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: - Wonderful software
I mostly use Pages on my new iMac after using Quark, Word and Pagemaker in the past in my work. I am finding this easy to use and the price was right!
Rating: - iWork '08 is worth it's weight in gold
I've reviewed iWork in the past, and have always thought it was well worth the $79 asking price. However, with iWork '08, these applications have become MUCH more valuable to me.
Some context: I am a marketing executive by day, and an independent writer by night. During working hours, I use Pages to create whitepapers, sell sheets, and other items that we used to have to outsource to a designer for a few $K each. Pages makes documents look so professional, we've been able to take most of this work in house. In fact - I do it myself, and it takes less of my day to do it myself than it would take for me to manage the outsourced help. ages is just easy to use, and creates fantastic looking documents.
I use Keynote when I give presentations myself, but use Powerpoint normally (because no one else has Keynote, and I don't want to have to keep converting files). Keynote opens powerpoints fine, so I can watch/present a presentation without having to have Parallels open. It exports well to powerpoint, too, so I can work in Keynote exclusively if I want to: for example, when working on a plane and tryin to conserve battery life by NOT running windows side-by-side with OS X.
Similarly, spreadsheets open fine - but I'm a marketing guy, so I may not be the best judge of number-stuff.
For my alter-ego as a wannabe writer, I use iWork even more. I wrote, edited, designed and produced by newest novel (Cluck: Murder Most Fowl) entirely using Pages '08. For anyone who has written a book, this means not only writing 100,000+ words, but it also means re-write upon re-write. I tracked nearly thrity minor drafts of my manuscript through the life of the project. Some points about Pages:
1. It handled the large files easily. Scrolling through 300+ pages was fluid on a MacBook Pro. Even when the illustrations were put in place (27 individual 400dpi images) the file remained easy to manipulate.
2. The spelling & grammar checks work better than expected. Of course, you can't rely on these, but they are a necessary aide when dealing with massive amounts of text. The 'proofread' function was markedly better than MS Word's grammar check, although I missed an "ignore this rule" button.
3. Searching for certain words seemed to miss results on occasion, especially when the text was formatted specially or the search term contained punctuation (I submitted this as a bug to Apple, and it will likely be resolved in a future revision)
4. Pages was able to create a print-ready .pdf easily without requiring any extra software. The high-resolution of the images was preserved (I worried about this, since the app handled them so easily in-line I figured maybe they' been downsampled), ad all formatting remained intact.
5. Sepaking of formatting: I was able to design the interior block of Cluck: Murder Most Fowl with absolute precision, and I was also able to adjust the design along the way with little effort.
The bottom line is that Pages '08 is even better at producing quality, professional-looking and print-ready documents than the original Pages. Cluck is "searchable inside" (or will be, soon) so you can see for yourself how Pages can produce results.
Keynote
I also use Keynote for personal uses other than corporate presentations. Interestingly enough, Keynote '08 has been critical to me in the development of promotional videos for my book. Now, I'm no move director, but with Keynote I can:
* animate objects along a path
* chose from a variety of quality transitions
* imbed movie files (AVI files from my Flip Video Camcorder: 60-Minutes (Black) )
* add text (again, with great font handling)
* control the timing of everything
* export to .mov videos
I was able to create some great-looking (well, I am an amateur, but I think they look great) videos, with hardly ay effort (and about 30 minutes, tops). If you want to see for yourself, you can find them on YouTube is you search around for "cluck" and/or "book promo".
Overall, I would recommend iWork '08 to anyone who needs professional results but isn't professionally trained ad/or who lacks the serious $$$ required to purchase more "professional" tools. The applications are easy to use, well-integrated with the "Mac experience", and produce amazing results. All for small change.
In the business world, iWork has what it takes to bring smaller projects in-house, which could save huge amounts of budget money AND save time.
I would give this ten stars if I could.
Rating: - Beware iWork '08
The Numbers program contained in iWork '08 represents that it works well with Excel files. Wrong. And it's not just a problem with Excel files created on a PC, but those created on other Macs. While Numbers will import an Excel file, every imported Excel file I have attempted to print has completely frozen Numbers and failed to print. The Apple Store where the iMac was purchased was baffled by this complaint, and claims never to have heard of the issue, however user based input at Apple's web site includes numerous Numbers-Excel compatability issues (and if only I'd read them before buying Numbers). Trying to get "help" from Apple was a disaster; after a 15-minute phone wait, the tech who answered spent 15 minutes insisting that I try to cut the Excel content and paste it into Apple's tech editor and print it from that program; the tech finally admitted that he didn't know anything about iWork '08 and transferred me to someone he claimed would be able to help. After waiting another 15 minutes on the phone, the next tech advised that I'd been transferred to the wrong department, whereupon he transferred me to another department, and after another unanswered 15 minute wait on the phone, I gave up.
Like other iMac features, I feel that iWork '08 and Numbers offer a lot of glossy promises and a real lack of substance.
Rating: - Avoid if you do a lot with tables
Overall, iWork seems like a very nice software set. My review focuses on one aspect, however, and that is tables. I do all kinds of things with tables in MS Word, and was disappointed to find out that tables in Pages are horribly hard to work with in comparison. I tried my best - read the documentation, read Apple online forums, etc. Pages makes the tables with huge cells by default (like you would see on a PowerPoint presentation) and when you try to resize them smaller, it hides part of your text and an annoying box with a plus sign appears in the cell. The box remains even if you resize the font to fit. Then, the text won't center in the middle of the smaller cell, even when you click the button that is supposed to do this. You can't change the text direction in the cells either (who wants to use text boxes? what a pain!). A table I could fit on one page in MS Word, takes up 2+ pages in Pages, even with identical page margins. I just don't understand why the software is so restrictive in this aspect. I was almost tempted to keep this software, just because I might have other uses for the programs, but now I have to sell it to help buy Office Mac 2004. It's a shame that something as simple as tables could not be better engineered to allow the end user to get stuff done. However, if tables aren't as essential to you as they are to me, then ignore this review and go ahead and buy the software.
![Apple iWork '08 [OLD VERSION]](http://g-images.amazon.com/images/G/01/software/new-item-1.gif)
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