iWork '07 with Spreadsheet (Screenshot)

[ready2switch]

I feel that Excel is the strongest of the MS Office apps, so it will be interesting to see how this new iWork app turns out. On one hand, it would need to be pretty powerful and slick to make me want to give up Excel - then again, I am a bit of a power-user of Excel. On the other hand, Apple is all about simplicity, and perhaps they will be targeting "light" users who will find the basic features and ease-of-use more appealing and less intimidating than Excel. I guess we'll have to see...

Agreed. Excel is by far the "best" program out of MS Office. Word is just horrid. It has a ton of features and capabilities, yes, but for "power" or true professional users, it thinks too much. True professionals don't need the auto-formatting or any other assumptions that add massive amounts of code to your documents. Excel still has some of this, but it seems that its assumptions are much more basic, which allows power users to start from scratch, rather than undo/turn off/reformat every little thing.

I have not used any of the iWork programs, so I can't comment specifically on them as they are. What I would hope for in future revisions of iWork (or any Office replacement suite) is very basic applications (be it word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, or anything else) that have every feature I could ever need plus the ones I didn't know I needed. Nothing forced on me, but everything available to me. And the deal-breaker: Office compatible.

iWork as it is now may not be aimed at true professional users, but I believe in time and with development it can and should be the better alternative to Office. From what I know and have seen from Apple, they should be able to accomplish this and I look forward to seeing their 07 product, even if it contains a few "first tries".

 

[MacVault]

iWork compared to office? lol

iWork is like fisher price toys of productivity.

Microsoft office crumbles everything related to iWork.

I know people hate microsoft but man their office suite is
1 bad ass software.

Sometimes apple feels like they belong in the 2-10 year category
i love simplicity but man comapring apple and microsoft
is so diffrent i dont see how this rivalry carried for so long.

You're exactly right! I agree 100%! Apple seems to sacrifice features for simplicity and this makes many of their products seem like fisher price toys, such as Pages, iCal, Mail, etc, and probably the worst case of fisher-price-ness unfortunately is the OS X GUI.

 

[adrianblaine]

You're exactly right! I agree 100%! Apple seems to sacrifice features for simplicity and this makes many of their products seem like fisher price toys, such as Pages, iCal, Mail, etc, and probably the worst case of fisher-price-ness unfortunately is the OS X GUI.

have you looked at the default look for XP lately? The epitomey of "fisher-price-ness". I don't particularly care for how Office '07 looks on Windows either...

 

[MacVault]

For just every day stuff, iWork is just fine, and a lot cheaper (much cheaper with the student discount). Office is overloaded with features that the average user doesn't use. As a simpler, cheaper alternative for those who do not need an advanced word processor iWork is fine.

But why not have all the features available for when you do need them. Everyone says MS Office is bloated or whatever but what's wrong with having the features there for when you need them??? I'd much rather have a few extra features show up in the menus than have to install/run a different Application when I do need the extra features. It is SOOO nice knowing I have features and options when I'm using MS Office. I don't know why people praise feature-less-ness in the name of simplicity. That just makes me want to throw up .

 

[adrianblaine]

But why not have all the features available for when you do need them. Everyone says MS Office is bloated or whatever but what's wrong with having the features there for when you need them??? I'd much rather have a few extra features show up in the menus than have to install/run a different Application when I do need the extra features. It is SOOO nice knowing I have features and options when I'm using MS Office. I don't know why people praise feature-less-ness in the name of simplicity. That just makes me want to throw up .

I'm not defending Apple's need to be simple, I just don't have a need for the advanced features of Word. I am mostly under the impression that Apple is using this time to perfect the applications in iWork while MS still makes Office for Mac. Better now than leaving people without anything if Office does get pulled.

 

[Machead III]

Pages is next to useless. Even as it stands with it's few current features, it's slow, clunky and unberable to use reguarly.

As much as I hate to admit it, Word is a pretty excellent piece of software, and 2007 looks even better - the complex features are there if you need them, and even the biggest technophobe now knows which buttons they're interested in.

But most of all, it's fast - it loads quickly, it responds quickly, it's interface is slick and sharp. This is what Pages lacks most - it really does feel Fisher price.

Apple could and should be ready to take Pages up a notch to directly rival Word.

 

[Xyl]

have you looked at the default look for XP lately? The epitomey of "fisher-price-ness". I don't particularly care for how Office '07 looks on Windows either...

It reminds me of those horrific Teletubbies.

 

[MacVault]

have you looked at the default look for XP lately? The epitomey of "fisher-price-ness". I don't particularly care for how Office '07 looks on Windows either...

Oh yea, I was network admin for a couple years in an XP/Server 2003 environment, and maybe the "default look" seems toy-ish, but let's talk about features, right-click menu integration, UI consistency, etc - this is where MS blows Apple away! MS gives the user access to just about whatever option the user could ever imagine. Apple, on the other hand, tells the user what they should or shouldn't imagine/want.

 

[p0intblank]

Yay for a new application! Personally I'm more excited to see what iLife '07 has to offer, but iWork updates are good, too.

