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Microsoft Bashes Apple's iWork Software, New iPads

dysamoria said:
Check again. They might have removed all that in iWork 2013. It still doesn't have pivot tables.

No, not really. Apple just ported the iOS versions to Mac OS X and trashed the existing Mac OS X versions. That's why so many features that USED to be there are now GONE.
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Actually No. I am running iWork 2013 and it has Vlookup and Hlookup in the functions toolbox. So you are incorrect. I have looked at both iWork 2013 and the latest iCloud version. They did NOT port the iOS version to the OS X version.

Screen Shot 2013-10-24 at 10.30.14 PM.png

They actually re-factored the source code to optimize 64 bit processing capabilities in Mavericks. As I said before pivot tables is the one thing that Numbers is missing.
 
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BaldiMac said:
And yet Apple consistently enjoys the highest consumer satisfaction ratings across its product lines. Maybe your opinion isn't as universal as you think it is. :)
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So you believe forcing users to do it Timmy's way is better than choice? Last time I was in the apple store the genius even suggested I could jailbreak if I want to downgrade. It's a real problem with apple.
 
Note to Apple, count me among those who are definitely not happy with the downgrade of features in Pages and lack of backward compatibility with Keynote. I'm no programmer, but I can't help wonder just how hard it would be to keep Bookmarks and hyperlinks in a document. Very displeased with that change. Also, a presentation I was working on in Keynote 2009 can't even be opened in Keynote 2013.

On the plus side, the collaboration feature is nice.

Come on Apple. You have oodles of money to make this work better than the competition. You should be better than this.
 
dysamoria said:
Apple just ported the iOS versions to Mac OS X and trashed the existing Mac OS X versions. That's why so many features that USED to be there are now GONE.
They might have been better off to hold off on it a few more months to get more features from the EXISTING VERSION of iWork apps into the new cross-platform version, rather than promote this new version as an upgrade when it is actually a REGRESSION. Because of the regression, Microsoft isn't wrong in calling iWork watered down. It was already to begin with, but it was VERY CLOSE to being RIGHT. Now it has lost so much that it had and they are arrogantly promoting it as an upgrade. Apple is NOT servicing actual professionals with their software. If not for third party software, at this point, there would really be strong argument for NOT using Apple hardware in a workplace (and i say this HATING both Windows, PCs, and Linux).
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Agreed that this is not servicing professionals. The earlier version of Pages was very close to being a variant of Word. I'm glad to say that Keynote is still ahead of PowerPoint. Numbers is lacking in too many power features for me to use much. You're completely right that without the 3rd party software, there would be a strong argument for using something else. On the other hand, that is something Apple has gotten right: letting 3rd parties make apps. Heck, I'll continue stomaching Office for Mac 2011 (it ain't that bad really).
 
Marc-SP said:
Well, it seems you really dislike Outlook.com, and that is fine, but most reviews like it, so cannot be so terrible.

http://reviews.cnet.com/e-mail/microsoft-outlook-com-e/4505-3536_7-35404526.html
Excellent inbox organizational tools, and complete SkyDrive integration. It doesn't serve personalized ads, and it's all wrapped up in a simple, easy-to-use interface.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/personal/2013/02/23/outlook-microsoft-email/1933337/
Microsoft did a good job refreshing its email service

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2407877,00.asp
Clean, simple, intuitive interface. Fast. Excellent mailbox


And you also did not say why people should not use the free Office web apps. Any reason to "escape" from them? :)


.
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You might want to look at the user ratings... The reviewers liked it but the users clearly did not like it.
 
Marc-SP said:
Are you serious? I am sorry, but I think you don't know what you are talking about.
What happened to all the things Palm or even MS did long time before? All of them were designed for mobile 100% (PalmOS, Windows CE/Mobile), and the touch screen were fully functional (resistive technology was more popular then, but thats it). I had a Windows mobile 5 device and I really could do many things and quite well with it. The technology was more primitive than iPhone, but it was the same that would have been available to Apple at that time (also, see Apple Newton a few years before).

And I recognize that iPhone and iPad opened new markets and were ground breaking products when they were released, but they not invented mobile OSs or working touchscreens. Not at all.





