Some Power Users Are Unhappy With Lost Features in the New iWork

[Night Spring]

What you are saying possibly without realizing it, is that Apple is counting on a new majority of iWork users not noticing that features have been dropped from the software -- only because they never used it before it became free. The old majority is going to be ticked off permanently because they've not only been using these apps for years, they now rely on them to do what they've always done.

Well... Yes, I agree that Apple is counting on an influx of new users who never experienced the old version. But I think there is also a significant number of users of the old versions who aren't ticked off because they never used any of the missing features or aren't horribly affected by their going missing. As I said, we aren't hearing from those users because they have no complaints, therefore they are silent. And then, a certain percentage of people who are angry now would eventually calm down and forgive Apple. Add all that up (new users + old users unaffected by missing features + affected users who eventually forgive Apple), and Apple still has a sufficient user base, even if some of the currently angry users leave and never return.

 

[Tlingit]

... 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.

I'm sorry, I am trying but I just cannot see why someone would write such a thing. And I'm really trying, because I LOVED that Snowy River movie.

If you use Pages, Numbers and Keynote for relatively trivial things, then I guess I can see how you might see this broken "upgrade" as just a stereo... but how can you think you know more than me about how I use iWork and judge that it is "no big deal."?

My business and my family's livelihood rests in in several hundred iWork documents, not to mention the legacy data of out years that rests on my Drobo (and offsite DVDs) so I won't lose them.

Product development documents, research surveys, speeches, presentations, business canvases, customer reports, consulting analyses, analytics, academic papers, intellectual property, course narratives, software documentation, market analyses, blog articles -- and you can throw in a few screen plays and two half written books as well -- all that and more rests in Apple iWork files.

For us, that really is a very big deal.

Like the person who posted a bit ago about his "150-page dissertation is now in a complete disarray," some of us really went all in on Apple's office productivity platform and are genuinely thrown by this unexpected amputation of functionality we've come to depend on.

Now, I haven't yet upgraded iWork.

Smart. Fortunately for me, I only upgraded one of our 15 Macs to Mavericks and the new iWork. But I seriously don't know what I'm going to do about the iWork upgrade.

I guess I could hold at iWork '09 until (as you said you were going to do) until Apple issues enough patches and updates make to upgrading more feasible...

But honestly, I'm thinking this week marks the beginning of the end of my iWork days, and I need to get to work converting those files to Microsoft Office.

 

[ezekielrage_99]

Ok I am just going to put this now out there, with the new versions of iWork being so darn close to the iOS versions it now raises the questions will we see an ARM Macbook Air in the not too distant future?

Think of it, an ARM Macbook Air would potentially be great for battery life.

 

[50548]

Ok I am just going to put this now out there, with the new versions of iWork being so darn close to the iOS versions it now raises the questions will we see an ARM Macbook Air in the not too distant future?

Think of it, an ARM Macbook Air would potentially be great for battery life.

That wouldn't be a surprise, unfortunately - I'd be as bold as to say that iOS for Macs is closer than ever; you may expect it in the form of OS XI.

 

[NOV]

Just curious, What didn't you like? I have used logic Pro for a long time, and I find logic pro X fantastic. At the place I work we have a guy on staff to do music arranging, he also does live loops, track and click. He loves the new logic. So do I. Can't see any issues as of yet.

I haven't had a chance to mess with the new iWork, but it does look really nice and clean. My biggest concern is numbers, I do a lot of spreadsheets. Although most of them are basic math formulas. I don't exactly use 4000 rows of text

What I didn't like was that I'm color blind and the new interface is very hard to read for me. What I also didn't like was the uneconomical diversion of screens and the way that changed or had hidden all kinds of functionality that I was common to use in L9 (and before, I use Logic since vs 3).

But what really made me ask me back my money was that LPX was completely unable to deliver any substantial music productions. All kinds of bugs and weirdness going on. So back to L9 for me.

 

[Dalavia]

I have to agree with most of the comments here which have expressed disappointment that this "upgrade" has been savagely mishandled.

