Apple’s iWork Package Is Elegant but Wimpy Compared With Office
August 16, 2007
by Walter S. Mossberg
When you hear that Apple has released a new product, you think of a sleek Macintosh laptop, or perhaps a beautiful program for editing videos. But a spreadsheet? Not a spreadsheet. After all, expertise with spreadsheets is the sort of computing skill about which the “Mac guy” in Apple’s TV ads mocks the “PC guy.”
And yet, last week, Apple brought out a new spreadsheet program called Numbers, thus completing one of its least-known products: a productivity suite called iWork. The iWork ‘08 suite, which competes with the Macintosh version of Microsoft Office, also includes a word-processing program called Pages and a presentation program called Keynote. The two were upgraded last week. IWork costs $79, about half the price of the lowest-cost version of Microsoft Office, which sells for $149.
In the past 10 years, Apple has out-designed Microsoft and its hardware partners in a number of key areas. But can Apple really take on Microsoft in the category of productivity software, where Office rules on both Windows and the Mac? To find out, I’ve been testing the new iWork, which runs only on the Mac, against the Mac version of Office.
My verdict: iWork ‘08 is a nice product, capable of turning out sophisticated and attractive word-processing, presentation and spreadsheet documents. It can even read Microsoft Office documents, whether created on the Mac or on Windows computers, and can save documents in Microsoft Office formats so they can be opened in Office on the Mac or on Windows.
But iWork simply isn’t as powerful or versatile as Microsoft Office, especially when it comes to word processing and spreadsheets. And it suffers from a design that places far more emphasis on making documents look beautiful than on the nuts and bolts of the actual process of writing and number-crunching.
There’s one big omission in iWork: It has no integrated email, contacts and calendar module comparable to Outlook in Windows or to Entourage, the Outlook equivalent that’s a part of the Mac version of Microsoft Office. Apple decided to rely on the very good email, calendar and address book programs that it builds into every Mac.
But iWork has one big plus: It’s the first Mac office suite that can open (though not create) files in the new formats Microsoft introduced in the Windows version of Office earlier this year. The Mac version of Office won’t do that until Office 2008 is out in January.
The new Numbers spreadsheet has some refreshing innovation that makes it far more approachable for casual spreadsheet users than Microsoft Excel often is. Numbers allows you to place multiple spreadsheet tables, plus charts and graphics, on a blank canvas that you can arrange any way you want. Each of the spreadsheet tables functions like an Excel spreadsheet with individual cells able to hold numbers, text or formulas.
Numbers has some other nice features to make things simpler. Any cell meant to contain a value you type in can be controlled with a slider or up-and-down arrows, so you can rapidly see how different numeric values would alter calculations without a lot of retyping.
I also found that Numbers made it easier than Excel to sort columns, and to add or move columns and rows. It’s also easier to create formulas using the actual names of columns and rows rather than their number/letter coordinates. And Numbers lets you drag and drop common formulas, such as Sum and Average, to the bottom of a column of numbers.
For real spreadsheet jockeys, however, Numbers is wimpier than Excel. It has only about half as many functions for making calculations and doesn’t do pivot tables.
The Pages program was originally more of a page-layout program than a writing tool. The new version attempts to fix this imbalance with a less artsy word-processing mode. But the effort is only partly successful. It still de-emphasizes some writer-friendly features. For instance, its auto-correct function is much weaker than Word’s. Another example: In Word, to see how many words your document contains, you just glance at the bottom of the screen. In Pages, you must dig down into a submenu to find the answer. The command for showing invisible formatting marks also is harder to find than in Word.
The strongest part of iWork is Keynote, the presentation program, which still makes it easier than Microsoft’s PowerPoint does to make rich, beautiful slide shows. The new version isn’t a major overhaul, but it includes a new feature called Instant Alpha that makes it easy to eliminate unwanted backgrounds from photos.
In my tests, importing and exporting documents between iWork and Office worked fine for simple files. But fidelity isn’t always perfect, especially in Numbers, where missing Excel functions or Numbers-only features don’t carry over.
