Where is the update to iWork? [Merged]

derbladerunner said:

I agree to a large extent. MS is maybe the other extreme, Office unfortunately has "feature creep" in my view and once people finally "got" Office, MS redesigned the UI in Office 2007. Most users only use a fraction of its features.

Apple on other hand with no updates for four years and no roadmap is much worse in the Office space.

There is need for "middle ground", especially in education: A simpler and cheaper Office than MS Office, maybe extensible with plug-ins and web access/online collaboration. iWork could have been this solution.

One example for lack of strategy (or interest ?) is the discontinued iwork.com (for people who don't remember the online portions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IWork.com ). Although the Beta had many flaws, more and more people work in teams in separate locations, better collaboration features are needed for iWork in the future.

How come the OS (OS X 10.9 probably out this year) is updated much more frequently than Mac HW and SW: Mac Pros and software like iWork not updated for four years ?!

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I don't think a middle-ground solution is what we really need.

Microsoft Office is fully-featured; yet, it's simple and intuitive. Anyone can write on Word, or create a presentation with PowerPoint. Taking out some features of Microsoft Office won't make it simpler. And Microsoft Office is not really expensive, especially for students and home users.

People often complain that Microsoft Office is bloated and confusing due to the number of features. Well, Microsoft Word 2013 will consume about 50 MB of RAM, and it won't even reach 100 MB, even if I open some very complex documents. Menus are simple and intuitive and easy to be found.

Mac users, however, may complain about Microsoft Office for a reason. The Mac version of Office is slow, memory-consuming and not half as intuitive as the Windows version. Microsoft put a lot of time, money and effort on Office for Windows, but not on Office for Mac. Perhaps that's why people keep saying that Office is bloated and all, but that applies to Office for Mac. Office for Windows is much, much better. This is certainly Microsoft's fault, but it's Apple's fault too. It's Apple's fault because Apple doesn't provide a decent alternative that could threaten Microsoft Office.

In the Windows world, Microsoft has the best Office available for some reasons: it wants to push its own operating system, and it had some pretty good competitors, such as Word Perfect and Lotus 1-2-3, and it managed to kill them all. But in the Mac world, which office suite competes with Microsoft Office? Apple doesn't give a damn about iWork. iWork is for dummies, for beginners, not for serious, real work. LibreOffice? Well, it's a cheap copy of Microsoft Office. It is a pretty good office suite, especially for free, but it doesn't have the refinement and the level of investment to keep up to Microsoft Office.

Hey, Apple, why don't you spend one or two billion dollars per year in the development of iWork? There is cash enough for it. Microsoft puts hundreds of million dollars per year (perhaps even over a billion now) on Microsoft Office, and that's the reason why it's so good. How much does Apple invest on iWork? Close to nothing, I guess.

neutrino23 said:

Seriously? Have you ever used it? No offense but this sounds like an ad from MS.

We sell a product that includes Office for reporting. I find it an endless source of trouble and mystery. People who have taken classes in using Office and practice with it every day do okay with it. Non-experts struggle.

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Yes, seriously. I mean it.

I've finished to write my PhD thesis earlier this year. I've tried every option, for Windows and for Mac, to write it. For Mac, I've tried Apple Pages, Microsoft Word 2004, 2008 and 2011 for Mac, Nisus Writer Pro, Mellel, Scrivener, Mariner Write. For Windows, I've tried Word Perfect, LibreOffice Writer, OpenOffice Writer, AbiWord, LyX, FrameMaker, Lotus Word Pro, Adobe InCopy and InDesign, Nota Bene and TextMaker. I've even tried Google Docs. But I finally settled with Microsoft Word 2010. I've tried every possible alternative for Word after Word 2003 crashed and corrupted the .doc file containing my Master thesis. I really tried to avoid Word. However, .docx is far better than .doc, and I liked the ribbon interface introduced with Word 2007. Word 2010 was good to use, and I can't think of any other processor which is more straightforward to use. When Microsoft released the 2013 version of Microsoft Office, I bought it in the first day.

For some strange reason, I don't find other office software easier to use than Microsoft Office. I don't think Apple Pages is easier than Word. I just think it has less features, and that its interface is not as good.

Apple shouldn't be focusing on making a middle-term office suite. It should just make an office suite to match Apple's quality. To blow Microsoft Office away. But that would require a level of investment that Apple will not make.

