Shall I get iWork?

[Damien]

I cancelled my order for iWork because of the amount of negitive reports abbout the lack of features and the bad import/export features. I attend college and need to be able to transfere files back and forth easily and my work consists of reports and other documents so i cant use pages for this.

Keynote is not really needed as I dont have to do any presentations. (well, none in fact). I was going to get it to Jazz up word documents but the lack of quality in the import options takes that away too!

So is there anything else i am missing?

 

[wordmunger]

I cancelled my order for iWork because of the amount of negitive reports abbout the lack of features and the bad import/export features. I attend college and need to be able to transfere files back and forth easily and my work consists of reports and other documents so i cant use pages for this.

Keynote is not really needed as I dont have to do any presentations. (well, none in fact). I was going to get it to Jazz up word documents but the lack of quality in the import options takes that away too!

So is there anything else i am missing?

You'll certainly be able to jazz up Word documents with pages; you just might not be able to re-import them into Word and have them look good. But you could always save as PDF, then they'd be fine on any PC, just not editable in Word.

 

[davidwes]

could someone show iwork to html

Does anyone have an example of the iwork pages to html feature?
Thanks

 

[JDOG_]

I'd steer clear of iWork for a bit, maybe until they improve pages in future iterations. The one thing that really seems to be nagging me (& most people who use the program) is the effort you need to go through to change things like the font which could have easily been a drop down menu (a la Word). It's cliche-tastic, but if the wheel ain't broke don't try to fix it.

Also the import/export is seriously whack with anything other than a regular document. Things like italicized print or bold comes out on one side of either program as not that it started out being. Wait til they work out the kinks and add some features with 2.0 then think about it.

Keynote is awesome...best software update I've seen from Apple in a while.

 

[deltrotter]

Hi JDOG

Guess you have Keynote 2. If you do, can you comment on how well it handles audio in presentations, i.e. can you use a narration throughout the presentation (for it to go on the web). Does it have some form of audio tool etc.

TIA

Del

 

[JDOG_]

Deltrotter-

On my machine it's handled the audio pretty well. Maybe a slight hiccup once or twice, but I'm doing this running about 5 other apps including iPhoto, which I guess is probably pretty system intensive. Not sure about narration, my guess is that you'd have to use some other program to record your narration and then affix clips to each slide instead of just having your narration go through the entire presentation. Powerpoint does this really well, or at least the 04' version does. As far as audio tools go, you just have the same ability to scroll through your library and playlists until you find the song you're looking for. Like Keynote 1 it has the search box and the preview. Unfortunately there's no ability to FF or RW or even clip the part of the song you want. If you're really looking to do that however, there is a workaround by changing the start & stop times in iTunes itself and then copying the song over...keynote will then make a copy of that to the presentation while retaining the original times of the music in iTunes. Then once it's in there you can just change the start & stop times to what you want...definitely a pain in the @ss, but it beats having to have 20 seconds of song prior to what you want. Hope this helps, here's a screenshot of what the media bar looks like for audio:

 

[deltrotter]

Thanks JDOG

That is really helpful. Think I'll be ordering my copy of Keynote 2 on Monday!

Cheers

Ray

 

[JDOG_]

Yeah definitely go for it. Keynote's new transitions and word animations are things you would have had to have Final Cut Pro (with Livetype) and some serious knowledge of both programs to get things to work as seemlessly as they do now. I am pretty pissed that I can't run two of the new transitions despite the fact I've got a 32mb video card...I can't imagine what requires more than that for a simple presentation!

Pages is pretty cool too, I gave it a few hours on a project I was working on for school making a survey and it looks pretty slick despite crashing twice and almost merciless spinning beachballs between clicking on various elements of the layout. Frankly it's astonishing it came out of Apple's labs and into production without them realizing it doesn't run well without a G5 processor and a graphics card that can run a 30" display. Hopefully they'll clean up the code somewhere to make it run without as many hiccups.

 

[deltrotter]

Hope my new iBook with 1gb memory handles it!

Cheers

Del

 

[deral]

Hope my new iBook with 1gb memory handles it!

