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It's official: iWork is a flop

Pages is absolutely much, much better than AppleWorks. Two days after I started using it, AppleWorks was history on my Macs (and good riddance!).

Yes, Pages can be slow, but I'm using it daily on a G4/450 Cube without being too annoyed with that issue. I suspect it will be better optimized in future versions.

I wonder if anyone thinks FileMaker is a flop. After all, they give away free trial versions.
 
lets face it, iWork is MUCH better than appleworks, and anything microsoft makes me sick.

i thought the templates in Pages were great fun, i think it is good, although its easy to get pissed of with it. theres no way to change the background colour of ur pae for example. and if there is, i couldnt find it after 20mins. either way, its not acceptable, especially for apple who normally make such user friendly apps.
 
iWork is great! I use it for all documents I create now. And now I can say that I have 2 pieces of Microsoft my macs - Windows media player and Excel :D

aussie_geek
 
iWork is a good first try. If Pages is compared to Publisher, not Word, then I say it is a decent program. As far as a basic word processor, it is just - okay - not spectacular or even good. Keynote is a decent alternative to Powerpoint without a doubt. I'd say on the next released version Pages will be much more competitive. For now, I have to agree with the flop assessment. Apple has scored a perfect 10 on its belly flop into the pool of Word alternatives. Just don't try to take notes or outline in Pages. It's the most frustrating experience to say the least. It can't even handle some very basic features Word has been utilizing since its conception. Then again, we should be comparing Apples to Apples. I haven't used Apple Works and, based on what's been written in this thread about it, I'm glad I never had the pleasure (or misfortune). If it was not up to par with Pages, that's pretty sad. This doesn't mean they won't have a star performer on their hands in the future. Only time will tell.
 
I plan on trying the trial version that came with Tiger. I had already planned on using iWork shortly after Tiger came out, so this trial will be a nice way for me to "test" the waters before I take the plunge.

Appleworks is nice, I just think it has a few limiting factors.
 
yeah pages is slow (on a 667MHz TiBook, ymmv), but it's a 1.0 piece of software. i'm sure iWork 06 will see a much improved version.

but then Cells will be a 1.0 product so you'll have to wait for iWork 07

;)
 
Inspector Lee said:
In retrospect, I should've tried OpenOffice.
Click to expand...
You might want to check out NeoOffice/J. It is a mac port of OpenOffice.org and it is pretty good. It doesn't require X11 windowing as it does it natively I BELIEVE. But I'm not sure exactly. In any case, it is still a bit more sluggish than say MS Office, but it is much faster than it used to be and gets better with each version.
-Kevin
 
I have iWorks'05 and except for spreadsheets, I've stopped using AppleWorks.

Yes, Pages is not complete compared to Microsoft Word, but it should catch up over eacg release, and except for one misisng featord, Pages is better than the AppleWorks document editor.

I exepct iWorks'06 will have Pages 2 and be even better. It should also have Cells (or Sheets) - a spreadsheet program. This would be a version 1.0 and would be at least as good as the AppleWorks spreadsheet, but might take a couple of revisions to get up around the features that Excel has. I think the main thing that would be nice is all the fetaures in the AppleWork spreadsheets plus the ability to store more than one sheet in a file - that is the main feature missing that Excel has that I notice.
 
I think it's a pain in the ass to use. I have a hard time with Pages, though Keynote 2 is not that bad. However, I did a history project in pages and got 150/150 so I was pretty happy.
 
I agree - it is a pain.

StarbucksSam said:
I think it's a pain in the ass to use. I have a hard time with Pages, though Keynote 2 is not that bad. However, I did a history project in pages and got 150/150 so I was pretty happy.
Click to expand...

It is hard to believe that a company that could produce Tiger also released an unfinished product like iWork.
 
Yeah, Im not a fan. I bought it, but would of been much better off spending the money on iLife '05. I'm not surprised its not selling very well.
 
OCOTILLO said:
It is hard to believe that a company that could produce Tiger also released an unfinished product like iWork.
Click to expand...

Keynote is very impressive and Pages is only v.1, Puma wasn't too hot either! ;)

I'm personally of the opinion that Pages is pretty handy (as a desktop publishing tool, rather than a word processor) and it'll be interesting too see how the iWorks package develops.

Oh and it's hardly 'official' now is it?! :rolleyes:
 
I don't want Pages to "catch up" to Word. I'd be like chasing a boat anchor all the way to the bottom! The biggest problem with Word is feature bloat. I want simplicity in my word processors. I want it to get out of the way of my writing as much as possible. Slowness aside, Pages is pretty good at doing this. The way it handles the creation and modification of styles is a major improvement over both Word and AppleWorks, and this is a big deal IMO.
 
i really want to like pages, but i do need to do some heavy formatting every now and then with my work, and word works better for some of that stuff. Pages is slow, and its interface could be a little bit better in my opinion, but other than that i think it works very well. ill definitely be looking forward to Pages 2 to see what that may offer, hopefully apple will progress this 'suite' along faster than iLife seems to be going
 
For me, i bought office because everyone at college uses MS word. But i'm used to work and pages has nice templates but in college they just want a paper without graphics on it. This isn't high school anymore... And powerpoint is ok, i only used it once and managed just fine with it. I don't do many presentations yet.... so there is no need for me
 
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