I gotta agree. As nice as iWork seems, it's just incomplete. Something named iWork without a spreadsheet in it is just silly especially when AppleWorks included a very nice spreadsheet. Same goes for a database app, which AppleWorks also included. iWork does two things fairly well but as a "Work" app it's just not there yet.

The linked article is too short - and only supplies the conclusions of the author without any examples to clarify.

e.g., what is meant by "for anyone who does a lot of writing, this is not the main word processor you'd want to use"? It would be nice to know what the author thinks is _missing_.

I'm not expecting that the new iWork will indeed have the plethora of features that Word has taken onboard over the years. Much of those features go unused by the vast majority of Word consumers.

From what I saw of the Pages demo, however, I suspect that it would be more than adequate for a vast majority of those who apparently need Word for just about anything and everything. Likewise for Keynote 2...

To call Keynote klutzy is a laugh. I've used Keynote. I know Keynote. It's about as easy as easy gets. Pages is great. IUt's more like a consumer Indesign than it is like Publisher. People usually love publisher for one thing: the clipart. Thats it. Buy a box. It will be better anyway.

As for the first poster's complaint about a lack of spreadsheet, i think that doesn't apple here since the reviewer is commenting on apps that exist now with the package.

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geoduck wrote:
I gotta agree. As nice as iWork seems, it's just incomplete. Something named iWork without a spreadsheet in it is just silly especially when AppleWorks included a very nice spreadsheet. Same goes for a database app, which AppleWorks also included. iWork does two things fairly well but as a "Work" app it's just not there yet.

iWork '05 is 'building the replacement for AppleWorks'. Steve said it himself. That's why iWork '05 doesn't have a Spreadsheet app yet. I expect it will be there next year (maybe a database app also - FileMaker Express, anyone?)

When this happens, AppleWorks will be finally replaced by a complete suite of productivity applications - iWork '06.

"Comparisons to Microsoft's established Word and PowerPoint are inevitable in that Pages and Keynote are both intended to serve the core functionality of their Big Redmond counterparts. Though the iWork suite is a fraction of the price of just Word, for instance, many consumers and professionals alike will be making the comparison, whether or not either of Apple's offerings are intended to replace Word or PowerPoint."

OK, now I have to call this a cop-out, at least in regards to Keynote. What else is it, besides a Powerpoint replacement?

And the review was pretty top level - no real example of what "klutzy" means, which I take to mean "clumsy". Not a term I usually associate with Apple software (except the lack of a "Cancel" button in the Safari preferences pane...)

Keynote is used for the two most followed keynote speeches in the computer industry . . . If Steve J can use it with east it can't be that klutzy.

I agree that a database and spreadsheet would have been nice. My guess is that there has been a lot of work looking at FileMaker 7 and figuring out how much to put in the iWork version, with file compatibility being important. I actually think integrating the spreadsheet with the database will be a bigger job that the integration with Pages.

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Guest wrote:
The linked article is too short - and only supplies the conclusions of the author without any examples to clarify.

I agree. Has this guy actually used these applications? There's no reason to think so.

For those of us who actually communicate--in real life, away from a keyboard, that is--it should be noted that Keynote is *the* standard in presentation software. If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me how to do "that" in PowerPoint...

Also, his sole criticism of Keynote 2 is that it incorporates movies less well than PowerPoint. This is ludicrous unless they did something utterly foolish in the second version. It's Apple, for goodness sake, the company that invented Quicktime.

For me, it's Keynote for $79 and a cute toy app thrown in for free.

I absolutely hate Word. I find it totally un-intuitive, unforgiving and inflexible (though I have no exprience of the latest version I accet. Indeed I use quark rather than deal with its limitations and terrible user interface in doing what I want it to do. What actually is it that 'writer's have to do that would make Word a must have solution- certainly defeats me, and I do a fair amount of writing too. I can't believe that Pages would be even more clumsy knowing Apple's approach but I will have to wait till I use it I suppose to judge for sure. I suspect however that having spent the time (as I refuse to do) to fight with word's dictats and surrendering wholeheartedly to them exhausted, any other way would indeed appear clumsy. After all I have similarly heard such comments by Windows users about the Mac way of doing things. Indeed I suspect horse handlers would have said the same about motor vehicals back in 1900. 'Difference' can often be confused with 'less good'.

I'm a designer. If I need to design a page, I'll use illustrator, photoshop, indesign, etc. Personally, it's Illustrator for me.... I don't like restraints. That, personally, is all I run into in Word; constraints. I'm a power user, but I get sick of exerting my power on bloated applications just to do something simple. Sometimes I just want to write some copy, without the overhead that a full featured layout application requires. Word drives me nuts, with its autocompletion and smart word / sentence / paragraph selecting. I'm sure all of these features have some kind of preferences, or theres a menu somewhere that can turn them off or whatever, I just don't have the patience to find it. If you truly write all the time, and don't have any more advanced applications, then I'm sure Word is a godsend, but I don't consider it's layout functions high-end, and I don't want to be saddled with them.

