Apple's iWork Selling Well

[sushi]

I cannot understand why people are buying ms office becaus openoffice is free and has more opions than 99% of all the people need.

Actually no.

If you work with folks who use Microsoft Office, then you just about need to have it to be compatable.

Open Office is fine, but not there yet. Nor are the other alternatives.

 

[~Shard~]

Er, Apple already owns Filemaker...

Sorry, my facetious comment obviously didn't get conveyed properly...

 

[sushi]

I had iWork '05 and ran Word alongside. I updated to iWork '06 and banished Word from my Mac forever. I am totally M$ free.

Frankly for me M$ Office is overkill. Entourage is clunky, Word is bloated, Excel was useless to me and Powerpoint was a hit and miss experience. When I consider the stable and more user friendly Apple alternatives I can't imagine why I would ever have it back clogging up my ram and chewing up space on my hard drive.

Perhaps a lot of other Mac users have started to feel the same way (especially with the obvious disregard to Mac users M$ have recently displayed) and have migrated to iWork '06 as a stress free alternative.

Heck, my favorite Word Processor is FullWrite Professional 2.0. I use it for all of my personal correspondence.

However, because I deal with DoD, Government and large corporations I have to use Microsoft Office. No choice.

 

[gauchogolfer]

Thanks!

I just fired up grapher for the first time...thanks for the tip! Copy/paste as PDF works fine, at least for simple equations. Really complicated ones may still necessitate LaTeX, but this looks to be a good time-saver. Now, if the Equation Palette in Grapher could only interface directly with Pages and Keynote, I'd be in business.
Thanks again for the suggestion...macRumors is great.

I've no real need for equations or plotting graphs like Grapher does so I've rarely used it but it copies to the clip board as a PDF. You then paste it in to Pages and you can scale it without losing quality as it's not a bitmap.

I'd presume Grapher isn't as comprehensive as Mathematica but it certainly provides some level of equation editing and plotting to placate the cries of 'I can't use Pages as it doesn't have equation editing'.

 

[sushi]

I have MS Office for Excel. In fact, I'll hug my copy again right now. When Apple is ready to play the spreadsheet game, I'm ready to try their app.

One reason Excel is so good, is that it was first created for the Mac.

What I miss were the days were the menu/features were the same between Office for the PC and Mac (Office 98 for the Mac and Office 97 for the PC).

It was so easy to go back and forth between the two back then.

Sometimes I wonder why Microsoft doesn't make DVD that contains Office for Mac, Winders, Linux. One DVD. One Code that will allow you to run it on three computers. And, all the same programs for all languages.

...wake me from my dream. Arg!

Sorry, my facetious comment obviously didn't get conveyed properly...

Okay time to receive your punishment...

...50 lashes with a wet noodle!

Speaking of Filemaker, it sure has improved over the years.

 

[~Shard~]

Okay time to receive your punishment...

...50 lashes with a wet noodle!

Oh damn, not again!

 

[CubaTBird]

are you guys forgetting that microsoft will be developing office for the mac for AT LEAST the next five years? what's it to apple to make a spreadsheet program?

 

[TheMasin9]

improvements

if they have made improvements on 05, this is good, i do believe they could make pages word competetive, just build in a good spell checker and more formatting options and it should be good to go.

 

[kenaustus]

I doubt that MS is worried about iWork - even if it has Numbers and FileMaker Jr. added.

What I believe they WERE worried about is getting caught with their pants down, like they were when the Intel announcement was made. As I understand it MS will continue with their profitable Office for Mac for 5 years and in return Apple will give then more advanced notice on moves they are making.

I was one that was expecting iWork 06 to be a full replacement of AppleWorks and that the db would be an "Express" version of FileMaker - allowing for easy migration to the full versions. Numbers would match Excel feature for feature, but would handle the majority of the functions that are generally used by non-engineering types. The other feature of AppleWorks - lots of wizards and templates - are stuff that the newer programmers can take care of and learn "The Apple Way" in the process.

Oh well, there is always iWork 07 . . .

 

[sushi]

FileMaker Jr.

LOL. Good one.