Fortunately, it has not been the unmitigated disaster for me personally, because I was able to restore my files from Time Machine and I have deleted the new versions of the apps.

The key thing is, I think, to understand that Macs and iOS devices have different purposes and different capabilities. That is why we spend money on Macs - to get those extra capabilities. Therefore, it is disingenuous to downgrade the capabilities of a Mac to the level of an iOS device.

For example, although we are discussing Pages here, related problems are affecting Keynote. I use Keynopte for much of my teaching, and I made a conscious decision to do it a MacBook Air rather than an iPad because I need to embed movies in Flash format. Guess what? The new Keynote has disabled Flash files, presumably because they cant be played on iOS devices. Yes, I know I can through my 100+ Keynote files, identify and pull out the Flash files, manually convert them, etc, but that is a strange way of enjoying the benefits of an "upgrade".

Pages 4.3 is an incredibly powerful tool when it is used to its potential. For example, I have recently finished writing and publishing the 7th edition of a 752 page book containing 1400 photos and a couple of hundred diagrams, all done in Pages 4.3 (sample pages at http://www.planetgeography7.com/PG7/Samples.html). Without textbox linking and the many, many other features that have been deleted in Pages 5, this task would have been impossible.

I think there is a clear case for improving Pages 5 to get the compatability and collaboration priorites right for those who need them (which does not include me!), but also using Pages 4.3 (and the other parts of the "old" iWorks) as a basis for producing pro-level apps for those of us who need them.

Let's face it, I didn't buy a 27" iMac so I could only do things that are possible on an iPad.

 

[numlock]

I have to agree with most of the comments here which have expressed disappointment that this "upgrade" has been savagely mishandled.

Fortunately, it has not been the unmitigated disaster for me personally, because I was able to restore my files from Time Machine and I have deleted the new versions of the apps.

The key thing is, I think, to understand that Macs and iOS devices have different purposes and different capabilities. That is why we spend money on Macs - to get those extra capabilities. Therefore, it is disingenuous to downgrade the capabilities of a Mac to the level of an iOS device.

For example, although we are discussing Pages here, related problems are affecting Keynote. I use Keynopte for much of my teaching, and I made a conscious decision to do it a MacBook Air rather than an iPad because I need to embed movies in Flash format. Guess what? The new Keynote has disabled Flash files, presumably because they cant be played on iOS devices. Yes, I know I can through my 100+ Keynote files, identify and pull out the Flash files, manually convert them, etc, but that is a strange way of enjoying the benefits of an "upgrade".

Pages 4.3 is an incredibly powerful tool when it is used to its potential. For example, I have recently finished writing and publishing the 7th edition of a 752 page book containing 1400 photos and a couple of hundred diagrams, all done in Pages 4.3 (sample pages at http://www.planetgeography7.com/PG7/Samples.html). Without textbox linking and the many, many other features that have been deleted in Pages 5, this task would have been impossible.

I think there is a clear case for improving Pages 5 to get the compatability and collaboration priorites right for those who need them (which does not include me!), but also using Pages 4.3 (and the other parts of the "old" iWorks) as a basis for producing pro-level apps for those of us who need them.

Let's face it, I didn't buy a 27" iMac so I could only do things that are possible on an iPad.

this is the whole debate summed up in a sentence.

if iwork, imovie etc are going to go after the lowest denominator ie ios devices then obviously more equipped devices will suffer from not being able to take full advantage of better hardware and much more screen real estate.

i guess that is one way to prove the ios line is no less a content creation device than the mac line

 

[olowott]

power users and hmmmm we ......... apple is trying to please the majority here

 

[Rossatron]

I can agree with the main points you make. However, why put it out for public consumption now then? iWork hasn't been updated for 4-5 years. What would another 6 months or a year make?

Also this Pro vs consumer thing for iWork is just not right. Just because some of us use it a lot and have become accustomed to a lot of its features does not make us Pro users. We are just heavy users. It doesn't take much use to know that this Pages 5 version is light on the features.

