Apple Updates iWork Apps With iOS 18, watchOS 11, and macOS Sequoia Features

[Apple Knowledge Navigator]

My use case probably mirrors others, where I’m essentially ‘locked in’ to Office since the file formats are industry standard.

However, there are still genuine reasons why I choose some of these apps. Keynote is all-round a nicer app to use than PowerPoint and is just as effective. Excel absolutely owns Numbers unless you’re creating basic documents, which is fine for more personal/home projects. And I’d argue Pages is nicer to use than Word if only because of the object handling and sidebar formatting pane.

Of course, the one sticking point for Office compatibility is formatting. I often exchange documents with colleagues and feel forced to use the most basic and boring fonts only because I know it’ll be on their Windows machine.

 

[spittt]

I use Pages and Notes for work regularly. The Collaborate feature on these apps allows you to share Pages and Notes files with office staff or spouse as needed. Makes for great productivity teamwork at the office or just co-ordinating things like shopping lists with the wife.

I would never trust putting any of my personal or business info in Word or Google Docs as Microsoft and Google appear eager to scrape all your data just to train their AI agents and also target you with ads. Why people put all their personal details into a phone made by a search engine is beyond me.

 

[iStorm]

Still no dark mode icon?

There's dark mode icons now...

 

[tostatetheobvious]

I've used Numbers from almost the beginning in my work as both a systems engineer and an electrical engineer. Ditto on Keynote for presentations to customers and colleagues.

I much prefer them over Microsoft's.

Why do you prefer them? Genuinely curious as I can't fathom the advantage.

 

[citysnaps]

Why do you prefer them? Genuinely curious as I can't fathom the advantage.

They're far easier to use for what I like to do. And free, rather than costing a lot. They've been well supported by Apple over the years.

I'd probably feel differently if I was a professional accountant.

 

[StellarVixen]

Does anyone actually use these tools?

I can't imagine a scenario where even Apple accountants or engineers would use Numbers of all things over Excel

Every day.

Excel is superior but not that superior. It's price worth paying to be Google and Microsoft free imho.

To each their own.

 

[marzer]

Does anyone actually use these tools?

I can't imagine a scenario where even Apple accountants or engineers would use Numbers of all things over Excel

I try, god knows try because they are freebies...but editing is so clunky in iWorks compared to Office and office alternatives. Editing cells and formulas in Numbers is what makes me remember why I dislike iWorks so much. The amount of clicking to do the simplest entries would cripple me with carpel tunnel.

 

[techpr]

I've never seen anyone using iWork apps.

I use Keynote every day and Numbers 2-3 times a week. Keynote is way way superior to PowerPoint.

 

[london_apple]

Does anyone actually use these tools?

I can't imagine a scenario where even Apple accountants or engineers would use Numbers of all things over Excel

I use Numbers for my personal budget and financial planning. It's actually quite sick... I've integrated shortcuts for adding line items for spending, automated when using Tap to Pay. It's quite 🔥

 

[Heelpir8]

I noticed Numbers spreadsheets I copy/paste directly into Fastmail emails are now properly formatted. Two thumbs up.

 

[e-coli]

Does anyone actually use these tools?

I can't imagine a scenario where even Apple accountants or engineers would use Numbers of all things over Excel

I work at a Fortune 50 company and we use Keynote extensively. It crushes PowerPoint. The Office interface is an absolute disgrace. It actively works against the user. Also, the Keynote collaboration tools are far superior.

 

[citysnaps]

I work at a Fortune 50 company and we use Keynote extensively. It crushes PowerPoint. The Office interface is an absolute disgrace. It actively works against the user. Also, the Keynote collaboration tools are far superior.

A similar experience. In the past I worked for a small Palo Alto based company that designed full-custom signal processing ASICs. I used Keynote for presentations and Numbers for analysis. They were great tools for our needs.

We were eventually acquired by a very large 30,000 employee US semiconductor company where PCs were mandated. Engineers I worked with there were jealous that we could still use Macs and Keynote for quickly producing superior customer presentations, and using Number for analysis.

 

[Bodhitree]

I use Pages for nearly all my writing projects, it’s sufficient to my needs, powerful and very straightforward to use. I’ve used Word for a number of years on PCs and I was nearly drowning in options.

Excel is better than Numbers for a power user. I made a number of very complex spreadsheets that wouldn’t have been possible in iWork.