 

[sbb155]

Microsoft worried? NOPE

MS is not worried at all about apple. They could crush apple in a second. HOW? My not making office for mac. Sorry, but in the educational and corporate markets, 100% compatibility with office is necessary. When I email a document to my coworkers, it must be 100% compatible. Same with PPT. This is the problem that apple will always have. Believe me, apple needs MS to keep making office. Now, all the Mac-faithful who are disillusioned will criticize this, but not those in a corporate market. Apple will always be ok for artists, but to gain real market share, they need to continue to have office. And that is why apple and MS are inexorably linked.
Just one person;s opinions

FOr what it is worth, the apple products are the best for movies/video/music. But for corporate work, there are problems.

 

[ppnkg]

MsOffice works fine on the mac. There is a mac lab at my uni with lots of mac minis and I use Word and Excel there. At home I've got NeoOffice, which is ok generally but it's slow and becomes less responsive with more complicated/long documents.
I'm still thinking whether I should buy MsOffice for my home mac. It's not a question of being pure or hating microsoft. It's a question of doing things without unnecessary complications.

For my thesis, I use LaTex+TeXShop. It's the best option. For longer texts with bibliography and tables etc `office' apps are simply not good enough.

 

[freeny]

Never even considered iWork. Perhaps after reading these testimonials ill give it a try....

 

[windmaomao]

Simple. Interoperability between Word and Writer is not perfect yet. I've had situations where I was handed a Word doc that got mangled when I tried to edit it in OpenOffice. I spent half an hour re-editing it in Word (on a PC, no less) and then I spent the money to buy Office.

Personally, I still use AppleWorks when I don't have to share my documents, but many people still need Office, simply because everyone else still has office.

very true, same here

 

[kenaustus]

MS is not worried at all about apple. They could crush apple in a second.

And there is an army of lawyers at the Department of Justice who would jump on this with hours of the press release. Then add the other countries that don't love MS. The cost to MS would far exceed the profits the Mac version brings in each year.

 

[windmaomao]

are you guys forgetting that microsoft will be developing office for the mac for AT LEAST the next five years? what's it to apple to make a spreadsheet program?

oops, that depends who wants to get the money eventually

MS is not worried at all about apple. They could crush apple in a second. HOW? My not making office for mac. Sorry, but in the educational and corporate markets, 100% compatibility with office is necessary. When I email a document to my coworkers, it must be 100% compatible. Same with PPT. This is the problem that apple will always have. Believe me, apple needs MS to keep making office. Now, all the Mac-faithful who are disillusioned will criticize this, but not those in a corporate market. Apple will always be ok for artists, but to gain real market share, they need to continue to have office. And that is why apple and MS are inexorably linked.
Just one person;s opinions

disagree. It depends on what you define crush, think about firefox and os x tiger and linux. It's all about making money and the same time inspiring people.

p.s I use opera though

 

[aegisdesign]

if they have made improvements on 05, this is good, i do believe they could make pages word competetive, just build in a good spell checker and more formatting options and it should be good to go.

It uses the OSX Spell checker. What's wrong with that? It could do with a grammar checker perhaps.

More formatting options? It already has more than Word. Can word do shadows? reflections? irregular and regular masks? opacity? gradients? It's one area where Pages is certainly not weak.

MS is not worried at all about apple. They could crush apple in a second. HOW? My not making office for mac. Sorry, but in the educational and corporate markets, 100% compatibility with office is necessary. When I email a document to my coworkers, it must be 100% compatible. Same with PPT. This is the problem that apple will always have.

I don't believe that for a second.

1) Email your cow-orkers PDFs if they don't need to edit the documents directly. I get emailed so many Word documents for me to look at of which all I need to do is read them. They don't need to be in Word and often as a PDF they're much smaller. A lot of the time they don't even need to be in any document format - how many times do you get some office newbie typing a memo in word and then emailing you a word document that's just text? It's bizarre.

2) Microsoft is opening up it's document formats finally to XML in Office 12 making it easier for other companies to interoperate with native Office formats. They'll have to because of EU laws and more enlightened businesses.

I've already worked on a number of projects with organisations where they don't allow proprietary document formats such as Word (or for that matter Apple's Pages).