Short list of "very limited" things Surface 2 (not-pro) does better than iPad :):
  1. Watching video in widescreen (eg. netflix),
  2. Multitasting (eg. check info on a website while on the side write email),
  3. Showing key information without the need to enter in every app (via live tiles),
  4. Arrange and resize tiles to customize the start screen according to your needs (eg. make important things or things that shows info on the tile, such as twitter or facebook, bigger)
  5. Standing on a table or lap with the kickstand,
  6. Office files creation and editing (for better or worse Office is the standard),
  7. Typing with the optional but very well integrated keyboards (iPad has third part keyboards but most waste battery with bluetooth and are not backlit, aside form being thicker and heavier),


But, as you said, to each its own. :)

----------



Buy a dog :). It seems you need someone. Bye.
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ummm waste battery? Surface only gets a fraction of the battery life an iPad does....The third party keyboards are better than the cheapo click keyboard MSFT gives you. If I needed a keyboard Id rather have it blue tooth to begin with.

I'm not going to sit here and try to reason with people who think Excel is a great database.
 
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BaldiMac said:
I wouldn't call an ad hominem fallacy objective.

It is my opinion based on many objective facts. Do you really think its a good laptop? Hardware alone - it has poor ergonomics, limited screen angle adjustment, a below average keyboard, and requires a flat surface to work on.
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And what is objective about them?

Have you ever used a Surface? No, you haven't.

-It does not have poor ergonomics. Demonstrate that it does.
-The screen angle adjustment has now been improved and works great in my use.
-The new backlit keyboards are fantastic. Many reviewers corroborate this finding.
-No, it does not require a flat surface to work on.
 
I am not interested in a Surface. It seems like it hovers in a weird space. That space being the laplet. The laplet losses the advantages of either form factor. The awkwardness of using such a product was too great for me. It does not have a light weight snappy mobile OS or a full fledged desktop os, it has a bad middle ground once again losing the advantage of either end. The form factor is also an issue. Desktops and to a lesser extent laptops are designed to be used sitting at a table or desk. A tablet on the other is made to be used in your hands or propped up against you. If you use a tablet on a table it does not work well. You hands block the screen, you have issues with ergonomics, and lastly issues with input.

I have a Mac desktop and a Windows tower for gaming. I love both them, because they excel at what they are good at. Which is heavy duty tasks such as photo editing and gaming. I also love my iPad, it goes every where with me. I use it to read to read my textbooks, communicate with my professors,connect with my peers, watch tv, and for many other things. The reason why I like both is that they pick an area and excel at it. They do not try to be a jack of all trades. One cannot expect a desktop to be a portable computer just as one can not expect an iPad to ruin Solid Works.

For all those saying that "real work" cannot be done on a iPad you are lying to yourselves. Your documents are able to viewed and created on a iPad. Sure the functionality is less but that is expected. You are getting a different set of advantages and disadvantages. Just yesterday I saw a lawyer typing a legal document on an iPad using Pages. That is real work. An iPad is. tool sure it does not do everything well but neither does a hammer and I have never heard of someone saying it is not used for "real work" because it does not drive in screws.
 
Liquorpuki said:
Surface is not selling because MS marketing sucks. So many missteps I'm not even gonna bother. Even Shaw is oblivious to his company's brand perception. He doesn't realize when he talks, it comes across as arrogance rather than insight

Contrast with Apple marketing, who's able to get millions of people to pay $40-50 for a piece of polyeurethane, by calling it "smart" and gushing about how beautiful it is
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I had never even seen an Apple ad when I bought my first Mac. In fact the only ads I saw/heard were ones from real people and they were always along the lines of;
Macs are way too expensive.
Nobody knows how to fix Macs.
There is no software for Macs.
Macs are only good for graphics.

All negative in comparison with good recommendations about HP and Hewlett Packard and AMD.

Got a Mac as I wanted something different. Not everybody listens to marketing.
 
AdonisSMU said:
ummm waste battery? Surface only gets a fraction of the battery life an iPad does....The third party keyboards are better than the cheapo click keyboard MSFT gives you. If I needed a keyboard Id rather have it blue tooth to begin with.
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Don't know if you are just ignorant or troll, but anyway... :rolleyes:

Surface 2 gets about the same battery life as iPad. More than 10 hours of HD video playback, for example. If it less is not really significant. Not "a fraction", that could be understood as 1/3 or 1/4. Check any review.

All reviews agree the touch cover and type cover from MS are great, save battery by not using bluetooth and protect the screen. There are no better or even similar 3rd party keyboard for any other tablet. Still, you can use any keyboard you like, bluetooth or USB, with Surface.