I like the new document browser.

 

[iHorseHead]

I occasionally use Numbers for basic calculations but it doesn't fully support some complex functions found on Excel spreadsheets that is use for work.

New versions of iWork abandon older OSes, so I stick with Excel which works fine on older OS ( I'm using Monterey.... its only 3 years old!)

You get what you pay for!

Everybody knows that Microsoft Office is better than iWork. Always has been.
Apple abandons older OSes always so fast it's ridiculous.

 

[iHorseHead]

A similar experience. In the past I worked for a small Palo Alto based company that designed full-custom signal processing ASICs. I used Keynote for presentations and Numbers for analysis. They were great tools for our needs.

We were eventually acquired by a very large 30,000 employee US semiconductor company where PCs were mandated. Engineers I worked with there were jealous that we could still use Macs and Keynote for quickly producing superior customer presentations, and using Number for analysis.

I very highly doubt it since you can make great things in powerpoint that you can't in keynote

 

[citysnaps]

I very highly doubt it since you can make great things in powerpoint that you can't in keynote

Nope. That's the way it was.

 

[iHorseHead]

Nope. That's the way it was.

Doubt it. I remember even back in 2011 I had to switch to powerpoint because keynote was just that bad.

 

[citysnaps]

Doubt it. I remember even back in 2011 I had to switch to powerpoint because keynote was just that bad.

Feel free to doubt all you want. That's the way it was. I'm glad you're happy with Powerpoint.

 

[oldmacs]

I love iWork, but Apple is so lazy with it. Still features missing from when they revamped it ages and ages ago.

 

[KooL BeAnZ]

There's dark mode icons now...

View attachment 2420022

Reboot fixed it!

Thanks ☺️

 

[svish]

Good to know about the changes in the different apps.

 

[Performa6220CD]

Excel is a great tool that people are grandmasters at and some use all day everyday. I get it.

I recently did a development job and Excel on my Mac was required at first because it was a source of inputs to the web application (xlsx). At least until the web application being built replaced the use of those files.

I was able to open all xlsx files in Excel on the Mac in read only mode. But stubbornly refused to pay Microsoft to “subscribe to use a spreadsheet” for 19.99 a month and install One Drive or use it in the cloud. I tried to find a buy it own it version and it didn’t exist (or was outdated).

Numbers did most of what I wanted and exported as an .xlsx to work with in the app being developed. A bit alien, I bet if I had some immersion time and ran through some tutorials I would become proficient. My only knock is that the visual presentation of the spreadsheet seems overly emphasized. It felt like GarageBand vs Logic (Excel). Perhaps a version a bit more business focused like a Numbers Pro that closely emulates Excel workflows and makes use of the shared RAM on these M chips for warp processing of massive sheets? On machine LLM processing or declarative analysis “give me a vertical stacked bar chart of the whatever vs something column and place it in cell G4 and put a short sentence analysis below it” I bet a lot of people would pay $200 for that.

If you’ve yet to experience the miserable user experience of Excel in the browser, with OneDrive/Sharepoint and “seamlessly” opening in the desktop version then you’re lucky. It’s all focused on routing you into their paid ecosystem and at the Enterpise level keeping them entrenched paying for tiers. This sort of garbage is where people start to look away from “industry standards” like Excel for buy it once, no subscription, focused tools with a lighter interface that don’t put proprietary information online. Look at how Adobe has driven people from a lot of their products with similar business model to quality alternatives from smaller companies like Pixelmator and Affinity.

 

[bd700pilot]

Everybody knows that Microsoft Office is better than iWork. Always has been.
Apple abandons older OSes always so fast it's ridiculous.

Huh… I didn’t know that…

Been using and enjoying Apple’s apps for years and love them. Far cleaner interface and integration and it’s not a MS product. Guess I’ve been wrong this whole time.

 

[iHorseHead]

Huh… I didn’t know that…

Been using and enjoying Apple’s apps for years and love them. Far cleaner interface and integration and it’s not a MS product. Guess I’ve been wrong this whole time.

Every business and every school I've worked at has used Microsoft Office. Very rarely, only once I've seen Google Docs.

 

[bd700pilot]

Every business and every school I've worked at has used Microsoft Office. Very rarely, only once I've seen Google Docs.

Couldn’t care less what they use. I can export to those formats with Apple. No MS or Google crapware on my devices if at all possible.