I agree with you. I don't know why they released it *now*. Maybe with the new iOS7 and the release of Mavericks they wanted to have a unified cross-platform IWork suit, even if not completed 100% - just to show where things are headed.

 

[Firelock]

My professional work is technically demanding, though perhaps not in the way you mean. I am a researcher and writer by profession and I can say without qualification that Pages (at least in its previous incarnations) is a fully professional writing tool. I would much, much rather use it for serious writing than Word, if for no other reason than it gets out your way and lets you write. It also allows me to produce high-quality reports with ease. Based on what I see coming from others in my profession (a great many truly grotesquely formatted reports produced in Word), I think Pages gives me a clear professional edge. The fact that Pages doesn't have a bunch of obscure features that hardly anyone uses doesn't change that fact.

BTW, can you use the quote button to respond to my posts? It quotes back, and I can see much more easily that you are responding to me. Thanks.

Right, when I said technically demanding I did not mean your profession but the type of feature sets you need in your software. But in any case i do agree that Apple removing critical features, without warning, on any of their software is maddening to the users who have sustained them for so many years. I am personally in dread fear for what they are going to do to Aperture in their next major release, assuming they ever have one.

It has really gotten to the point where Apple creates some great software that is hard to walk away from because of the mix of power and ease of use, but then they let the software either die slowly for lack of updates, or kill it quickly by "upgrading." The list is getting long now: iWeb, iMovie, Final Cut and now Pages. Aperture seems to be in hospice. I am going to think long and hard before I invest more of my time and assets in any future Apple software product.

 

[ezekielrage_99]

Let's face it, I didn't buy a 27" iMac so I could only do things that are possible on an iPad.

Summed up in one absolute winning point, again more proof why I think we'll see an ARM MBA in the not too distant future.

Though I am hoping in 6 months from now the features lost will be added.

 

[vladi]

No reason to be upset, there are alternatives out there in case you can't achieve what you desire to in iWork. As a matter of fact there are no dependent pipelines that require iWork so its not like with Final Cut where people bitched for a good reason. But even then they could have switched to Avid or Adobe anytime.

Now what very few people know is that Logic Pro is done. They are selling their assets to other DAW developers.

 

[RedOrchestra]

Though I am hoping in 6 months from now the features lost will be added.

Don't hold your breath, on that.

Certainly won't do anything for those who, unsuspectingly, opened their files in the all new '13 only to find their files have lost functions which won't be re-captured in any subsequent updates

 

[JFreak]

"65536 ought to be enough for anybody."
-Steve Jobs

Hahaha

Excel, while it is the best MS software ever, has had this 65536 row limitation for ages, and it was only few recent releases back when they lifted that. If you call Excel a professional grade spreadsheet program, you will not have a problem with 65536 row limitation.

 

[cgsnipinva]

Missing the Forest for Some of the Trees

I would agree that it is obvious that some functionality has been removed (Pages being by far the most impacted and Number from my inspection has actually gained). However, I do not see it as trying to simplify everything on the mac to the iOS level and I do not see OS X being replaced by iOS. I will again assert that this is the result of a massive code re-write. Someone asked me when I would expect the next version of iWork to come out. I will argue that what we will see going forward are a series of updates ala Google where we won't have monolithic version upgrades - but rolling feature updates. Hence - Apple offering these applications for free. You cannot charge for frequent updates throughout a year. After reading all of the comments good, bad and indifferent here and reading what I have read on Google and MS blogs - here is what I think. Take it for what it is worth - I offer it up humbly.

One of the big (BIG) drawbacks of Google Drive and MS Office (and I loooooooove Excel and how it works with SQL Server) is the huge and I mean epic difference in functionality between the client app and cloud app version. Even Google Drive applications have very restricted functionality in features on iOS and Android versus a desktop/laptop browser. The same for Microsoft - in fact the iOS version of Pages and Numbers had more features than the other two versus the desktop versions. This gap has been the biggest complaint about cloud based and tablet based productivity applications. You would read many of the same arguments on Android/Google forums and MS forums. What I see is Apple trying to break that issue by working to make sure that there is the same experience (we all know that word) across all platforms without difference. You would think at least Google - that has very feature rich apps working in a browser could have that done in mobile OS - right? But apparently its is much harder than one would assume.

