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Excellent Alternative to Word Jul 04, 2008
I've been a long time user of Word on my Mac and when I upgraded my laptop I decided to give iWork a try.
I need basic word processing, spreadsheet, and PowerPoint capabilities. iWork works beautifully. I especially like Keynote as a substitute for PowerPoint. iWork provides many useful templates in Keynote, Pages and Numbers. With iWork I can also open all the Office documents friends send me via e-mail.
So far I've experienced no problems or glitches with iWork unlike the many I encountered with Word on a Mac. Apple's backup to iWork is also much better than Microsoft's with Word.
Nice product!
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
Solid Suite for the Non-Professional Jul 03, 2008
This is a great suite of programs for those of us who don't necessarily need the full power of the Microsoft Office suite. It will be able to do nearly all of what you want it to do in a non-professional environment (read home or possibly small business) for a whole lot less money than MS Office will cost.
That's where this suite shines. For $79 or less ($69 currently on Amazon) you get 80% of the MS Office functionality plus famous Apple-brand style. It's infinitely better than the hack-job "NeoOffice" for Mac which is the free OpenOffice-based office suite that is nearly unusable due to a bad translation.
Pros:
-Pages is a fine little word processor for writing virtually anything you can think of. It's simple to use and flows well with the rest of the "Mac experience." If you just want to sit down and type a letter or a book, it's hard to beat. This is the Apple equivalent to Microsoft Word
-Numbers is a usable spreadsheat program that will do some basic number crunching and data manipulation. It's competent and works like most other Apple programs. This is the Apple equivalent to Microsoft Excel
-Keynote is the best application of the suite. It is a powerful presentation design program that is not only on par with, but superior to Microsoft Powerpoint, which it is aimed at. If you want an idea of what it can do, just watch any of Steve Job's keynote addresses to see a good presentation in action. He uses Keynote, too.
Cons:
-Generally speaking, if you are familiar with MS Office programs (as I am), you'll have a bear of a time migrating over to iWork. Apple has its own version of what is logical in the interface, and though I can't say if it's better or worse, it's definitely different and hard to navigate for an MS Office veteran. If you're new to such programs, though, it's probably more intuitive.
-Pages is a little light on features and flexibility. This offers a simpler user interface, but also means you lose a lot of power that the professional grade MS Word offers. It also has a lot of trouble importing anything but the most simplistic Word documents and doesn't appear to be compatible with Office 2008 for Mac yet (I'm not sure about Office 2007 for Windows, though).
-Numbers is the weakest program in the suite. It's not really usable in a standard office practice as it lacks so many features and capabilities that have been in Excel for generations. It's more-or-less a sort of placeholder until Apple decides it really wants to be in the Enterprise market. Few home users will bother learning to use a spreadsheet program of any type unless they have to. This is more of an afterthought.
-Keynote is the jewel of the set. It's only real weakness is that it will ruin you on Microsoft Powerpoint if you ever have to go back or have to export your presentation into Powerpoit format. That's the Achilles' Heel of Keynote is the lack of widespread use anywhere. Industry doesn't use it. Education doesn't use it. Heck, even hotels and conference rooms don't use it. You have to bring your own Mac if you really want to use it.
Overall, this is a great suite for the money, but can't really compete with its entrenched and much more mature Microsoft counterparts (except for Keynote). This is a must-have if you use your Mac for anything productive, especially if your budget is a bit tight.
i[t] works Jul 02, 2008
this product is great. it does what it needs to. there are many features that aren't apparent until you dig in and explore. one setback is that, when using graphs, you are very limited in your intervals and labeling the graphs. it is recommended that, if you need to produce graphs of any quality, create your graphs in another program and import them into keynote or pages...
Hits the mark but misses in a couple of areas Jun 28, 2008
First I have to say I'm a huge Apple fan. They slowly won me over from the PC side now I find PCs barely usable. That being said this is a very intuitive and usable productivity suite. It integrates wonderfully into OS X. That being said it does not support open document format yet (odt) or any of the open office formats.
Additionally with Open Office for Mac being as good or better than MS Office and it's free. It makes it hard for me to justify paying any money for office productivity suite.
2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
 Very disappointing! Still need office Jun 25, 2008
Pages is not really a word processor at all. It is, at best, a mediocre page layout program. The spell-checking and grammar-checking are basically useless. In my mind, spelling and grammar are as fundamental to word processing as are cut and paste. Apple has been on a real role lately that I had really high hopes for iwork. It doesn't take long to find out this product is just plain junk. I'm sorry I bought it and will go back to office.
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