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Apple iWork 08

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Anthony Fiti
Beth
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Aug. 26, 2007

Specifications

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Conclusion

At only $79 for a single license, and $99 for a five-license family pack (compared to a single license $149 (MSRP) Student & Teacher version of Microsoft Office), you can say the price is certainly right for Apple's iWork suite. Especially considering that one would need to spend the full price of $399 (Office Standard, MSRP) for a full (non upgrade) copy of comparable Office software that consumers are licensed to use in a non-educational setting. Though that version of Office does come with Entourage (the Mac equivalent of Outlook), there is no Word, Excel, and PowerPoint version of the suite. No cheaper versions that have comparable software to the iWork suite are available.

I'm very pleased with the quality of the software as well. Looking around at Apple's official forums, you can see that Numbers is the application most prone to not working as expected, but that isn't surprising given its version 1 nature, and it's newness to nearly everyone outside of Apple.

Apple has a distinct advantage of being able to start fresh in the productivity market. Microsoft is on version 12 of its Office suite. Sometimes it's better to start with a clean slate, and not be bothered by backwards compatibility or user familiarity. And that's where Apple has the upper hand. Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are relatively young applications, but they're not necessarily new for Apple. The Appleworks suite of a word processor, spreadsheet, and database dates back over 23 years to 1984 and the Apple II series of computers. I still remember using Appleworks from 5.25" floppy disks on my Apple II GS in the late 1980s. The days of no spell checking, inputting commands by entering numbers, swapping program and data disks... those were the days...

If you need a productivity suite for the Mac and aren't too terribly worried about not being on the same MS Office standard as everyone else, I'd strongly recommend that you try, if not buy, iWork '08. Even if you have Office, give iWork 08 a try with Apple's 30-day free trial and watch the demo videos Apple has provided.

Pros

Much cheaper than Office, especially for multiple licenses
Only one edition to choose from - MS Office has eight different bundles
Apple has a specific page to send feedback for bugs and feature requests to developers
Apple has provided introduction videos, along with support forums for iWork

Cons

First version of Numbers - minor bugs and a few missing features
The fact that rest of the world is using MS Office
Some features aren't supported if you export to an Office document

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Page 5 of 5

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Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: Pages
Page 3: Keynote
Page 4: Numbers
Page 5: Conclusion

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3 User Comments

1 - Posted by Splash6 on August 28, 2007 - 6:59 am

Numbers is definitely a noteworthy application. It is the biggest change in spreadsheets since their creation. By creating a series of standalone tables it will soon be possible to use standard libraries of modular tables. It will no longer be necessary to check through every individual cell of a spreadsheet to ensure it is correct, just to check the tables have been wired up correctly. This will be the biggest step forward in the quality of spreadsheets that will ever have occured and can not be far off.

2 - Posted by Max Slowik on August 28, 2007 - 12:56 pm

So it's a database with a spreadsheet interface?

3 - Posted by Vic on October 2, 2007 - 1:46 pm

Is there a "Password protect a document" feature in iWork 08 - I can't find it. Help please

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