iWork, which is a bundle of applications that was initially released last year, needs serious improvement in my point of view. I tested out iWork with the iWork Trial disc that came with Tiger, and I was really disappointed. I was expecting it to be like a replacement for Microsoft Office, but it was totally different. Pages, a new app in iWork, seemed to be only focused on writing newsletters and ordinary letters. Apple, get real, do ordinary people have any interest in buying an $80 product just to write letters. Or maybe Apple was trying to be careful to not copy Office too much.
Keynote, on the other hand, is no comparison to PowerPoint. I was utterly impressed with the “Apple style” in Keynote, and I really liked the UI and features it included. I was testing it out, and I tried saving the presentation as a PowerPoint file, and it opened beautifully in PowerPoint with no issues or changes.
Numbers, a suspected app to appear in the next version of iWork, is to become a spreadsheet manages and is to compete with Microsoft’s Excel. With Numbers, Apple is taking one step towards competing with Office, and hopefully an update to Pages will make it more of a word processor and less focused on writing letters.
3 Responses
Andy Merrett says:
I know many people who have been really impressed with Keynote – it just looks so much nicer for a start. Darren at Problogger uses it for his graphs, and people often ask what software package he uses.
I’ve not tried Pages – I suppose I use Word because I have to. Yes, Apple needs to provide a decent alternative to Word, but maybe they shouldn’t try to emulate it. Trouble is, Word is such a standard now; would people use something else if it had all the features and compatibility of Word but wasn’t laid out the same?
As an aside, one thing I never understood, was why Microsoft decided that people using Office on a Mac would want sound effects? They’re everywhere! Opening and closing files, deleting and inserting rows and columns in Excel… they can be turned off but it’s just plain weird why they are there in the first place. Is it just a joke? I mean, even if you liked the sound to start with, who would still find it endearing to have a ‘whoop’ or a ‘swish’ noise every time you manipulate a spreadsheet row?
Ahh well…
December 14th, 2005 at 3:59 am
Jon says:
I use both pages and word… and I must say that I have actually written some papers in pages instead of word because word would not undo formatting, etc. that I accidentally used. Pages works as a nice word processor but only after you go and change some of the preferences and tool options. word still has many more options availible but pages is a nice start. another thing that I found that has only occured a few time is that you can paste a larger amount of text from a source into pages than you can into word. Keynote is a nice replacement for powerpoint… and it was nice to export as a ppt file for my class presentation too.
January 5th, 2006 at 12:25 pm
Appleology | iWork ‘07 says:
[…] About a year ago I had written an article, iWork ‘06, with my opinions on how iWork ‘06 is not yet complete to compete against Microsoft Office for Mac. Today, I am an iWork and an Office user, because I have discovered that Pages and Keynote are not at all targeted towards competing with Office. Both suites of applications are entirely different in their purpose; I find myself using iWork for more creative reasons and tools for creating presentations, while I use Office for word processing and making spreadsheets with Excel. […]
July 10th, 2006 at 3:07 pm
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