Apple and others will not always have the problem of having to be 100% compatible. And in any case Apple and Microsoft have formalised an agreement committing MS to a further 5 years of Office for the Mac. By that time the office suite landscape may have substantially changed and hopefully software vendors can compete on features and not MS Word compatibility.

 

[hayesk]

Let's go the other way. Is there going to be a decent long technical document writer for MacOS X. Now that Adobe has given up on FrameMaker (why they bought it in the first place is beyond me), there is nothing in that area.

Word simply cannot cut it when collaborating on 500+ page documents. It crashes constantly, cannot keep cross-references straight, and has weak style enforcement.

 

[Lynxpro]

Compared to MS Word, OpenOffice is just clunky and sucks. Compared to WordPerfect, MS Word is just clunky and sucks. I just sent an email to Corel telling them if they will re-release WordPerfect for Tiger and include ODF support, I will buy it.

I'd really like to see Google buy up the remnants of WordPerfect, open sourced it, and made it as free as OpenOffice. Such a move would give Steve Ballmer a heart attack when Microsoft's share price collapsed.

 

[gauriemma]

I didn't realise WordPerfect Suite was still being sold. I thought, Novell.. Borland, nope.. errr..... Corel had given up on it. ( WP has been sold on more times than a hooker ;-) ).


Personally, I always thought WP was a far better word processor than Word - and generally, far more innovative ( in the 90s ).

I used to use WordStar back in, oh, '86-'87. How's that selling these days?

 

[cgc]

I cannot understand why people are buying ms office becaus openoffice is free and has more opions than 99% of all the people need.

OpenOffice is ugly, slow, and very unMac-like...

 

[bousozoku]

I used to use WordStar back in, oh, '86-'87. How's that selling these days?

That sounds more like WordStar 2000, the graphical version. I still have WordStar 3.3 on my CP/M machine. It works but for some reason, word processors that fit into 64KB don't sell well these days. Those things were fast though but of course, you had to guess at how it would look finally. WYSIDNWYG (What You See Is Definitely Not What You Get--Of course, that could be applied to the Windows 3.x versions of MS Word also.)

The WordPerfect people really held on too long to version 5.1, including porting it to Atari ST and Amiga and Macintosh with minimal changes. I guess their market has changed a bit since Data General is out of business.

 

[Zatko]

PDF export is horrible

Not true. It has perfect exporting ability which is what causes the problem.

iWork 05 and many other applications on the Mac export PDF to the latest PDF v1.5 spec which wasn't supported until very recently by Adobe in it's reader. The workaround for iWork 05 in Tiger at least was to use 'Print' and then 'Save As...' and select PDF/X as the output. Otherwise transparency and shadows don't work.

With iWork 06, Apple seem to have realised that exporting to the latest spec wasn't actually good news for compatibility with users who've not updated their PDF reader and they now export in PDF v1.4 specification which anyone with Adobe Acrobat 5.0 or later can read. This is also good news if you send your output to a print shop as most of them are way behind the times.

Sorry but it is true. PDF/X does indeed fix many of the issues, but you are rewarded by quality degradation, which for me makes it not an option.

Here's an example of Pages excellent PDF export capabilities...
Showing the same PDF created by Pages in Acrobat 7.0.5 and in Preview:

http://www.caffeinatedconsulting.biz/apple/pages/pages.html

 

[areyouwishing]

I truly wish Apple and Microsoft could co-develop Office. Use the MS name to comfort the IT department, and have Apple's style.

In the enterprise Entourage trumps the "iCal, Address Book, Mail" combo, but the later has a much better interface. If Apple created a PIM that integrated into Exchange or an IMAP-LDAP combo, I would buy iWork in a heart beat.

Take Apple's mail as the base, stick in iCal, Address Book, a today screen, and iSync and we've got the best PIM in the world. See below and fill in the blanks.

 

[kwajo.com]

I use iWork for all my essays and presentations, it's a beauty for everything I need it for, especially Keynote. the new versions that just came out are greta improvements, I especially like the new comments feature in Pages. It's great for making note of things I need to revise later