The latest two updates of the office suite apps by Apple have me rethinking checking them out - seriously - again, seeing stock market and finance options being reinforced. I'm still not deleting my iWork '09 installation and hoping it works on macOS 10.13 (ditto GarageBand 6.0.5)!
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Apple Releases Updates for Pages, Numbers, and Keynote on iOS and Mac
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Aww, so close, but not quite there yet. If they could just add support for pivot tables in Numbers...!
While MS Word and MS Excel are considered by all that use both iWorks and MS Office as superior, experts have a strong consensus that Keynote is better than PowerPoint.
I would argue that for certain tasks, Pages and Numbers are the better products if you are proficient in their use (because they function distinctly differently than MS Office). They are stronger when having simple tasks to be accomplished. I also favor Pages for newsletters over MS Word. Naturally if it is complex layout that I would use InDesign if available.
Any academic paper that requires any sort of citation is easier using MS Word because of its References tool and Source Manager.
95% of people use Excel to display data and generally only use some very basic functions. For this crowd, Numbers is superior. The fact that you can have multiple, independent tables on the same sheet is really nice.
But yes, Numbers needs better conditional formatting, and for many, pivot tables.
But yes, Numbers needs better conditional formatting, and for many, pivot tables.
Pages is miles ahead of Word in:
- Responsiveness
- Font rendering
- Making tables
- Graphic heavy documents
- Generating equations (since last update)
Add that to a simpler user interface, and Pages becomes a really good app.
Same!
We're not alone, I've emailed two other people with the news that it is back.
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Meh, they really need to go the route of SPSS. Pivot Tables is too Excel style, I only see people use Excel for flat file databases these days. Excel is a dying app.
I hate word. How does backspace suddenly change the font, the font size, color and paragraph justification for the text BEYOND the cursor?!?!
Move a text box by 5 pixels and it shifts four pages down, inside out and upside down.
Grrrrrrrr.
I see people around my office inside Excel constantly. Its is hardly dying. It has much more sophisticated conditional formatting than Numbers has. It has much more robust formulas. Its ability to display Spark Lines has made it a go to tool for statisticians in many fields. Those people would never consider using Pages for the work they do.
Personally, what I do can easily be done with Pages and Excel is overkill. But I wish it has Spark Lines.
It really comes down to "know multiple tools, and know when to use the right one at the right time." Don't limit yourself because of bias.
Thanks for the explanation.
Also... hearing about linked textboxes took me back to high school and Aldus PageMaker.
And... Venture Publisher!
I've developed nearly a hundred presentations in a professional capacity (not as in, I made presentations for meetings at work like everyone does but as the actual end product at a marketing agency) in both Keynote and Powerpoint and find Keynote is much faster to work in than PowerPoint - the fact you can work with vectors is huge, and the application rarely gets bogged down when working with huge files. PowerPoint does have some awesome features I'd love to see come to Keynote, but it still takes significantly longer to get the same quality output.
Numbers has nothing on Excel for flexibility and depth, and the same is true for Pages on Word outside of desktop publishing ...but Microsoft has Publisher which is more powerful for desktop publishing too. In that case - do you want a simple tool that does a little of both, or two separate tools that are more complicated but do much more? Are you working on a brochure/one-off item? Or is it a monthly 125 page magazine? (not that you'd use Microsoft Publisher for professional magazine work either!)
And of course, are you more comfortable with Apple's UX approach or Microsoft's UX approach? You can click between a dozen panes till your fingers are sore, or handle more ribbons than a rhythmic gymnastic competition. Pick your poison.
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Pages is finally returning to ’09 levels, only what, 8 years later? I have finally raised my rating in the App Store to three stars. There are still a few basic word processing features that are missing, but I now have faith that apple is actually going to make this a usable product.
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Interesting. I don't use a word processor very often more a spreadsheets user but could give it a whirl if I'm using a word processor again.
Thanks!
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Powerpoint is a resource pig! Thanks!
Forget about Numbers then. In fact, forget about Excel on a Mac. I actually have a desktop windows PC just to use Excel. It is not nearly as powerful as my MacBook Pro, but Excel runs much more stable and is able to perform demanding operations much faster than my Mac in very large databases.
This is my pet peeve. The vast majority of Excel spreadsheets I see contain zero calculations. It is being used overwhelmingly for making simple tables. This is like climbing into an 18-wheeler for a run to the grocery store. When I need a table I drop one into a Pages document. So much easier to format (and to add a formula or two, if I need them).
Wait.... Apple's word processor didn't let you type directly on the page?
Not if you used the “Publisher” file type. If you used document, yes.
I believe that your iWork '09 apps should function perfectly fine with 10.13. However, from what I remember, they are 32-bit apps, so the end of the line is coming soon. With 10.14, Apple will "aggressively warn" you when you open them and there may be compromises. I would imagine that they will drop support in 10.15.
However, I wonder if you could just run Sierra or High Sierra in Virtualbox (or other virtualization product) to take advantage of these old, but useful apps? That's what I am going to look into for Office 2011 since it will not run past Sierra. I have no desire to buy Office 2016.
This, while they're advertising the $1300 iPad as a "full fledged" "super computer".
Completely ridiculous.
They are free office is not, and they are integrated into iOS and macOS with continuity and a bunch of other stuff all natively.