I think this is the case because what I find in the newest Numbers is actually more functionality than before (not that I did not want more). Keynote appears to be mostly the same - it is odd that Pages is the one iWork app that has had the biggest decrement. I think that is because the features that were removed had to be significantly reworked to make them consistent across iOS and OS X.

The release of iWork we have seen has required a lot of code re-write and testing - that is why I think Apple advertised it as big. If this is what Apple is going for - and they are working to make iWork work the same on all platforms - that is huge. That is the nut Google and MS have not been able to crack. As features roll in 4-5 at a time in rolling updates and everyone can take a look at them - on all devices - then MS Office will be under threat.

Keep in mind - Apple's commanding market presence is in mobile - revised versions of iWork and other key apps that work the same on a person's tablet will be a way to get them to OS X and a desktop or laptop.

Hence MS very odd blog outburst. Despite what people think - MS is not full of dumb people. They know their market despite marketing blunders in devices. Maybe MS leadership sees what is in the works with Apple better than most of us.

Overall the Mavericks update has added many more features to OS X and performance enhancements - I am very happy. Finder has FINALLY been improved as well as Calendar and Mail. I love the new iPhoto and iMovie.

For now I still use MS Office for Mac for practical reasons - but Numbers does all my personal spreadsheets and I will be watching what comes next in this space for Apple.

 

[Bilbo63]

I'm not much of a Pages user, so I cannot comment, however you can count me as one who feels that the new versions of Numbers and Keynote are a step backward.

I find the new version of Numbers more difficult to use, not easier in addition to being less powerful.

That's great that these versions are Mac OS / iOS / Web compatible, but at what cost? For me the disadvantages of the new versions outweighs the advantages.

 

[JFreak]

And BTW the new logic is very "pro", its a huge leap forward. Apple is not abandoning its "pro" customers.

Except that half of the pro users don't get it. Some love it, some hate it. Talk about serving to (all) pro's. And with Avid's PT11, the performance gain of AU's are gone so lots of pro's are going to switch now.

 

[Pompiliu]

Who cares?
We use Office.

 

[aced411]

Casually I'm an architect. So I think I'm a power user, Ok?

We use ArchiCad in the office, but we also do intense use of iWork, in a daily basis.

I make technical reports of hundreds of pages with Pages 09 that I simply can do with Pages 13. Only the lost of facing pages capability is enough to had it deleted of my HD

My point is you're investing in the wrong tool. Do yourself a favor and buy Microsoft Office. Pages is meant for home users typing a letter to grandma.

 

[IJ Reilly]

My point is you're investing in the wrong tool. Do yourself a favor and buy Microsoft Office. Pages is meant for home users typing a letter to grandma.

Finding out how completely wrong you are would require reading what other people write, so I doubt you will ever discover how completely wrong you are.

----------

Right, when I said technically demanding I did not mean your profession but the type of feature sets you need in your software. But in any case i do agree that Apple removing critical features, without warning, on any of their software is maddening to the users who have sustained them for so many years. I am personally in dread fear for what they are going to do to Aperture in their next major release, assuming they ever have one.

It has really gotten to the point where Apple creates some great software that is hard to walk away from because of the mix of power and ease of use, but then they let the software either die slowly for lack of updates, or kill it quickly by "upgrading." The list is getting long now: iWeb, iMovie, Final Cut and now Pages. Aperture seems to be in hospice. I am going to think long and hard before I invest more of my time and assets in any future Apple software product.

Yes, this. Particularly your last point. You could easily add the MobileMe to iCloud transition to the growing number of instances where Apple punished early adopters of their products. It's becoming a disturbing pattern, especially to those of us who stuck by Apple and the Mac during the darkest years, when being a Mac user exposed us to heaps of scorn and ridicule.