If you’re a Mac user with basic word-processing and spreadsheet needs, and a strong emphasis on design, iWork is good choice, especially if perfect compatibility with Microsoft Office isn’t a high priority. But for office-suite users more concerned with function than form, I’d recommend sticking with Office.
Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. Find all my columns and videos online free at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.
Comments
it feels like I’m constantly switching between apple word processing programs to write my books: nisus (nice but no comments feature), mellel (nice, but complicated), word (too big and distracting); Papyrus (my current favorite but expensive and poor support and you can’t cut and paste text to create footnotes).
Now, I’m back to the Pages to give it a test. for the most part I like. it looks great, but you’re right it has some odd aspects to it (don’t care much about word compatibility except for sending files, and it does that fine). when you hit the asterisk button over the eight it automatically goes into list format — sometimes — this can drive me crazy, but worse it seems like the longer I work on a file the slower the cursor moves and the slower it deletes words. i’ve called apple about this, but so far their solution is no solution. Too bad, I’m ready for my nomadic word processing days to end, but it doesn’t appear to be happening soon.
Posted by jeff kisseloff at August 16th, 2007 at 6:51 amIt’s a fair review, but it does feel a bit odd comparing Apple’s very consumer-oriented ‘Works-style office suite to Microsoft’s business-oriented behemoth: they’re really aimed at very different audiences. The biggest tip-off to this, aside from feature set and focus of those features, is the price: $79 is far, far cry from MS Office for the Mac’s non-education-only price of *$400*.
I do agree that Pages ‘08, though much improved, could use some more focus on writing-oriented tools. The ability to look up words in Google and Wikipedia is nice, but from a submenu from a contextual menu? yecch. And while you can show a live word count from the Info pane in the Inspector panel (it works for text selections as well), that feature should be easier to discover, and an element of Pages’ new contextually-savvy toolbar as well.
Posted by Mark Abrams at August 16th, 2007 at 8:13 amNumbers, at least the trial version, seems unable to open a moderately sized Excel spreadsheet (112 rows, 120 columns). I get a “too large to open” message. Is this a weakness of the trial version, of Numbers itself, of my aging G4 Mac?
Al Feldzamen
Posted by Al Feldzamen at August 16th, 2007 at 9:00 am3 Arrowood Lane, Ithaca, N 14850-9793
607-257-8080
alfeld@twcny.rr.com
You probably get criticism for being too favorable to Apple. I remember when that definitely wasn’t the case though, so I think you are probably pretty objective.
In this case though, you did a disservice to your readers by NOT mentioning Keynote.
Keynote simply blows away Powerpoint. There is no comparison. When reviewing iWork, that is a big part of it. It’s at least as big a point as the ability to read and write Microsoft’s (proprietary) formats.
Why not mention that Keynote is pretty much universally viewed as better than powerpoint, in a productivity suite that is less than 1/4th the price?
Also, it’s patently unfair to compare iWorks RETAIL price to the EDUCATION price for Office.
The price tag for Office (or an outright copy of Windows for that matter) is ludicrously expensive.
No wonder no one buys it that way (everyone gets it with a PC, in some cases it may be cheaper to buy a comptuer with Office and Windows than to just purchase the software!
As far as the message about the file being too large to open–I had not seen that (I don’t have numbers yet). But, it’s certainly not your G4. Excel is actually rather limited (numbers probably too) in that it can only open a spreadsheet with a maximum of 256 columns. That is puny for statistical work. If your spreadsheets are that large, you probably need soemthing like SPSS. Excel is a ‘toy’ by comparison.
Posted by Brian Pickering at August 16th, 2007 at 10:47 amI agree with Waler Mossberg’s article and conclusions, as a long-time Mac user, and also with the previous post about Keynote. Actually, I wish I had posted sooner as I would have made the same points in a milder way.