Cheers

Del

I've been playing with iWork with my G3 iBook (384 ram), and I'm surprised how smoothly both apps work. I expected it to be worst. (this is btw, a postitive review)

 

[pyrotoaster]

Pages is pretty cool too, I gave it a few hours on a project I was working on for school making a survey and it looks pretty slick despite crashing twice and almost merciless spinning beachballs between clicking on various elements of the layout. Frankly it's astonishing it came out of Apple's labs and into production without them realizing it doesn't run well without a G5 processor and a graphics card that can run a 30" display. Hopefully they'll clean up the code somewhere to make it run without as many hiccups.

Pages certainly has its flaws (I actually bothered sending feedback to Apple about the way design elements just hemorrage out of the document in exported HTML files), but I didn't have any massive performance issues.

My 1 GHz Powerbook handled Pages pretty well. The higher-graphics templates were a visible strain, and it was a bit pokey moving things around when I was working with those, but the app rarely just stopped and beachball'd me.

The regular ol' word processing works very well, and the styles formatting is very easily customizable to fit the needs of an individual document.

 

[chameeeleon]

My iWork has yet to arrive (it's delivery on the 29th for Canada), but I'm glad that Apple opted not to replace Microsoft Word. Although Word slower than it should be, and yes, uber-bloated (I cannot for the life of me figure out who would use the horrible and inaccurate "Autosummarize"), I like the Mac version a lot, and after a busy semester of English I've certainly put it through it's paces. The interface, especially the formatting palette, is much nicer than the Windows equivalent, which seems to be centred on only having one document open at a time. For example, I love how when you click on a picture in Word the formatting palette flips to be picture-centric. Had Apple simply made a word processor, I would not have purchased it because I enjoy Word to much.
Yet aside from typing word-centric documents for English, etc., I also have reports to type that need to have visual appeal, and although I've tackled through laying things out by tables in Word for the past few months (which, along with a little colour and pictures, can look better than you'd think), I craved a Publisher-ish app. If the templates in Pages are as easy to use as they look, then I'll chock it up as a good app. I doubt I'll type much of anything in it - I'll use it in co-operation with Word.
Probably the most reassuring thing about iWork is that come January next year, there will almost certainly be a new version of Pages and Keynote - much more reassuring than when Keynote first came out and then sort of died off and even left me wondering if it would be discontinued. This update-a-year cycle we're on seems to be perfect.

 

[Bear]

...
Yet aside from typing word-centric documents for English, etc., I also have reports to type that need to have visual appeal, and although I've tackled through laying things out by tables in Word for the past few months (which, along with a little colour and pictures, can look better than you'd think), I craved a Publisher-ish app. If the templates in Pages are as easy to use as they look, then I'll chock it up as a good app. I doubt I'll type much of anything in it - I'll use it in co-operation with Word.

I've played with pages a little bit. Making charts and tables is very nice. I think it will quite easily do what you need for the fancy reports. At some point I may actually read the documentation, but I was able to find out how a lot of things worked just by playing around.

Probably the most reassuring thing about iWork is that come January next year, there will almost certainly be a new version of Pages and Keynote - much more reassuring than when Keynote first came out and then sort of died off and even left me wondering if it would be discontinued. This update-a-year cycle we're on seems to be perfect.

I agree that we should see improvements with the next version. I don't even mind shelling out the money (especially if the price stays the same) each year, especially if they add Cells (or Sheets*) to the iWork bundle. Uexpect the iWork bundle will be quite nice in a couple of years. In the meantime, pages Pages looks like what I want forr some stuff. One feature I would like added is templates for Avery (and other brand( labels.

Remember to use the Apple feedback option and send Apple your suggestions. Without the ssggestions, they may overlook something you're interested in. Although making a suggestion doesn't guarantee it will get added (nor how soon), if Apple doesn't know a feature is wanted they may not think about it at all.

* Some people thing the speard sheet application will be called Cells, I personally think the name should be Sheets. The one drawback to the AppleWorks spreadsheet program (unless I'm just not seeing the option) is having multiple spreadsheets in one file. So, I'm hoping the iWorks spreadsheet program will be more like Excel in that aspect.