----------

Well... Yes, I agree that Apple is counting on an influx of new users who never experienced the old version. But I think there is also a significant number of users of the old versions who aren't ticked off because they never used any of the missing features or aren't horribly affected by their going missing. As I said, we aren't hearing from those users because they have no complaints, therefore they are silent. And then, a certain percentage of people who are angry now would eventually calm down and forgive Apple. Add all that up (new users + old users unaffected by missing features + affected users who eventually forgive Apple), and Apple still has a sufficient user base, even if some of the currently angry users leave and never return.

Yes, it's a cynical calculation, I am sure. Clearly the early adopters, the people who really got and used these apps, are seen as expendable within Apple's greater scheme of things. But even calculated cynicism can be handled with more grace than Apple has exercised in this instance (which is to say, none).

----------

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.

Exactly. And only because I was fortunate enough to read a few message boards before diving in did I discover the huge gotcha that Apple built into the new app before it did any damage to my work.

 

[ATC]

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.

Out of curiosity why did you archive '13 instead of just deleting it? For future installations you could go to your Purchases tab in the MAS and the new iWork should be available to re-download.

Also, now that you have '13 archived do you see available updates in the MAS for '09? On mine it updated '09 to 13' automatically (as I had automatic MAS updates enabled), and when I disabled auto-updates and re-did the whole '09 install it now always shows 3 updates available via MAS which is annoying as you can't hide them.

----------

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.

Thanks, I'll give that a try when I get home tonight.

 

[numlock]

My point is you're investing in the wrong tool. Do yourself a favor and buy Microsoft Office. Pages is meant for home users typing a letter to grandma.

have you even checked out apples own pages website?

http://www.apple.com/mac/pages/

btw does the realtime collaboration work if i am using pages macos and the collaborators are on ios or icloud?

the only show it with two browsers. obviously if i have pages installed i would rather work on that than open a browse just to collborate

 

[ChrisA]

Well... Yes, I agree that Apple is counting on an influx of new users who never experienced the old version. But I think there is also a significant number of users of the old versions who aren't ticked off because they never used any of the missing features or aren't horribly affected by their going missing. .

I think Appe has figured out the VERY few users do anything at all with their computers ut watch movies, play games and mess with web sites like Facebook.

If you are doing productive office work it is almost certainly in a Windows PC using MS Office. I'd guess that even inside Apple's own buildings everyone there is using MS Office to do real work

So what Apple is doing is looking at the engineering cost to make iWork better vs. the money they make off the three dozen people who actually use iWork to make complex documents.

If I were running Apple I'd make a hard rule: No one, for any reason is allowed to use any non-Apple software or computers, no exceptions if the job can't be don't then we don't do that job. With a rule like that you'd bet the word processor, spread sheet and so on would work better.

----------

Summed up in one absolute winning point, again more proof why I think we'll see an ARM MBA in the not too distant future....

I expect the entire Mac product line will eventually go away too. We can see the plan now. First dumb down all the Mac apps so they are no better than iPads. Then after that there is no reason to have a Mac and they disappear. From the looks of it this is the long term plan.

 

[avidos]

Wow.... downloaded all the new software, thinking after 5 years it would be amazing....

But no... my 5 year old versions do much more, look better and are easier to use.

This is the end of the line for mac software, if this is how it's going I will look else where as I can't use the s.... they have put out.

The should sack those responsible and get people in that actually care about their customers.....

 

[Snowy_River]

I'm sorry, I am trying but I just cannot see why someone would write such a thing.

I'm afraid that you missed my point. I was responding to someone who was basically saying that iWork was the engine of the computer. Given the fact that, at least based on rough bench marks, an iPad 2 has enough raw processing power to run iWork '09, that analogy is simply false. The reason for stripping down of the features in iWork has nothing to do with the "horsepower" of the platform.