Keynote is head and shoulders — even more — above Powerpoint in every way and I will never go back to using Powerpoint if the balance between these two applications stays the same, as my presentations are better overall and get MUCH better reviews and audience feedback. PPT makes it easy to make fiddly, idiosyncratic, oddly formatted and just plain unreadable presentations that end up being distracting to the user. I’m not saying that all presentations end up that way, it’s just that this is what PPT makes it easy for the user to do. Keynote makes it even easier to make attractive, clean, and powerful presentations that have good impact on the audience and are a joy to prepare and present.
Apple’s Mail, iCal (which is standards-compliant with other cross-platform calendar tools, unlike Microsoft’s awful calendaring system), and other similar built-in utilities are also easy to use.
The word processing and number-crunching spreadsheet capabilities of the rest of Apple’s iWork offerings are weak, as Walter says. But it’s significatn that Numbers exists at all, and given the XML calabilities that have emerged in these applications (including Keynote), the Mac BU of Microsoft had better not rest on its market dominance in these areas!
Posted by Alan Sill at August 16th, 2007 at 11:33 amFor an “apples to Apples” comparison, the appropriate MS product is the “Home and Student” edition of Office 2007. Its street price is $110, and like iWork it excludes the email and calendar component, on the assumption that users will rely on OS mail and calendar. It does include the superb OneNote note-taker, which is worth the whole price. Unlike the earlier “student” version of Office, it requires no claim of educational use, which MS never took seriously anyway.
Also, we seem to have gotten too comfortable with the idea that Apple creates software that locks users into its own hardware. Any other company would be denounced for such a policy. The very fine iTunes for Windows proves they know how to write code for the mainstream platform without sacrificing their “elegance”.
Posted by Charlie Brenner at August 16th, 2007 at 12:39 pmI stopped reading after “no pivot tables”. That’s a show stopper for me.
Posted by Scott McReynolds at August 16th, 2007 at 2:51 pmJeff: try one of the LaTeX-based word processors that’s available for the Mac. They’re very well regarded for writing books.
Posted by Avi Flax at August 16th, 2007 at 3:00 pmWalt, the free, open-source office suite, NeoOffice, has been reading and writing the new Office 2007 file formats for some time now. There’s a wealth of great open-source software out there that runs on OS X, and NeoOffice is especially worthy of your attention.
That being said, I’m enjoying iWork ‘08, especially the new Keynote, immensely.
Posted by Barry Campbell at August 16th, 2007 at 4:53 pmLooking forward to trying out iWork 08. I’ve heard that Pages now has a grammar checker.
Posted by Neil Anderson at August 16th, 2007 at 11:35 pmWalt, I have to say I usually agree with your take on Apple products but this time I have to protest a little. I feel this is way too much of an opinion piece. You concentrate on comparing iWork to Office’s strengths but if you actually concentrated on Page’s strengths compared to similar features in Word and did the same with the other respective apps you could say that iWork makes Office look like a dinosaur. It just depends on what direction you take. Just because Office is a kind of de-facto standard doesn’t mean it is an actual standard. And it definitely doesn’t mean that Microsoft’s approach is the best approach for productivity apps. It’s just one approach which isn’t even a logical one.
Office’s apps are notoriously difficult to create beautiful documents. Yes they are good for typists and hardcore number-crunchers but they lack in taste and are rather daunting to most new users. And in this brave new world where there are way more small businesses and families using computers than there are professional writers, journalists and columnists (who have their own design departments to do this stuff) iWork is a breath of fresh air.
You criticised Pages for being hard to do a word count. All you do is click the inspector button and then click the document tab. Not exactly hard is it. Once found it’s pretty easy to remember where it is. This little gem has lots of statistics about your document for whoever actually needs that stuff. I certainly don’t. You might do because you are a journalist and are probably given a quantity of words to fill but it’s not only journalists and writers that use word processors.
Now here’s the rub. Pages is probably called “Pages” because it actually allows you to create whole finished documents. Not just type the text for documents. Have you looked at it from that perspective? Word in contrast is a great word processor for writers and journalists but it’s layout, image editing and document finishing features are so limited and illogical in use that they totally suck. This is why most Word users write their columns in Word, then use Quark or inDesign to lay it all out. Not every occasional user wants to spend a wedge of cash on all these Apps let alone learn them.