 

[dernhelm]

I'm not defending Apple's need to be simple, I just don't have a need for the advanced features of Word. I am mostly under the impression that Apple is using this time to perfect the applications in iWork while MS still makes Office for Mac. Better now than leaving people without anything if Office does get pulled.

I agree. I have both Office and iWork, and in the 80% case I use pages because it is quicker and easier to get obvious stuff done. Example: try mixing columns and tables in word and you will quickly go insane. But in iWork it just does what I want it to - it seems to guess what I'm after and work with me instead of against me. The same goes for placement of images, background colors and text wrapping. In all of these, I am 100% faster in Pages than I am in Word, and I generally like the results better when I am done. I do agree that the "inspector" panel was a little weird at first, but once I got used to it, I actually liked it better than "button bars" that never seem to be displayed when you want them to be.

There are times when I need the "extras" office provides, and I am glad I purchased it, but it infuriates me more often than not when I want to do some of the simplest things.

Keynote is simply better than powerpoint for what I do, and so I never use powerpoint except to view stuff sent to me from PC users. My own slideshows are all done in keynote. But then again I don't do that many.

For myself iWork '07 is a no-brainer purchase. I didn't upgrade to iWork '06 (because I didn't need most of the new features and didn't feel like spending the money). So I am ready for an update to the suite. I just hope the cost does not rise too much with the addition of the spreadsheet component.

 

[lonepilgrim]

Everybody requires you to have MS Office. Studens, small businesses and even a lot of home users will dump macs in droves when there is no MS Office option.

No one requires you to have Office. Office is far more complex than probably 99% of people need, business users included.

More and more people are buying Macs for home because they don't want an ugly Dell running Office like they already have in their own office.

 

[2ndPath]

But why not have all the features available for when you do need them. Everyone says MS Office is bloated or whatever but what's wrong with having the features there for when you need them??? I'd much rather have a few extra features show up in the menus than have to install/run a different Application when I do need the extra features. It is SOOO nice knowing I have features and options when I'm using MS Office. I don't know why people praise feature-less-ness in the name of simplicity. That just makes me want to throw up .

Yes, leaving out features for the sake of simplicity is not good. What rather needs to be done is to organize the features in a coherent way. I haven't used office so often recently, but one of the biggest problems of many of the professional applications is not the number of features, but the way they are organized. In photoshop for example there are several adjustment menues which do essentially the same but in several different ways. I guess it's the result of the organic growing of the applications and refining this into a coherent GUI is a challenge but would be very nice.

 

[islanders]

This is a good website that compares the features between Pages, Word and FrameMaker. It’s a little outdated but informative.

If you think you might be interested in Frame as an option, please sign the petition to bring Frame back to OSX.

http://www.fm4osx.org/comp.html

 

[2ndPath]

Oh yea, I was network admin for a couple years in an XP/Server 2003 environment, and maybe the "default look" seems toy-ish, but let's talk about features, right-click menu integration, UI consistency, etc - this is where MS blows Apple away! MS gives the user access to just about whatever option the user could ever imagine. Apple, on the other hand, tells the user what they should or shouldn't imagine/want.

I agree that vista offers a better access to more options, but in point of the consistency of the UI design I still think Mac OS is clearly ahead in the game.

 

[sishaw]

It all depends

on what you want to do. Pages is fine for putting together a newsletter or something, and for mixing formats, as people have suggested. For anyone doing serious writing, such as a legal brief, news article, fiction, etc., Pages is unusably slow. Even OpenOffice is better.

 

[Machead III]

Even simple aspects of Word's interface make it much more approachable.

Icons needs to be small and inconspicuous, you do want plenty of them on the tool bar because you don't want to have to dive into menus all the time...

Even framing the document on all sides over a background, in Word 07 one that's nicely beveled, keeps you look in the right places and make the whole thing easier on the eyes.

ie. this screenshot

http://www.mstechtoday.com/screenshots/vista/5308/word2007.PNG

 

[dernhelm]

Oh yea, I was network admin for a couple years in an XP/Server 2003 environment, and maybe the "default look" seems toy-ish, but let's talk about features, right-click menu integration, UI consistency, etc - this is where MS blows Apple away! MS gives the user access to just about whatever option the user could ever imagine. Apple, on the other hand, tells the user what they should or shouldn't imagine/want.

So humor me. What features are you talking about that blows away OS/X?

Right click integration? Pick an issue that hasn't already been made moot. Ever since the mighty mouse introduction, OS/X has right-click integration shipping with their products. And even before that - right click was available if you simply purchased a two button mouse. And please don't tell me that "you shouldn't have to purchase another mouse" because I don't use the two-button mouse that shipped with my Dell machine either - mostly because it was so terrible.

Now let's talk about some windows features. Like Search. Ever used search to search for files with funny extensions? Notice it can't find these files? Ever wonder why? Because by default Windows ships with the inherent inability to locate files with unknown extensions. Of course, you can turn it on - by making prodigious use of the famed windows right-click integration. Here are the steps: right click My Computer then choose Manage -> Services and Applications -> Indexing Service. (Breathe) Right click on Indexing Service choose Properties, click on the checkbox that says "Index files with unknown extensions" and click OK. Now search will find files with extensions that are "unknown", whatever that means.

