Apple's productivity suite for the Mac, iWork '08 includes three applications: Pages '08, Numbers '08, and Keynote '08
Powerful word processing and page layout with 140 Apple-designed templates with Pages
Effortlessly create stunning presentations, complete with Apple-designed themes, cinema-quality animations, and voiceover narration with Keynote
Create compelling spreadsheets for everything from family budgets and event planning to invoices and complex financial reports with Numbers
Import and export compatibility with Microsoft Office
Rating: - iWork is only OK
As a student I have found iWork to be only OK.
Numbers:
My biggest problem is with Numbers. Numbers does not have any sort of linear, exponential or logarithmic regression functions, error bars or trends which makes it next-to-useless for any sort of lab work or mathematical analysis. While Numbers does have the basic statistical functions, the input is unintuitive and commands are different from excel which makes crossover very difficult. Numbers does look pretty, but unless you use the templates, creating your own style is difficult. Each portion of the table needs to be changed separately and short of automator I don't see any easy macros (note: you can save a template). Templates are helpful occasionally, but the majority of people who use Numbers are doing some sort of number crunching and in this aspect Numbers falls short, way too short. Too much pretty, not enough function, Numbers is not Excel.
Pages:
Pages is at least somewhat useful. It types, formats, spell checks and prints, which is all most people need it to do. Unfortunately, Apple portrays Pages as a Microsoft Publisher alternative--it is not. It's not even close to MS Word which is a step down from Publisher layout wise. My main complaint is that the dictionary/grammar check are not as powerful as Word. It doesn't make changes as you type, recognize common grammatical mistakes or even register capitalization rules. Templates are helpful I guess (in this way it is like publisher), but honestly how often do you use them.
Keynote:
Better than Microsoft Power Point - hands down. Apple focuses on the `pretty' in each of these programs and for keynote this is actually a good thing.
Rating: - Good Mac-centric office suite...now outdone by MS Office 08
This is an absolutely wonderful-looking office suite from Apple. For a few months, it was the best you could get for your Mac, especially the new Intel macs.
But as of last week's release of MS Office 2008 for Mac, iWork returns to second place in the Office Feature set. There is nothing here that isn't outdone by MS Office 08.
What iWork continues to excel at is the interface, and the mac-centricity of the program -- everything looks and feels like all your other familiar Mac programs.
For those who have been reared on MS Word and Excel, there is no comparison, however.
The one downside of iWorks -- you can not natively save programs to .doc or .xls format. You need to "export" each document you want to share with your PC-office co-workers. This adds an extra step to every save...eventually you stop doing so and hope that nobody wants any of your files...and when you do need to share them you need to convert all of them.
I installed MS Office 2008 the day it was released, and found myself having to convert hundreds of Pages documents to use them back in Office -- a royal pain, and really one of the reasons that iWork is now banished tot he Application folder. I dare not delete it from my harddrive for fear that I will have files I saved in iWork format that can't be converted in Word....there's the rub -- you MUST convert files using Pages or Numbers, you can NOT convert anything inside MS Office basically meaning you have to keep two office suites on your hard drive.
The other serious (not yet fixed despite being out 6 months) flaw in Pages is the drop color problem -- if using shadowing around photo-image boxes the program changes the colors of your photos on the page. There is no work around for this other than to save the entire document as a PDF, open in Text Editor, re-save it as a JPG, and and then print. This affects all macs across the board. Graphic Designers beware.
My Timeline....up until iWork 08 was released, MS Office 2004 for Mac was the Suite of Choice....then for about 6 months iWork 08 was the clear leader...now with the release of MS Office 2008, there really is no comparison and MS Office 08 wins in the full-feature-full-compatibility realm.
Rating: - Really nice program to work with
I really like using this program. I used to work on Windows with Office XP, Office 2003, Office 2007, and [...], but this program, however different, was intuitive enough for me to get right to work. (I've also used Office 2008 for Mac more recently, but I don't like it as much.)
Everything looks elegant, effects (like slide transitions in Keynote) are totally cool (way better than in Office), it's really easy to use, it has really good performance, it's actually fun to use, and I'm always finding new cool things to do with it. Like control Keynote with the Apple remote or make a flash website out of a Keynote presentation (and yes, there are similar features in Office, but Office doesn't perform well enough and it's not fun enough to experiment in). You can even make 3D graphs that look like real materials or draw vector graphics almost as well as in Inkscape or Illustrator. And the list goes on and on, it's really nice to use.
Office compatibility is just 'okay'. It works, but when you import a Word document, for example, you're going to have to manually fix things like picture location or page boarders. Using Keynote to open a PowerPoint won't import transition sounds. But I noticed that even Office 2008 won't look the same as documents viewed in Office 2003. PowerPoint files are best viewed in Office 2008, but Pages opens .doc files BETTER than Office 2008, I noticed. Excel compatibility is fine.
I can't go though everything I like about the program in one review, but you can download the trial from Apple so there you go. I would highly recommend trying iWork 08.
Rating: - Good but not enough
While it's great that Apple has added its own version of Excel, I'm still underwhelmed by the number of templates available in Pages: Apple's answer to Word. I tried to find a template for a simple thing like a daily "chore checklist" for kids, and there was nothing there.
If I had it to do over again, I'm not sure I would have spent the money for this upgrade over iWork '06. But it's a solid upgrade so I give it 3 stars.
![Apple iWork '08 [OLD VERSION]](http://g-images.amazon.com/images/G/01/software/new-item-1.gif)
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