cells are empty
• Data validation does not work
• External data links do not work
• Pivot tables do not work
• Macros, OLE objects, tracked changes, ink annotations not supported
• Most D – database, CUBE, Statistical or Engineering functions not supported

Ditto for PowerPoint. According to a respected AV technician he has never - not once - been able to open a PowerPoint presentation in Keynote without some loss of formatting, loss of transitions, embedded multimedia files not playing (a Quicktime issue) and text overflow. His advice is do not expect to import or export PowerPoint to Keynote without substantial time to rebuild the presentation. To get over this he recommends simply exporting PowerPoint to PDF slides.

At this time, I cannot find a compatibility comparison between iWork 13 and Office 365/2013 but I suspect the feature and compatibillity gap will have widened. Ironically, importing iWork 13 files into Office is reasonably free of issues – certainly none of the above usually occurs!

The moral of this tome – if you use Office stick to it. If you use iWorks stick to it. Do not attempt to interoperate with both on the same files unless you are prepared to spend a lot of time fixing things – and in one absent-minded moment you will accidently save the document and have to start all over again.