And I wish the MS keyboards were given (free) or were "cheapo" as you say. The only big problem they have is the pretty high price MS slaps on them. :(


AdonisSMU said:
I'm not going to sit here and try to reason with people who think Excel is a great database.
Click to expand...

Agree 100%. That people is insane!! :mad:. Excel is a great spreadsheet software, though ;).
 
AdonisSMU said:
You might want to look at the user ratings... The reviewers liked it but the users clearly did not like it.
Click to expand...

User ratings are not trustable. They are affected a lot by fads, FUD and fanbois. Also, people tend to post and rate more often if they have something negative to say.

At least, profesional reviewers have to spend some try testing the thing and evaluating it. One review can be "wrong", or "paid", but I gave you 3 profesional reviews and they generally agree Outlook.com is good. Profesional reviews, even imperfect and biased as they always are, are still better than users opinion, specially if the users just have to give one random number and not explain their reasons.

Of course, even if the reviews are super great, if you don't like, you don't like. They are not God or anyting :)
 
Microsoft is terrified of free software. Guess why? Because they sell software. They're scared of everyone using LibreOffice. They're scared that the much more popular iOS (vs. Windows in the mobile space) is going to give away productivity software for free and that iOS users won't bother to buy Office for iOS because they don't feel they need to (iWork is "good enough" for most). Apple, being a hardware company, and a major platform in the market, is ruining Microsoft's business model as a software company by dropping the effective value of Microsoft's software to zero. Microsoft can't sell their software for zero.

Windows was able to win out in the PC market for a variety of reasons, and it allowed Microsoft to dominate productivity simply by being the only player in town. Everyone used Windows, so everyone used Office, so everyone stayed with Office. But now PCs are dying, and Microsoft has had no success in moving into the new market, so their entire company is at risk.

So yeah, they're bitter. I don't blame them. Apple has cut the legs out from under them and Microsoft has no way of getting back up again without a major reorganization.
 
This sums it up...

"Shaw would do better by getting Microsoft to make a product that people actually want to buy." - Jim Dalrymple (loopinsight)
 
mrxak said:
Microsoft is terrified of free software. Guess why? Because they sell software. They're scared of everyone using LibreOffice. They're scared that the much more popular iOS (vs. Windows in the mobile space) is going to give away productivity software for free and that iOS users won't bother to buy Office for iOS because they don't feel they need to (iWork is "good enough" for most). Apple, being a hardware company, and a major platform in the market, is ruining Microsoft's business model as a software company by dropping the effective value of Microsoft's software to zero. Microsoft can't sell their software for zero.

Windows was able to win out in the PC market for a variety of reasons, and it allowed Microsoft to dominate productivity simply by being the only player in town. Everyone used Windows, so everyone used Office, so everyone stayed with Office. But now PCs are dying, and Microsoft has had no success in moving into the new market, so their entire company is at risk.

So yeah, they're bitter. I don't blame them. Apple has cut the legs out from under them and Microsoft has no way of getting back up again without a major reorganization.
Click to expand...

There's an unprecedented amount of wrong in this post.
 
brianvictor7 said:
Note to Apple, count me among those who are definitely not happy with the downgrade of features in Pages and lack of backward compatibility with Keynote. I'm no programmer, but I can't help wonder just how hard it would be to keep Bookmarks and hyperlinks in a document. Very displeased with that change. Also, a presentation I was working on in Keynote 2009 can't even be opened in Keynote 2013.

On the plus side, the collaboration feature is nice.

Come on Apple. You have oodles of money to make this work better than the competition. You should be better than this.
Click to expand...

What features were eliminated from Pages?
 
Dave.UK said:
I think what I said was lost on you! Without Microsoft there could possibly be no Apple.

As for the the smartphone argument - smartphones were heading in that direction anyway. Apple speeded it up, but the entire argument that we would all still be using flip phones with keyboards today if it wasnt for Apple is complete rubbish.

----------



And Google.......Or whatever Apple people use because im guessing its uncool to use Google
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*Without Apple there could possibly be no Microsoft.
 
itguy06 said:
Sounds like he's scared....

I've opened a few formatting heavy Word docs in the new Pages and they opened flawlessly.

Same with some formatting heavy Excel docs I've got.

I'm VERY impressed with this new iWork - iWork '09 missed a lot of things and this is a very good start.