I would suggest you have a good go at using iWork for things that you don’t intend to hand over to a designer to polish up. For stuff you intend to start and finish within Pages. Start with a template that suits the style of document you want to create, then alter that template to suit your needs. Think of the template that seems the most suitable as your muse.
Many people have a visually creative brain but not all of them can pluck their creativity out of thin air. For example, I personally look all over the place at other people’s web sites and do screen-shots before I start work on a new site. I make notes about what I like about them. Then I start on a site of my own and some of the ideas get used as a starting point. I then work on it until I get a unique site design. iWork templates allow you to do that very nicely. Some who are not at all creative will just use the template outright. Others will modify them but keep the basic theme. Others will completely change them but it’s still the same. A good starting point. It’s a logical approach to document creation.
In contrast, MS Word, in the Mac world is well known for unnecessary features and is terribly hard to figure out. I would happily have traded those unnecessary features for decent layout control and an attractive set of starting points (templates). I remember in the 90’s when Word on the Mac first got all bloated with unnecessary features, they had a feature called “Word 5.1 compatibility mode”. This would hide all the useless crap in favour of the simpler layout of Word 5.1 which most Mac users preferred.
I believe that if a new user trained themselves to use Word and Pages they would drop Word in about 10 minutes. This is because Apple tend to initially show only what most people need and then, when a person wants to start exploring they can find all of the complicated stuff in the inspector and other pop-up panes like the drawer. Pages has some very powerful features but it is not daunting upon initial use. It allows you to slowly learn it without apparent feature overload which is the natural way for most people.
Now criticising Numbers as being weak is a bit out of order Walt. It’s not like both companies shot off together at the starting blocks. Apple decided that spreadsheets are ugly and rightly so, they are! Numbers strength is again in attractive document design. I can see that the export to PDF feature will allow small businesses to produce dynamically up-datable literature where figures regularly change that can be exported to PDF and sent to customers monthly, weekly or whatever. Yes you can do this with Excel but not in an attractive way. Clients are more likely to feel satisfied with reports they get from a company with professional looking documents than they are from companies that use traditional ugly spreadsheet layouts. The data is the same but the finish is nicer. You buy an expensive car you want a tasteful design, decent paint job and good upholstery right?
I remember when Keynote was at version 1. People said it had some nice templates and features but was hardly a Powerpoint beater. Now at version 4 it is widely considered to wipe the floor with Powerpoint. Powerpoint has been out since 1987. That’s 20 years. It took Apple just 2 years to match Powerpoint on features, three years to pass it and 4 years to leave it in the dust. They are already way ahead of Word on document formatting with Pages and gaining fast on other features.
In contrast, Numbers has just hatched and shown it’s face to the world. It’s an infant with a bright future. As far as Excel is concerned Lotus improv should have been the standard format for spreadsheets anyway but MS with their mighty sword killed that one. I am hoping that Apple will gradually win over people to move away from Excel and try something new. Maybe with a little healthy competition we can see some real innovation.
I suggest Walt that you treat this as your initial impression. Then go off and really use these apps. Look at what they can do from the perspective of a small business or family. Try to understand the new approach to clean interfaces, lack of feature-bloat and good logical and tasteful layout. Then write a proper review that is worthy of your great reputation as a thoughtful journalist. I kind of get the impression that you are using one of Apple’s “less important” offerings to show the world that you can be objective with your opinion on Apple’s products but in this case I feel you just knocked down a good product with very little research. I never thought I would think that. Please tell me you just skimmed through and a proper review will come shortly.
Posted by Paul Randall at August 17th, 2007 at 3:37 amI am sure some of you remember WingZ (Informix, late 80s), which was way better than any spreadsheet on the market at the time. I believe Apple purchased the code base to this product and developed a product called Resolve (early 90s). I wonder if Numbers’ code base is related to WingZ? Anyone know?
