Before I begin I have been told by a fellow member that I should always state whether or not I own the product, so to clarify, and to avoid getting scary comments, I do own iWork.

Having bought a mac, as I assume you must have since you're reading this review, we are faced with a serious question; iWork of Microsoft Office for mac. Having just come from a PC I honestly thought it was a given, go microsoft office. But I then got to the shop, stopped and wondered why this was. Microsoft Office, priced at £349.95, is a good £295 more than it's rival, iWork priced at £55. So I decided to back and use the trial software expecting either iWork to be useless or Microsoft to be fantastic and definitly worth the £295 ... but it just wasn't.

Lets firstly look in detail at Microsoft Office. It contains word, excel, powerpoint, entourage and messenger. I shall begin by pointing out that messenger is a free download of the apple website, so why have they included it in the £350 bundle? Then we get to entourage, I know some people who do use Office, but they still can't see the point in entourage, it's meant to be used for emails etc but isn't really worth the money.

As we move on through the bundle, we have the typical word, excel, powerpoint trio which is exactly as it is on PCs so it's great, but there's nothing special about it to make it stand out to be worth £350, it's the exact same software I got free on my old laptop.

So we must now look to the alternative, iWork. Using this I knew it was by far the better software package. It consists of pages, numbers and keynote and is, as I said earlier, only £55 and even cheaper if you get 4 other friends and purchase the family pack and all chip in.

Lets first look at pages, this is macs version of word. Lets start with the templates, there are fantastic and there is enough to keep you amused for hours! Then as you start using it you see how easy it is to create fantastic looking pieces of work. My only query was that it used a different format to Microsoft Office, but then when I saw that it really is just two clicks and it's exported as a .doc file or .pdf file I was just amazed that this could possibly put people off and then importing, it does it without you doing anything, this is the same across the package.

Then numbers, this is the only place where they fall down because it's not quite as easy to use as excel and isn't quite as useful and this is my only query about the package.

Keynote, this is by far better than what you can ever produce on power point, more professional slide transitions, better usage when showing a presentation with the screen on your mac showing you the current and next slide and how simple it is to use and achieve a professional, good looking presentation.

I just can't see where Microsoft think they are worth £295 more than iWork and even if Microsoft Office was £55 I would still opt for iWork because it is easier to use and the end result is so much more professional than Microsoft can ever offer you.

So, save your money and buy 404,110 paper clips with the £295 you just saved. It's a much better use of your money