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Apple Releases iWork '09 9.0.3
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About the Office 2007 vs. the Mac versions. I personally like Office 2007 (on Windows) FAR better than the Mac versions of Office, especially the last 2008 thing. That is a mish-mash of interfaces of the worst frankenstein result, imo. They couldn't go full-on with the ribbon, so it ended up really, really weird and incoherent.
The ribbon in 2007 is basically fantastic. It takes the best parts of the pallete that MBU created and makes it far more usable in practice. IMO, best innovation to come from Microsoft in a long time. (Why the weird circle Office button, though? Ugh.)
Now, the problem with the ribbon is the adjustment period. If you are really diehard into the older methods you'll likely resist everything and make it painful for yourself. I teach classes using Office 2007 and I find it to be much more intuitive and graspable than the older stuff, especially for new users.
Just sayin'.
back on topic:
As far as the iWork upgrades. I'm always rooting for iWork, but there are always parts of it that drive me nuts. No angled labels in Numbers makes it impossible for me to work with my grade books the way I do in Excel and it makes anything I bring over from Excel unusable. Always a disappointment because I generally LOVE the rest of the way the app works. Pages, too.
All the office programs are in a weird place on all platforms because the use for them is getting antiquated. Not long ago there was a great article on Ars Technica about the waning utility of Word. Google Apps are becoming a much smarter solution and as they evolve to more fully featured apps, I think the middle ground is where most office work will get done eventually.
I'm glad Apple (and Microsoft) are also heading in that direction. Competition has done great things for all these solutions.
The ribbon in 2007 is basically fantastic. It takes the best parts of the pallete that MBU created and makes it far more usable in practice. IMO, best innovation to come from Microsoft in a long time. (Why the weird circle Office button, though? Ugh.)
Now, the problem with the ribbon is the adjustment period. If you are really diehard into the older methods you'll likely resist everything and make it painful for yourself. I teach classes using Office 2007 and I find it to be much more intuitive and graspable than the older stuff, especially for new users.
Just sayin'.
back on topic:
As far as the iWork upgrades. I'm always rooting for iWork, but there are always parts of it that drive me nuts. No angled labels in Numbers makes it impossible for me to work with my grade books the way I do in Excel and it makes anything I bring over from Excel unusable. Always a disappointment because I generally LOVE the rest of the way the app works. Pages, too.
All the office programs are in a weird place on all platforms because the use for them is getting antiquated. Not long ago there was a great article on Ars Technica about the waning utility of Word. Google Apps are becoming a much smarter solution and as they evolve to more fully featured apps, I think the middle ground is where most office work will get done eventually.
I'm glad Apple (and Microsoft) are also heading in that direction. Competition has done great things for all these solutions.
Office 2007 (windows) is a piece of garbage, and Office for Mac 2008 is another step down.
Although I do prefer iWork to either of these, my app of choice would be Office 2003 (windows)... go figure.
I grew up on 2003, it does everything I need it to do, and I know it inside and out... like literally, I know every feature... every one...
to be honest, the only time I ever fire up my old pc is to use 2003 PowerPoint, but I simply can't use any other version of ppt. keynote included, although I'm slowly warming up to it
To me, all text editors are the same, yes I prefer 2003 over any other, but all I need to do in a word program is type words.
I survived almost a month with just text edit
THANK GOD there is finally a direct iWork.com website.
It used to drive me insane having to search through emails to find a link to the document when I didn't have iWork on the computer I was using.
So happy
It used to drive me insane having to search through emails to find a link to the document when I didn't have iWork on the computer I was using.
So happy
IMO Office:mac 2008 got it pretty well right with what you can turn on and off *customisation! Definitely not something that Apple is likely to provide, and as it turns out, Microsoft are trending away from such themselves, hence no preferences for the ribbon in 2007. It decides what to show you, and leaves a huge amount to be desired. At least the fact that keyboard shortcuts from 2003 still work means one can still find things, whereas I've been using 2007 for work for about a year and only just found out the other way to bring up the font dialog, paragraph dialog, and styles pane ... a tiny glyph at the bottom right of the ribbon areas, so inferior to choosing options from a menu that I couldn't begin to describe.
Anyway, for instance with Word:mac 2008, you can set custom keyboard shortcuts to your heart's content, modify the menus themselves, hide the toolbar completely, as well as the sections of the formatting palette that you don't want to see appear, and you end up with a highly tailored interface that actually works quite well. There is a lot in the Ribbon that I would hide and change in the ribbon in the 2007 apps *just being able to have it vertical on the side à la the formatting palette would be great and save that valuable vertical screen real estate on a wide screen!
Back on iWork again, one big problem is that the apps disagree vehemently with their MS Office equivalents on how much content can fit on a page, with exactly the same margins and paper size. This means you can't rely on things looking the same on the Windows side with exports. Page and section breaks also tend to ... break in conversion. Anything with images becomes a nightmare to get looking good on both sides, and Pages just willy-nilly removes any content it doesn't like. I've just changed a 'text frame' to a 'text box' in a template from Word 2007, so that Pages doesn't just completely delete that content.
I have set up empty new documents for the iWork apps for creating Office-friendly files, and that helps a lot, and I guess once you learn the big problems, there is a lot you can avoid. Conveniently I'm pretty sure that will mean completely avoiding making graphs in Numbers ... boy is that a painful experience. Excel 2003 made the process pretty much foolproof. Excel 2007 made it so much harder I didn't think there was a beyond, until Numbers showed me the path
.
Template Chooser
When I update, I opened up a number of Pages documents immediately after (updating was a nice excuse to postpone some homework) and my Template Chooser failed to display any thumbnails and Numbers and Keynote failed to function correctly. Not sure what it was...but closing all of the applications again seemed to fix it. Just a heads up if anyone else runs into a similar/the same issue.
Edit: If the problem persists, relaunch Finder (force quit it from Activity Monitor).
When I update, I opened up a number of Pages documents immediately after (updating was a nice excuse to postpone some homework) and my Template Chooser failed to display any thumbnails and Numbers and Keynote failed to function correctly. Not sure what it was...but closing all of the applications again seemed to fix it. Just a heads up if anyone else runs into a similar/the same issue.
Edit: If the problem persists, relaunch Finder (force quit it from Activity Monitor).
Keynote needs audio update to be usable
I took the 30 day trial of Keynote recently, and it was very pretty. But I was doing a music history presentation and Keynote totally lacks basic audio features like cueing music over more than one slide. This made it pretty much unusable for me. I wrote Apple Feedback with my concerns after several of us tried very hard to hack around this in the discussion lists.
http://www.apple.com/feedback/
Is Keynote a dead loss when it comes to music?
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10137719#10137719
I'd love for there to be an audio update for Keynote. I'd buy it for that.
I took the 30 day trial of Keynote recently, and it was very pretty. But I was doing a music history presentation and Keynote totally lacks basic audio features like cueing music over more than one slide. This made it pretty much unusable for me. I wrote Apple Feedback with my concerns after several of us tried very hard to hack around this in the discussion lists.
http://www.apple.com/feedback/
Is Keynote a dead loss when it comes to music?
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10137719#10137719
I'd love for there to be an audio update for Keynote. I'd buy it for that.