Posted by Ron Bannon at August 17th, 2007 at 5:00 amAs others have said, iWork ‘08 is currently competing against Microsoft Office 2004 Standard Edition for Mac at $400. The $150 you mentioned applies to the Student Edition, which most users cannot buy; and the Professional Edition is $500.
All three editions can only be installed on one system legally to the best of my knowledge. I will soon have three systems in my home, so iWorks’ $100 Family Pack (five systems) is very attractive.
Granted, it ships with Entourage, the Mac equivalent of Outlook. However as you mention, Apple’s own Mail, iCal and Address Book do everything most users need for free. I can’t believe Entourage is so integral to the Office experience that it justifies any significant portion of the price.
Most power users will continue to use Windows/Office – that doesn’t seem to be the market Apple are targeting with this release and as such features like pivot tables and more advanced formulas would be overkill. For the average home user, the feature set is appropriate.
Posted by Dale Price at August 17th, 2007 at 8:48 amIf you are looking to match up Office more appropriately, you would be comparing it to iWork plus Daylite, a combination that is significantly more powerful and productive.
We switched over to Pages about 2 years ago to create all of our sales proposals. Pages’ design and layout strengths result in more effective sales presentations, which results in more money. I easily traded Pages’ “pretty” document building for Word’s 1 million other less important features.
Page’s one BIG problem is that it crashes (yes, Mac apps do that) and does not save the state of the document. And no, “Save automatic backup” doesn’t fix this. Word, on the other hand, fixed this over a decade ago. The result is that I have lost more hours of work with Pages than any other application I use. I have found an Auto-Save Applescript for Pages, but I invariably don’t have it running when I lose a 2 hour typing session. Even with all that frustration, I still will not go back to Word.
Keynote on its own is worth the purchase of iWork. We use it all the time for presentations and it’s simply a better experience than Powerpoint.
Numbers – I have no experience with yet.
Posted by Bill Sewell at August 17th, 2007 at 10:17 amI don’t disagree with you on the facts but I would shade it a little differently. Not everyone needs the full feature set of Excel. However, many people could use a simpler table oriented program.
For most people I think iWork would be fine. I see people making calendars and other simple documents in Excel. One guy even wrote all his office memos with Excel. iWork is great for this.
A relatively small group really dig into the more arcane features of Excel and for them Excel is the proper tool of choice.
A problem does arise if the expert users generate documents that they expect to run on all users’ machines. Compatibility has to be near perfect for this.
I will reinforce the many comments above regarding Keynote. It is fantastic. I use it almost weekly for presentations. Being able to make a much nicer presentation helps me stand out from the crowd.
Posted by John Konopka at August 17th, 2007 at 2:49 pmWalt,
I dont even own a mac and I thought that this was a horrible review. Could you pick any products more mismatched? You could have at LEAST picked something that was remotely similar or the same price point.
Heck why not even bring in the free office suite OpenOffice.org ?
What reviews do you have planned next? Prius against a F150? MSPaint against Photoshop?
KieranMullen
Posted by Kieran Mullen at August 17th, 2007 at 8:28 pmhttp://360oregon.com
Walt,
It’s actually very simple to see invisible characters in iWork ‘08. Simply click the “View” button in the upper left corner, then click “Show Invisibles.” That’s it.
Posted by Ricky Bloomfield at August 18th, 2007 at 11:08 amMr. Price, above, says:
“The $150 you mentioned applies to the Student Edition, which most users cannot buy…All three editions can only be installed on one system legally to the best of my knowledge. ”
Actual facts:
- The street price of Office 2007 Home & Student Edition is $110, not $150
- Anyone using Office at home can legally buy it.
- The license allows for installation on 3 computers.
Since these products have similar functions, pricing and license terms, it’s certainly reasonable to compare them.
Source: Amazon, and http://office.microsoft.com/en.....01033.aspx
Posted by Charlie Brenner at August 18th, 2007 at 3:36 pm@ Mr Price, that price is for the Windows version of Office, now maybe Office 2008 will have similar prices, but it isn’t out yet.
