iWork ’07

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.

The biggest issue I have with Office is that it is not yet Universal, so therefore there are some delays when I’m doing my work on my MacBook Pro. I have no issues or complaints with iWork ’06, except for its lack of word processing and spreadsheet functions.

The new version of iWork is expected to be much different than iWork ’06 in many different ways, unlike the difference between iWork ’05 and iWork ’06. Last year there was a rumor that Apple was to include a spreadsheet application in iWork ’06 named “Numbers”, but no announcement was made at MacWorld 2006 of any application. Now there are new rumors of a spreadsheet application named “Charts” in iWork ’07. Charts is not targeted towards those complex spreadsheet users, but more to the average consumer market who don’t have the need for the more advanced features found in Excel.

Pages 2, the word-layout software in iWork ’06 is expected to be heavily improved to compete with Microsoft Word. Pages 3 is to include a new interface to make it more friendly to use in day-to-day word processing tasks. Other features include a more user-friendly ways to change the fonts, integration with Spotlight, Google, and Wikipedia, a new improved grammar check, as well as more user-friendly ways to access common tools and settings.