My business and my family's livelihood rests in in several hundred iWork documents, not to mention the legacy data of out years that rests on my Drobo (and offsite DVDs) so I won't lose them.

Product development documents, research surveys, speeches, presentations, business canvases, customer reports, consulting analyses, analytics, academic papers, intellectual property, course narratives, software documentation, market analyses, blog articles -- and you can throw in a few screen plays and two half written books as well -- all that and more rests in Apple iWork files.

For us, that really is a very big deal.

Like the person who posted a bit ago about his "150-page dissertation is now in a complete disarray," some of us really went all in on Apple's office productivity platform and are genuinely thrown by this unexpected amputation of functionality we've come to depend on.

Oh, I get it that this is a big deal. My business rests quite firmly on iWork (mostly Pages). I'm quite disheartened by the news that there have been a slew of features removed. And it is that fact that is and will continue to keep me from upgrading for the foreseeable future. But, I'm hopeful that we'll see these features returned...

I guess I could hold at iWork '09 until (as you said you were going to do) until Apple issues enough patches and updates make to upgrading more feasible...

But honestly, I'm thinking this week marks the beginning of the end of my iWork days, and I need to get to work converting those files to Microsoft Office.

So, why? As much as I've been in the camp of "where is our upgrade for iWork?", the truth is that, for the most part, such an upgrade hasn't been needed. Have there been features that would be nice to have? Sure. But for those of us that have made iWork work for years, why would it matter? For the time being, iWork '09 will keep working. Why not wait for a while to see how things turn out? If, over the next six months to a year, updates roll out that bring back most or all of the missing features, why would continuing to run iWork '09 for that period hurt? Of course, if they don't come back, at some point you will have to look to migrating, but that is a move that can be put off for now, don't you think? It's what I'm going to do.

It's also what I've done in another area. I still maintain a number of websites based in iWeb. Just recently, with one of the OS 10.8 updates, iWeb started misbehaving BADLY. I'm hoping that OS 10.9 might correct the issue, but I'm not too optimistic about it. So, I'm looking at needing to finally move to a new platform. Of course, in the case of iWeb, there is simply nothing out there that provides the same kind of WYSIWYG web layout development, for any price. Yes, there are more powerful tools, but nothing that I've seen has anything close to the ease of development...

?..Without textbox linking and the many, many other features that have been deleted in Pages 5, this task would have been impossible...

WTF! Text box linking is gone! Okay, I've heard some things, but that's the first time I've heard that. That one is just unacceptable. That one is at the core of Pages' page layout capabilities.

Is anyone compiling a list of all of the features that have gone missing from the iWork apps? I'd love to see such a, more or less, complete list...

Let's face it, I didn't buy a 27" iMac so I could only do things that are possible on an iPad.

And, as I've said before, from a computing power standpoint, there's no reason that everything that iWork '09 is capable of cannot be done on an iPad. It's just a matter of developing a proper touch UI for it. So, while a number of people have latched on to this comment of yours, the truth is that things you want to do in iWork on your iMac should be equally doable in iWork on your iPad.

Who cares?
We use Office.

And you felt compelled to comment... Why?

My point is you're investing in the wrong tool. Do yourself a favor and buy Microsoft Office. Pages is meant for home users typing a letter to grandma.

This is such an asinine comment. The countless number of people, including a vast number of the people who have commented in this thread, that have found that iWork is the right tool for them, alone speaks to how wrong you are. I, personally, have been doing work in iWork for a decade, starting with Keynote and later Pages and Numbers. I despise MS Office (except Excel, which is the only remarkably lean yet robust and effective tool in Office).

...Clearly the early adopters, the people who really got and used these apps, are seen as expendable within Apple's greater scheme of things...

I find it hard to equate current users of a software package to being "early adopters" when the package has been around for over a decade (if you take into consideration that Keynote was release in 2003, eight years, if you want to count from Pages release in 2005). So many years of having software around negates it being an "early adopter" situation, in my mind. That's why I believe that Apple will bring back most, if not all, of the missing features in iWork 5.