Thank God for right-click integration. That is so much easier then pressing command-space and typing what I'm looking for. And what is with Apple anyway? How dare they assume that I would want spotlight to look in files that have "unknown" extensions. The nerve of that company! And no option to turn it off either! Unbearable!

 

[adrianblaine]

Oh yea, I was network admin for a couple years in an XP/Server 2003 environment, and maybe the "default look" seems toy-ish, but let's talk about features, right-click menu integration, UI consistency, etc - this is where MS blows Apple away! MS gives the user access to just about whatever option the user could ever imagine. Apple, on the other hand, tells the user what they should or shouldn't imagine/want.

This is why so many people don't like Windows. In many ways Windows is very advanced so the average user is very confused, but I have never found the Apple way telling me what I "should or shouldn't imagine/want." In many ways, the "keep it simple stupid" philosophy enable just the opposite and allow more productivity.

 

[Machead III]

"Keep it simple stupid" works in consumer media apps like iPhoto and iMovie, where users can upgrade to Aperture and FCP if they need increased power and sophistication, but the world is used to Word - the app that everyone from computer newbs to business users can use thanks to the ability for the human mind to ignore what it doesn't need to pay attention too.

When people word process, the amount of complexity in the tasks they perform may usually be low, usually be high, but can quickly alternate between the two, as is the nature of written language. Two apps doesn't work for word processing (TextEdit is for a level way below even consumer word processing anyway), so Pages needs to be as complex as Word, and just as, if not more, easy to navigate and intuitive in order to balance that out.

The solution is not Fisher Price word processing that may or may not be suitable for your needs every time you double click on a document to boot up your primary word processor, which pretty soon, will have to be Pages.

 

[lonepilgrim]

This is why so many people don't like Windows. In many ways Windows is very advanced so the average user is very confused, but I have never found the Apple way telling me what I "should or shouldn't imagine/want." In many ways, the "keep it simple stupid" philosophy enable just the opposite and allow more productivity.

Exactly right - Macs are computers for the rest of us. (More than twenty years later that Apple slogan is happily still very true.)

BTW if one is a 'serious' writer, then for all of Pages' supposed shortcomings I would contend that Word is not exactly one's best option either. Once you get into the tens of thousands of words it is as slow as molasses, and god help you if you want to make global style changes in a couple of clicks.

The fact that Word is seen as 'standard' or the benchmark for everything is just another repulsive example of Microsoft ideology.

So let's just see Pages for what it is - a nice consumer app that helps relatively inexperienced computer users make pretty looking documents.

 

[IJ Reilly]

What I'd love to see is a version of iWork that people would be eager to use instead of Office available *before* MS kills Office development, but I don't think that's likely to happen.

Which people? Some of us are already very happy with iWork as an alternative to Office. A number of others apparently aren't going to be satisfied until iWork turns into an Office clone, which if it happened, those of us who like the current direction Apple is taking will dislike very much.

 

[ready2switch]

This is why so many people don't like Windows. In many ways Windows is very advanced so the average user is very confused...

I have to disagree. In my experiences, Windows on the whole tries to cater to the "average" user and ends up with default options that more advanced users would rather not have to change or work around or disable.

As a personal example, the first things I do on a new Windows computer are change the look back to classic, change the start menu, change the control panel, change the way folders are displayed, turn off any auto-format or auto-correct in programs, remove toolbars, remove icons, and on and on. From my level of use, Windows is "dumbing-down" my work and trying too hard to help me do the work that I am very capable of doing on my own.

 

[~Shard~]

Perhaps one way Apple could bridge the gap between the powerful Excel and a more simplistic "light" spreadsheet app is by making some of the powerful, yet more commonly used/useful features easier to use. For instance, some of the formulae I use in Excel are quite advanced with regards to cell references, cross-sheet references, etc. I know how to do them, but try and explain the proper use of the $ in a formula to represent constants to some people and you'll lose them. Yet, people do need this functionality from time to time. Perhaps it will be this type of functionality which Apple will try and simplify in this spreadsheet app (among other things of course).

 

[IJ Reilly]

Agreed - I think iWorks is really aimed at home users who like to do the odd newsletter, monthly budgets etc. After all, the suite is considerably cheaper than MS Office (excluding edu dicounts etc).

Nonsense! I don't know where people get this idea. I am using Pages as our every-day word processor for our business, and it is perfectly acceptable in this role already, and will only improve. Just because I'm a business user, doesn't mean I need a word processor with four zillion poorly implemented features.

 

[clevin]

Nonsense! I don't know where people get this idea. I am using Pages as our every-day word processor for our business, and it is perfectly acceptable in this role already, and will only improve. Just because I'm a business user, doesn't mean I need a word processor with four zillion poorly implemented features.

errr.... u are business minority.