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kdum8 said:

I completely understand your frustration, but this is a little unfair. iWork is fine for home users, and I manage to run my business using Numbers & Pages, which is serious work and makes money. That said, admittedly there are some features in Excel I would love to have in Numbers, and I wish they would work harder and improve iWork. There are many things that could be added. I have used Office for Mac extensively, but it just isn't a patch on the Windows version mainly due to its very poor performance.

Is iWork a serious, decent office suite? Sadly I don't think it quite is. Close, but not quite.
Is iWork good enough for some businesses? In my case it is.

Above all, the number one reason I use iWork is iCloud. Despite the remaining incompatibilities between iOS iWork and the mac version, being able to work at home and then go out into the field and yet still update and work on my documents on the iPad/iPhone is a huge advantage, and one that Microsoft Office doesn't offer.

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Don't get me wrong. Pages, Numbers and Keynote are just fine for users who need simple stuff. Just like an iPad may also satisfy a home user who don't really need a laptop. But if you rely on enterprise quality solutions, if you need all the features, and if you need full compatibility with everyone, than you must have Microsoft Office. For Windows, not for Mac. That's the real deal. iWork is not.

kdum8 said:

Honestly you went to all that effort, but there is only one solution to writing a thesis that manages everything and really works. No WYSIWYG option has it. LaTex is the answer.

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I looked at LaTeX, and I even tried LyX. The fact is that I found it too complicated. Even LyX, which has a graphic interface, looked complicated and lacked polish. People are complaining that the features of Microsoft Word are confusing; but LaTeX is far more complex. It has a steep learning curve. I didn't have time to go through that, as I had deadlines. I am in the humanities field, and LaTeX is not my thing.

Plus, my supervisor wanted to make her comments in track changes and she doesn't even know what LaTeX is. In addition, if I want to publish the thesis, no publisher in my country will ever accept a LaTeX file, especially in my field. Pretty much everybody uses Microsoft Word, and I have to stay fully compatible with that. I don't know a single person, outside of Internet forums, which actually uses LaTeX.

LaTeX would bring me nothing but headaches.

Still, I don't know why a WYSIWYG word processor is not suitable for thesis writing. Word served me well, and was very convenient. It was a grammar checker that no other word processor has, and it has good hyphenation capabilities.

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Abazigal said:

I am tempted to download numbers for my mac for icloud support with numbers on my ipad. I am just wondering if Apple does update iworks, will it require me to re-purchase the new version? But if they have no plans to update it anytime soon, then I will feel like a moron for waiting for so long.

How? Can anyone here by my devil's advocate?

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If you want Numbers, go ahead.

It doesn't seem like Apple will update it anytime soon. It had recently published an ad to hire new developers to work in the iWork suite. However, an update may take months, or even years to happen, and we have no clue on Apple's roadmap.

I don't know if you'll have to re-purchase it. But anyway, it's just US$ 20, it's not worth keep waiting for that sort of money.

Any chances we might see something at WWDC? I guess not...

vistadude said:

Skaertus, you seem to be the voice of reason. I share many of the same opinions as you.

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Well, thanks, I'm flattered.

I'm curious about 2 things. I also wrote my thesis on Word. I was adamant in those days about saving as .doc, not .docx. But now it's 2013, nobody uses word 2002 anymore, and microsoft provides free .docx readers for those without office. So why should I keep saving as .doc and .ppt? What's the advantage of the X formats?

You mentioned you bought office 2013. What's the advantages over office 2010? I'm a power outlook/exchange user, as well as word and powerpoint. I think I use about 90% of it's features.

Thanks!

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Use .docx and .pptx, which are the new formats, and not .doc and .ppt. A .doc file is a proprietary format by Microsoft and used by lots of people, but it has its own problems. It may get corrupt easily, and there's no way to get text out of it if it does. I had this problem before, and I almost lost all my text of a dissertation thesis after Word 2003 crashed once. The .docx format is basically a ZIP file, containing two files, one with the formatting and the other with the text itself. If the file gets somewhat corrupt, you may still retrieve the text. And .docx is an open format. All modern word processors use XML formats such as .docx (or .odt, for instance, which is the file format of OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice).

Office 2013 is more streamlined than Office 2010. It gets a more modern interface, and some additional features. If you are an Office power user, you may well give Office 2013 a try, it may be worth it.

Well, finally!!! The new interface is nice, but I have not yet found new features...

Did anybody actually like the new Pages?