Bento was a stripped-down version of FileMaker. So, Apple (which owns FileMaker, Inc., the developer of the software) could include the full FileMaker, and perhaps even FileMaker Pro, in a future iWork and iWord for iCloud offering.
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Some Power Users Are Unhappy With Lost Features in the New iWork
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Bento was a stripped-down version of FileMaker. So, Apple (which owns FileMaker, Inc., the developer of the software) could include the full FileMaker, and perhaps even FileMaker Pro, in a future iWork and iWord for iCloud offering.
With the 64-bit A7 cpu, I expect more functionality in the future. I just hope that it is more than just improved graphics.
If you have an old version of Pages that you want updated to 4.3 I'm not really sure how you'd get it as I believe currently the update process is straight to 5. But you should try installing from disc and see if it first updates to 4.3 and if so it'll then update to 5 but it should leave an iWork '09 folder in your Applications.
But even with the iWork '09 folder in you Applications, I've come across other problems.
For example, while I have both 4.3 and 5 in my Apps I haven't found a way to make 4.3 the default document handler, it always defaults to 5; i.e. whenever I click on a pages document it opens in 5, not 4.3.
And if you remove iWork '13 entirely and you leave '09 installed, that's all good until you realize that the updates to '13 are being pushed via the MAS and the updates cannot be hidden.
I've decided to try to make iWork '13 work for me. I'm going to give it a good try over the next few weeks and in the mean time hope Apple starts to reintroduce missing features. I'm really missing a small/trivial piece from '09 which is Pages' default zoom setting; it seems entirely gone in '13.
If all else fails I'll get Office 11 for Mac. We have a MSFT Home Use program at my work which allows me to buy Office Home & Business edition for mac for $13. But I use Office all day at work and just prefer the old iWork for what I do, and so does my wife.
I have not read every single post. So this might have already been brought up.
They can do it, but why would Apple restore templates to iWork 13? There are several in the app store already from developers. Especially for Pages. Apple does not have to pay employees for the work. The can collect a fee from the developers doing the work for them each time an app is sold.
They can do it, but why would Apple restore templates to iWork 13? There are several in the app store already from developers. Especially for Pages. Apple does not have to pay employees for the work. The can collect a fee from the developers doing the work for them each time an app is sold.
Admiration for MS Office Users, Pages as alternative
I have the deepest respect for users capable of using MS Word for word processing. Though I can use Word, over the years it has become bloated and more buggy. It has lost formatting, lost lists, and been such a pain that I started using Pages so I wouldn't have to deal with Word. I simply don't have the skill or time to achieve the expertise to use Word and recover from its idiosyncratic tendencies and bugs.
I've tried OpenOffice. Quite inadequate.
But, I have wanted to use Pages to reedit documents from others so I can reformat them in epub format so I can use them in iBooks. Though iBooks can display PDF files, there is no way to highlight or add notes to PDF files. Epub is the only way I can get the functionality.
However, all these WYSIWYG processors have major failures. They are really poor at allowing you (at least me) to write without regard to style. As silly as this sounds, it was in some ways easier to write with software like roff and troff under unix, or edix and wordix or applix. For complex documents, it's TeX and LaTeX.
I have the deepest respect for users capable of using MS Word for word processing. Though I can use Word, over the years it has become bloated and more buggy. It has lost formatting, lost lists, and been such a pain that I started using Pages so I wouldn't have to deal with Word. I simply don't have the skill or time to achieve the expertise to use Word and recover from its idiosyncratic tendencies and bugs.
I've tried OpenOffice. Quite inadequate.
But, I have wanted to use Pages to reedit documents from others so I can reformat them in epub format so I can use them in iBooks. Though iBooks can display PDF files, there is no way to highlight or add notes to PDF files. Epub is the only way I can get the functionality.
However, all these WYSIWYG processors have major failures. They are really poor at allowing you (at least me) to write without regard to style. As silly as this sounds, it was in some ways easier to write with software like roff and troff under unix, or edix and wordix or applix. For complex documents, it's TeX and LaTeX.
This whole "pro iWork user" concept is pretty funny. Keynote, I guess. But Numbers has never been able to handle even 1/3 of what I do. I've tried. Have to use Excel. Call me arrogant if you want. But taking a product that is about .2 of a pro product and making it .1 of a pro product....meh.