MS is scared as every day that goes by without Office on the platforms of choice (iOS and Android), people will realize they don't need Office. And then it's game over for MS.
Click to expand...

Sorry, but the new Pages 5 is crap. I am an exclusive Mac user since '89, but this «upgrade» is so sloppy that it hurts. :( Apple: get this act together fast!
 
dysamoria said:
You cannot touch type on a tablet. If YOU can, or if you know someone who CAN, and they're just as fast and accurate as someone on a physical keyboard, then i want to know how it's done, because i cannot see it. This is the problem that iOS devices have always had with games. Controls suck. So what do we finally have? An API for physical controllers and products coming to market for that.
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Well if you can't see it, I guess it'll never happen, or it hasn't happened. I'll alert all the tech companies to stop trying to innovate, because there's this guy on Macrumors that just can't see it happening.

He can type faster on an iPad than a regular keyboard. It's because he's used to it, and comfortable with it. Just like I'm more comfortable typing on a regular keyboard vs iPad/touchscreen. I never said he was faster than anyone on a regular kb, except perhaps me, because I'm a fair typer.

So yes, he can type faster than I can on a regular kb, so there's one example.
 
pan88 said:
Sorry, but the new Pages 5 is crap. I am an exclusive Mac user since '89, but this «upgrade» is so sloppy that it hurts. :( Apple: get this act together fast!
Click to expand...

What is specifically wrong with Pages 5? It is faster than it was before - I do not see anything that was removed in functionality and it now includes collaboration.

Same with Numbers - no functions were removed - in fact there were more added and it is much faster and more responsive than before - indicating that there was a significant re-write or refactoring of code in the back-end.

I see this update similar to Google Docs update where they totally re-wrote the code base to leverage HTML 5. After that was done - new functionality was rapidly added making Google Docs a solid set of applications.

I see where Apple is going with this update. Is it on par feature for feature with Office now? No. However it is improved and I would expect the next release to include even more features built on an optimized code base.

Everyone is thinking that this is the last version of iWorks. I don't think it is.
 
cgsnipinva said:
What features were eliminated from Pages?
Click to expand...

Found this at the apple support website. For power users, this kills a lot of their productivity. For myself, I had an idea of using an iPad to prepare Standard Operating Procedure documents for my National Guard unit. It shouldn't have been a big deal to export from Pages to Word when the documents were ready to publish. Because the Army has so many references, I wanted to link to them and now that option has been removed. So that nixes that idea. I'm now in a position of needing to use a full laptop. Personally that is probably the direction I would have gone anyway, so this is hardly a tragedy in my case, but it is irritating to see a first class company like Apple making this move.

Anyway, here is the link and list you requested.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5468056?start=15&tstart=0

New Pages 5 added, removed or altered features:

Added
+ Right to Left text
+ Single model templates. No More Word Processing/Layout templates
+ Share outside iCloud
+ Phonetic Guide for Chinese & Japanese
+ Template names can be changed inside the Template Chooser
+ Text language is detected automatically

Removed
Select non-contiguous text
Outline view
Customizable Toolbar
135 templates
Capture pages/sections
Drag reorganize pages
Duplicate pages
Delete page
Manage Pages
Subscript/superscript buttons
Select all instances of a Style
Retain zoom level of document
Facing pages
Endnotes
Media Inspector links to iPhoto library on external drive
Alignment Guides
Styles Drawer
Merge Fields
Default Start Up page
Vertical Ruler
Style Function key shortcuts
Bookmarks and Links
Images within Tables
Import Styles
Clean Import of older .pages formatting
User Guide
Search Sidebar
Open Type features
Textbox linking
Word export to iCloud
Multiple Comments view
T.O.C. clean numbering

Altered
↪ Pages '09 files previewed on iPad via iCloud are irrevocably converted
↪ Update is missing for older installations, Apple is reportedly working on a solution via a redeemable code or update on their Support Download site
↪ Wrap methods have been cut back severely
↪ Documents reconverted back to Pages '09 lose all template information
↪ Language set under Edit > Spelling and Grammar > Show Spelling and Grammar now document wide
↪ Subscript/superscript text is now a convoluted route Gear > Advanced options > Baseline > Subscript/Superscript
↪ Header appears to be multi-column
↪ New file format (but still .pages?) not backwardly compatible
↪ Page numbering method changed
↪ Template file storage location moved …somewhere?
 
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