I use iWork ’09 and Office for Mac at home. I prefer iWork for basic spreadsheets and word processing at home, but use Office for just about everything else. My iMac came with Snow Leapord (10.6) and iWork pre-installed, but my recently acquired MacBook Air came with Mountain Lion (10.8) and without iWork.

I naively thought I could copy the iWork folder from my “/Applications/iWork ’09/” folder from my iMac to my MacBook Air. But, when I try to run an iWork application, I receive an error indicating that it’s “corrupt”.

A quick search later, and I was trying to copy additional files from “/Library/Application Support/” and “/Library/Preferences/”. Finally, I dug out the original iWork ’09 installation DVD that came with my iMac.

My MacBook Air doesn’t have a DVD drive, so I had to setup DVD sharing between my iMac and Air. On my iMac, I opened System Preferences, clicked Sharing under Internet & Wireless, and enabled “DVD or CD Sharing”. I checked the box “Ask me before allowing others to use my DVD drive” as a precaution.

After inserting the DVD into my iMac, I opened a new Finder window and clicked “Remote Disc” under Devices in the window’s sidebar, double-clicked the icon for my iMac, and clicked the “Ask to use…” button. (See “Use another computer’s DVD or CD drive” in Help Center for details. The “Ask to use…” button is a consequence of checking “Ask me before allowing other to use my DVD drive” on the iMac.) A dialog appears on my iMac indicating that my user on my MacBook Air would like to use my DVD drive; I clicked Accept, and the disc opens on my MacBook Air.

Initially, the installer failed because there was a newer version of iWork on my MacBook Air (the version I tried to copy earlier). I had to remove the following:

sudo rm -rf "/Applications/iWork '09/"
sudo rm -rf "/Library/Application Support/iWork '09/"
sudo rm -rf "/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iWork09.Installer.plist"
sudo rm -rf "/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iWork09.plist"

After removing the above, I was able to successfully run the installer. After installation, I ran Software Update to upgrade iWork to the latest version.