I find it both amusing and maddening how all these "so what" and "you think you're a pro and you use Pages" marginalization commentators demonstrate just how ignorant (of both usage of these tools and what professional use is) they really are. It's the old "it doesn't matter to me so I don't understand why it matters to you" garbage.
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But he's totally neglecting the most salient complaint faced by those of us who are angry: Apple made zero communication to users that this was going to be the state of things, and has made no communication to us about what we can expect for future versions. You live and die by your users. If they believe that the users getting work done in professional scenarios are less financially important to them than home users with kids writing reports (and look to the reviews for school report writers also pissed off), then be honest and up front about it.
What has happened here is no less important to iWork users than if Microsoft suddenly released a version of Word missing all the same features, without telling anyone, and allowing it to destroy people's existing documents.
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But he's totally neglecting the most salient complaint faced by those of us who are angry: Apple made zero communication to users that this was going to be the state of things, and has made no communication to us about what we can expect for future versions. You live and die by your users. If they believe that the users getting work done in professional scenarios are less financially important to them than home users with kids writing reports (and look to the reviews for school report writers also pissed off), then be honest and up front about it.
What has happened here is no less important to iWork users than if Microsoft suddenly released a version of Word missing all the same features, without telling anyone, and allowing it to destroy people's existing documents.
I use LibreOffice... pretty satisfied. Don't care with these paid office suites...
You are right, however I wouldn't be surprised if this was a new direction the company wanted to go, so they re-wrote everything and well ran out of time/engineers. Bare bones software, give it away for free then release updates.
Kind of reminds me of FCPx when it was released.
What software are you 99.5% of the time intending to share your document with? Hint: You might spot its name in the list of supported export formats.
Btw, you can create RTF files with TextEdit. Find this marvelous, full-featured RTF editor in /Applications/Utilities.
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If you have an old version of Pages that you want updated to 4.3 I'm not really sure how you'd get it as I believe currently the update process is straight to 5. But you should try installing from disc and see if it first updates to 4.3 and if so it'll then update to 5 but it should leave an iWork '09 folder in your Applications.
But even with the iWork '09 folder in you Applications, I've come across other problems.
For example, while I have both 4.3 and 5 in my Apps I haven't found a way to make 4.3 the default document handler, it always defaults to 5; i.e. whenever I click on a pages document it opens in 5, not 4.3.
And if you remove iWork '13 entirely and you leave '09 installed, that's all good until you realize that the updates to '13 are being pushed via the MAS and the updates cannot be hidden.
I've decided to try to make iWork '13 work for me. I'm going to give it a good try over the next few weeks and in the mean time hope Apple starts to reintroduce missing features. I'm really missing a small/trivial piece from '09 which is Pages' default zoom setting; it seems entirely gone in '13.
If all else fails I'll get Office 11 for Mac. We have a MSFT Home Use program at my work which allows me to buy Office Home & Business edition for mac for $13. But I use Office all day at work and just prefer the old iWork for what I do, and so does my wife.
I made a zip archive of Pages '13 and threw the original in the trash. Existing Pages documents now open in the old version. I'm not sure I see any downside to this approach. If at some point Apple fixes '13 it can be unzipped. The MAS made some sort of change in the original Pages package when it downloaded the new version, but so far at least, it appears to be a benign change.
ability to lock objects removed in iWork for iOS?!
Has the ability to lock objects in Numbers and Pages for iOS been removed with these new updates? The option doesn't seem to be there anymore....
With touch screen interaction on a spreadsheet, this was really important....
Anyone else can't find it either?
Has the ability to lock objects in Numbers and Pages for iOS been removed with these new updates? The option doesn't seem to be there anymore....
With touch screen interaction on a spreadsheet, this was really important....
Anyone else can't find it either?
If only what he said is true then it might be reasonable and sensible. Unfortunately it is only true for the people who started using the app this week. Those of us who adopted it years ago are being seriously screwed. Fortunately I found out what the new version of Pages does to existing documents before it destroyed years of my work. Others undoubtedly will not be forewarned, and so fortunate.
This is perhaps Apple's greatest blunder in a decade. It's even worse in some ways than the iCloud transition, and that was pretty poorly handled.
I have Office for Mobile in Nokia Lumia 920 and in Android....it works in both apart from desktop. Of course you need to have office 365 subscription to avail mobile office suit
CPU power has nothing to do with it. iWorks was run on less powerful CPUs than A7 in the past. It's the tablet limitations. Touch interface is good for "consumption" not so much for "creation".