Posted by Matthew Hutton at August 19th, 2007 at 5:04 amSorry I meant @ Charlie Brenner, I clearly didn’t read that right
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Posted by Matthew Hutton at August 19th, 2007 at 5:06 amWimpy is an interesting word here…
First, I should disclose that I am an Edward Tufte, “Good graphics with Excel is an oxymoron,” fan.
It sounds like Apple has again gone back to Xerox Parc for inspiration. This may turn out to be a very nice thing for users.
For me, the only thing not whimpy about Microsoft Office has been the marketing. As an example: To express the simple concept that the numbers in column C are each the sum of the corresponding numbers in columns A and B, would be C = A+B in R or S Plus. Using the Excel framework to express the same thing feels “whimpy” to me.
Posted by John M Miller at August 19th, 2007 at 7:19 amWalt,
Always enjoy your reviews. With respect to Pages, you wrote this:
“It still de-emphasizes some writer-friendly features. For instance, its auto-correct function is much weaker than Word’s.”
This made me think of just how completely annoying I find Word’s auto-correct function. To be fair, it does correct some mistakes in helpful way at times. Usually, though, I find it doing things that I don’t want it to do. It’s a typical Microsoft approach (reminiscent of Clippy) in that it tries to be helpful but really just gets in the way.
My wife has the same reaction, judging by the way she sometimes yells at Word. “Why are you doing that? I don’t want that!”
I haven’t used the new Pages (I use LaTeX or simple text editors for most of my writing), but a “weaker” auto-correct function might be a very good thing if weaker means that it doesn’t try to do so much.
Posted by Jon Hanson at August 19th, 2007 at 6:19 pmI’m one of the few but growing number of people that are equally comfortable and happy with a mac or a PC. In this battle, however, I must side with Office. If you compare iWork with Office 2003, I’ll accept that there are a number of areas where iWork excels. But Office 2007 simply blows this away! Most of the “prettiness” that iWork provides is happily possible in Office 2007. Also – ease of use (Apple’s biggest selling point) – is at a far higher standard in Office. The new ‘ribbon’ interface is hugely easy to use and productive. iWork, in comparison, requires way too many clicks to accomplish similar tasks.
When Vista (which I hate) was released, everyone claimed that MS had simply copied a number of OSX’s best features, and that, had it been released before OSX, it would’ve been great. I make the same argument now about iWork. Pre-Office 2007, it would’ve been great, but post that – no comparison.
Btw, I now use a mac with Office 2007 running on coherence mode with parallels. Works great!
Posted by Karan Bedi at August 23rd, 2007 at 3:40 amDifferent issue: I (and my contemporary co-worker–we’re philosophy faculty) have used WordPerfect for about 2 decades. None of us bothers with Word: it’s too unsutle for academic writing and journal editing. Now I’m fed up with PCs and thinking of migrating to iMAC.
Posted by Peter Schuller at August 25th, 2007 at 1:46 pmOne recurrent issue is formatting submitted articles in the proper way for the publication. WordPerfect makes almost all of this easy with “Reveal Codes” and “Search and Replace.”
Can Pages do this (easily? If not, what Apple-compatible software can. (I’m not, in such cases, interested in graphics– just pure text (although in several languages, preferably).
And what do I do about importing and/or reading thousands of pages of previous texts in WordPerfect, other than loading Windows (which I am very hesitant to do) into the iMAc?
Thanks.
@Peter Schuller:
Your best bet would be to move to LaTeX. It’s perfect for academic publishing – in fact, that’s its primary use. It deals wonderfully with logic formulas and such, too. Oh, and it’s free.
A good package to go with on a mac would be:
http://www.tug.org/mactex/
The system will require a few hours of learning, but after that it will save you days of work – especially when you use associated tools like BibDesk for managing references.
Posted by Thomas van Dijck at September 12th, 2007 at 3:42 pmOh, and here’s a tool you can use to convert WP documents to LaTeX:
Posted by Thomas van Dijck at September 12th, 2007 at 3:56 pmhttp://www.penguin.cz/%7Efojti.....2latex.htm
I do agree with much of Walt is saying, yet I have to disagree with his view on Numbers. For me Excel was always overkill and I never really learned how to use it. Numbers on the other hand is Excel for the common man. I use Numbers all the time now to keep track of things. I will agree that Numbers does lack some features, yet overall for those who need to do simple spreadsheets without a long learning curve Numbers is fine.
