How can Apple make iWork, work for you?

[neildmitchell]

Lots of chat about iWork, including from myself. What features would you like to see Apple work on to improve iWork, to really make iWork work for you?
Some may and have said "People want Office" Well... I DONT! :)
I hate the MS Office UI, program response to user interaction...

Should Apple make two lines of iWork? Consumer vs. Pro???
(Pages vs. ?Documents?)

1) Get away from Appleworks!! I know that the creative minds working for Apple can surely come up with a Better UI, program response to user interaction...(I retract this, I Love the hybridization of a word processsor and a pagelayout program. Pages is clean and streamlined with a fresh approach to word processing. I thought that it was a bit lacking in features, but ..
The cleanliness of the program UI compared to MS Word really threw me off.)

2) Complete Customization
* I would love a feature of being able to install only the features that I need. I hate MS Office features such as Mail Merge. I have never used it and will probably never use it, I dont want to see the option for it in the menu bar nor in a panel ( As far as I know Apple doesnt have features like Mail Merge, but I want it available if I ever need it)

3) Integration of Mail, Address Book, iCal, Preview, iPhoto, Pages, Keynote, ...

4)Addition of a spreadsheet program

5) Addition of a database program-?lite version of FileMaker? easy database setup and management for consumers and non-DBA's. An easy way to setup great looking databases that people can be proud of.

I guess thats all for now from me, how about you?

[CubaTBird]

heck i just stick with text edit, and plan to just use that in college as well.. give me a word processor with a spell check and im pretty much good to go ;)

[G5Unit]

Text Edit all the way!

[x86isslow]

I consider my laptop to be pretty top-of-the-line for most things. But if there are any programs that bring my computer to its knees, its Doom 3 and you guessed it, Pages. Until I can move an image across a page without a 2-minute beachball session, I'll stick with v.X.

[IJ Reilly]

I consider my laptop to be pretty top-of-the-line for most things. But if there are any programs that bring my computer to its knees, its Doom 3 and you guessed it, Pages. Until I can move an image across a page without a 2-minute beachball session, I'll stick with v.X.

Granted performance isn't great, but I run Pages on a G4/450 Cube without an issue even remotely like this.

Anyway, another vote for not turning iWorks into an Office clone. A spreadsheet app is an obvious omission, as well as a bundle with FileMaker (no need for a "lite" version).

[IJ Reilly]

Text Edit all the way!

Really? Can you even do page numbering with Text Edit? Headers and footers? Tables?

I do a lot of writing in Text Edit, but even a minimal a word processor it is not.

[Sparky22]

Make a consumer and pro version. Pro version would work for me