Blowing-Up-Grade
The worst part of the blunder is not the incredible shrinking set of features, but that users were not warned that opening a document made with the earlier version of the software on the iPad, and then on the Mac would irrevocably destroy some of the ("more sophisticated") formatting and content. When you upgrade iOS and the apps on your iPad, only to find out that now you also have to upgrade the software on your Mac to open the cross-platform edited document, only to find out that your 150-page dissertation is now in a complete disarray, and you have not had made a backup since last Saturday since iCloud was so handy, so you'll have to re-edit everything from scratch... you get the picture.
The worst part of the blunder is not the incredible shrinking set of features, but that users were not warned that opening a document made with the earlier version of the software on the iPad, and then on the Mac would irrevocably destroy some of the ("more sophisticated") formatting and content. When you upgrade iOS and the apps on your iPad, only to find out that now you also have to upgrade the software on your Mac to open the cross-platform edited document, only to find out that your 150-page dissertation is now in a complete disarray, and you have not had made a backup since last Saturday since iCloud was so handy, so you'll have to re-edit everything from scratch... you get the picture.
Just think of the power difference between an iPhone and a Mac Pro. Lobotomizing iWork so it has the same features on all Apple platforms is like Raul Castro declaring that all cars in Cuba must have their engines replaced with 4-cylinder engines so that parts can be compatible across every car in the country. Who would blame existing BMW owners for being upset?
I am the kind of guy who loves innovation and is usually an early adopter, so I have been giving iWork 5.0 a real chance this week...
But as of tonight I am officially regretting that I fully embraced Apple's iWork instead of sticking with Microsoft Office. I've got years of legacy documents in a file format I don't think I want to use anymore.
I agree 100% that Apple made a TON of improvements with version 5.0. The UI is much more visually appealing, but Apple also screwed up.
In essence, Apple threw their faithful iWork users under a (4-cylinder) bus as their thanks for learning and using iWork '09 to do real work in the real world these last years.
Jordan Golson (the article's author) is right that our grievances will probably fall on deaf ears. We have as much chance of getting Apple to listen to us as we do getting "Save As" back.
At any rate, I'm going to give Microsoft Office another look. Heaven knows they have their problems too, but at least they sometimes listen to their customers (e.g. Xbox, Windows 8.1).
Jordan, thanks for pointing out that iWork 09 is still on our Macs. That's going to be a big help.
I am the kind of guy who loves innovation and is usually an early adopter, so I have been giving iWork 5.0 a real chance this week...
But as of tonight I am officially regretting that I fully embraced Apple's iWork instead of sticking with Microsoft Office. I've got years of legacy documents in a file format I don't think I want to use anymore.
I agree 100% that Apple made a TON of improvements with version 5.0. The UI is much more visually appealing, but Apple also screwed up.
In essence, Apple threw their faithful iWork users under a (4-cylinder) bus as their thanks for learning and using iWork '09 to do real work in the real world these last years.
Jordan Golson (the article's author) is right that our grievances will probably fall on deaf ears. We have as much chance of getting Apple to listen to us as we do getting "Save As" back.
At any rate, I'm going to give Microsoft Office another look. Heaven knows they have their problems too, but at least they sometimes listen to their customers (e.g. Xbox, Windows 8.1).
Jordan, thanks for pointing out that iWork 09 is still on our Macs. That's going to be a big help.
Roger Rosen brought the suite to iOS and the web after a widely panned iWork.com. Big comeback I say. You can't do this stuff overnight you know!
Too slow (development and performance), too unambitious, too horribly buggy. It should never have got to the point where the words "iWork" and "abandonware" were synonymous.
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God I hope some Apple employees are reading this and get a sense of the nightmare that irrationally loyal iWork users have got through over the years. Roger Rosen - for putting users through misery, you're fired!
This is such an old line that is proven false day in and day out by people who have found that they can quite effectively use the iPad for "creation" and not just "consumption". Just because you say it's so, doesn't make it so...
This is a terrible analogy. While it's certainly true that there is a broad range of difference between the power between an iOS device and a Mac Pro, but iWork is not the engine, it's more like the stereo. And standardizing the stereo across models isn't that big a deal.
As for how much power is needed for iWork, I have iWork '09 installed on an old PowerMac G4, which, according to GeekBench (in so far as such scores can be compared), has half the computing power of my iPad 2. So, while there is certainly a question of building the proper UI for the touch interface, it seems that the current and recent generations of iOS devices shouldn't have any real problem supporting the same feature set as iWork '09 has.