Posted by Robert Matthews at September 20th, 2007 at 9:11 amIf you want compatibility you should use OpenOffice.org… you don’t have to pay anything for that
… ohh wait, I remember it… if you are a “Mainstream” user, you have to pay for your programs, since you don’t like any free program… even though it is supported by Sun Microsystems.
Posted by Igor Guerrero at September 21st, 2007 at 7:08 pmIt’s funny that for as long as there have been reviews of word processors reviewers have complained about the word count feature being “inconvenient” — meaning it takes more than a millisecond to get to — yet pretty much the only people who obsessively check word count in this way are writers of newspaper columns (and high school students). We other 500 million users of word processors just write until we’ve finished what we have to say, then stop! I think you could have found a better use for that 4% of your review (oops…I guess word count is useful after all).
Posted by Walter Smith at November 3rd, 2007 at 11:34 amWhy the comparisons to Office? Isn’t Office a $300-$400 product? Isn’t iWork $79? Even at education prices, iWork is still much cheaper than Office ($49 vs. $150 for Office).
Word and Excel have had nearly 20 and 15 years, respectively to refine. Pages is 3 years old, and Numbers is new. Keynote, which is the oldest app at 4 years, trounces PowerPoint. Keynote is so good that after using it, going back to Powerpoint will be painful.
But thats not to say that Pages and Numbers suck. They are great for home/school use, and they are very powerful and extremely easy to use. And both offer decent compatibility with Office. For the price, iWork is a much better deal than Office. However, if you need to exchange Word, Excel and Powerpoint docs with PC users on a daily basis, Office is the logical choice.
Posted by ted lee at November 10th, 2007 at 5:38 pmGreat review, but there are a few misleading points…
First off, the lack of an Entourage-like application in iWork is not an “omission”. Apple chose to integrate iWork with their existing trio of applications (Mail, iCal, and Address Book). Which, in my opinion, is far better than the buggy, unstable pile out garbage that is Entourage 2008. In fact, the level of integration between iWork, iLife, and the built-in OS X productivity apps in Leopard is far better than anything Office has to offer. Now if Apple would only fix Mail’s IMAP support, we’d all be happy.
Second, most of your criticisms of Pages seem to center around that fact that Pages doesn’t act like Word. Well, thank God! Word is a disorganized mess. And while Pages does take some time to learn, it is organized more like a good design application, rather than Microsoft’s unintelligent scramble of functions. That said, the palette structure needs more polish, and a more-accessible word count and beefed-up dictionary would be nice.
Finally, let us be clear about one thing in particular…Keynote is to presentations what Excel is to spreadsheet: simply the best, by far.
And finally, we’ve had the unfortunate pleasure of running Office 2008 on our brand-new, dual-core Mac Pros (with 8 gigs of memory). It blows. Microsoft has chosen to use its own proprietary rendering engine, rather than Quartz. Which may not seem like a big deal to some people, but functionally this means that Office needs to load a sort-of virtualized Vista into your Mac’s memory in order to run. And it doesn’t do it well. In fact, Office was sucking up about 90% of our usually blazing fast Xeon processor, and about 3/4 of the memory. It gets so bad at times, that switching between office apps can take up to 30 seconds. In the end, we were so frustrated by constant, unwavering slowdowns in Office, that we ditched the whole suite. Numbers may not be on par with Excel, but at least it runs well.
When we contacted Microsoft about this problem, they actually told us that this was due to Office’s amazing feature set! I nearly fell out of my chair laughing. Any one of Adobe’s Creative Suite applications is significantly more powerful, and offers significantly more features, than any Office application. But guess what, they run beautifully! Until Microsoft pulls their heads out of their rear-ends, we’re sticking with iWork.
Posted by Steven Luce at February 26th, 2008 at 10:21 am