I suspect and hope that these features fell through the cracks as the programs were being rebuilt, and that they will be returning. The pattern has come up many times before, the Mac community seems to have a short memory about such things. One of the recent instances, and certainly one of the highest profile instances, was FCPX, but it certainly wasn't the only instance.
The original release of iWork, itself, represented such an instance. There were many features that were not in the original version of iWork that were present in AppleWorks (formerly Claris Works), and many people declared that this was a betrayal by Apple and that we'd never see those features because Apple doesn't listen, etc., etc. Well, most of those features were folded back in (granted, one of the big ones that has yet to make a proper appearance is that of a database, but you can't win them all...).
Another example is iMovie. When they introduced the "rebuilt from the ground up" version, there were many people who were unhappy because there were some features that weren't in the new version that had been in the old version. Again, there were people who said that this was it, we'd never see those features again, Apple never listens to customers and only does just what Apple wants, etc., etc. But, again, the features did make it back. As someone who got very frustrated with iMovie in the old days, and had days of work lost when a project got corrupted after iMovie crashed, I was delighted with the upgrade, even if it didn't have all the features.
Now, I haven't yet upgraded iWork. There are a couple of reasons for that. For one, my iPad is still running iOS 6, and I'd have to give up my current configuration to upgrade to iOS 7. Second, I haven't taken to time to upgrade my MBP to OS 10.9. When I saw the keynote and heard that the new versions were completely cross platform compatible, my immediate thought was that might just be the carrot that would convince me to upgrade my iPad to iOS 7.
I do a lot of work in iWork, and having that cross compatibility would be very valuable to me. As things stand right now, I am careful with what documents I open on my iPad, just to ensure that I don't open one that my iPad can't handle. To me, the older version of iWork on the iPad was really iWork lite, and I was very pleased to hear about the new versions.
All of that said, I'm now thinking I may wait to give Apple the chance to release a patch or two, and get things straightened out a bit.
So, you see, I'm certainly not defending Apple for having done this, but I am trying to suggest that it doesn't mean that the sky is falling. (I'm neither in the camp of "it's no big deal", nor am I in the camp of "this is the worst thing ever!")
Using completely new proprietary file formats was the big mistake. I understand the desire to come up with something better but if most of the world's document data is recorded in a particular format, your office software should bloody well play nice with it.
Toolbar + Other issues
1. It's normal to have to adjust to an 'upgrade.' but when the upgrade is in fact a downgrade, then there are problem.
2. Can't customize the toolbar, so now it take 4 commands to insert a sub- or superscript, which impotant in scientific writing. Among other things
3. Everytime the program opens, it opens to the huge formatting screen on the right, which then probably needs another click to get the scree the way one intended it. Most writers need to make the format look correct oncly once, not every time.
4. Pages 5.0 is designed for people who write on mobile devices.But there is no logic here: iBooks is now possbile on a Macbook, so why does Pages5.0 have to be downgraded from a semi-professional system to one that is reminicsent of the power of word processing in the early 1990s?
All media are pumping out the Tim Cook line that the game changer is in providing free software. A noble goal, but no at the expense of gutting an application as important as Pages.
1. It's normal to have to adjust to an 'upgrade.' but when the upgrade is in fact a downgrade, then there are problem.
2. Can't customize the toolbar, so now it take 4 commands to insert a sub- or superscript, which impotant in scientific writing. Among other things
3. Everytime the program opens, it opens to the huge formatting screen on the right, which then probably needs another click to get the scree the way one intended it. Most writers need to make the format look correct oncly once, not every time.
4. Pages 5.0 is designed for people who write on mobile devices.But there is no logic here: iBooks is now possbile on a Macbook, so why does Pages5.0 have to be downgraded from a semi-professional system to one that is reminicsent of the power of word processing in the early 1990s?
All media are pumping out the Tim Cook line that the game changer is in providing free software. A noble goal, but no at the expense of gutting an application as important as Pages.
Open Finder, find a Pages document,
Do Get Info.
Find "open with" in the info box.
It shows Pages 5.0 as default. Change this to Pages 4.3 by selecting it from drop-down menu.
Click the "Change All" button under the drop-down box.
An "are you sure?" dialogue box pops up. Cick "continue."
That should do it. Do report back if it doesn't work.