Because of this, I was very happy with Pages when I turned it on. Only 10 icons across the top, no lines & dots & boxes all over the place or menus spread all the way across the screen. It's just simple.

As for iWork in general... it definitely needs a spreadsheet. It can't truly be a replacement for Office until it gets one. I would love to ignore the Office sweet, but until i get a spreadsheet, I'll still have to open excel to view them.

One thing I just noticed in pages. You have to use command+> to zoom in and command+< to zoom out. OK, that makes sense. In mail you have to use command+shift+equals(plus) to zoom in, and command + minus to zoom out and in safari its command equals & command minus to zoom in and out. These are all apple applications. You think they could use the same commands in the their applications. They USED to have tons of UI guidlines, you think similarity of key commands might be an important one. It would sure make the applications more intuitive.

Oh, well, it's better than word, where I've yet to find a key command listed in the menus to zoom in and out (bad eyes)

Am I the only one who sees Pages fitting into more of a "PageMaker-esque" market than horning in on Word's territory? Others mentioned above that it seems primarily for newletters, menus, letterheads, etc... the stuff for churches, schools, non-profits, and a few small businesses. A lot of these types of users were running PageMaker a few years ago, but now they are trying to accomplish the same with other tools that really don't fit the need as well.

The comparison I see is that Pages is to InDesign or QuarkXpress like iMovie is to FCP.

As for Word, TextEdit has all the word-processing power I need. Word just gets in my way. I wish I could delete it from my hard drive.

Realize that Pages is a version one product, while Keynote is a version 2.

Anyone remember Photoshop 1.0 through 3.0? Yeah, it didn't get really good until 4.0, right?

Apple will continually update and upgrade the software. Each new version will be better than the last with marked improvement.

Besides, not everything can be a homerun.

I got iWork installed late yesterday and spent about 30 minutes checking things out, mostly in Pages. First impression was that Pages is a bit unintuitive. It certainly demos well, but the reality of taking one of those beautiful templates and tweaking it a bit is that it's not as simple as it looks.

That having been said, I've had much more experience with Word than any design/page-layout software, and it's pretty clear that Pages is intended as a page design tool, not a word document tool. I'll have some time today to spend reading the User's Guide and trying things out again and I fully expect that once I begin to "think different[ly]" about it their design choices for the UI will begin to feel more natural.

A couple of "not so good" things I noticed: Undoing some change, regardless of how small it was, takes a surprisingly l-o-n-g time (although when doing multiple undo's, after the 1st one the rest seem to happen pretty fast).

Also, I was really hoping that the Export to PDF would produce smaller output files than, say, using Print > Save As PDF to convert a Word Doc to PDF. This doesn't appear to be the case, though.

Is it really true that Pages will not create an Index? It does a Table of Contents but that is not enough for a Word-replacement word processor. Maybe it is just for page layout.

It comes as no surprise that Mr. Wendland calls Pages the "poor man's version of Microsoft Publisher program for Windows." Apple clearly had no intention of creating a word processsing program but rather one that packages text in neat design templates with graphics and multimedia. For me, it is a major disappointment as I had my hopes on a full-featured word processor that would replace the need to have MS Word. I use InDesign and Quark for my design layout, so Pages is irrelavent. What I really need is a word processing program that can take the place of MS Word while providing full compatibility with my business associates with Windows PCs who use on Word. Unfortunately, it appears the only choice is Word for Mac, as I've yet to find ANY other word processor on the Mac that will import or export Word documents correctly (other than simple text documents with no formatting).

While Keynote is in version 2 and may be, by some accounts, well worth the $79 pricetag, iWork 05 as a whole is not ready for prime time. But, what else is new? Apple is notorious for getting its customers to pay for the privilege of Beta-testing its software.

I have used all three of the applications that seem to be integral to this discussion: MS Office, AppleWorks, and iWorks. I have designed MS Word templates for fortune 100 companies and I have used it to write letters to my grandmother. With that experience, I can safely say that my opinion of Word is that it is a bloated CPU/memory hog with hundreds of features that have no use to anyone but a few obscure people doing a few obscure tasks. It is certainly not suited to creating attractive documents without a ridiculous amount of contortion on the part of the document creator. AppleWorks (and it pains me to say this because I used to be a beta tester for them when it was still ClarisWorks) was not much better and given that it could not save .doc files natively, it was largely useless. I would agree with the opinion above that characterized this as InDesign Express. I was able, within 20 minutes of having opened the box and installed the software, to create a newsletter template and a letterhead template. Granted I may have a little more experience than most with this type of application, but I was truly impressed with the ability to create layered blocks of text with transparency that printed as they appeared on screen.
The only complaint I have about Keynote is that after you have presented your beautiful presentation, you are inevitably asked to provide it to the presentee. The fact that most of them have windows machines means that it has to be exported to a .ppt file which serves to highlght how bad powerpoint really is.
I am completely mystified as to why they did not include some facility to link a Pages document to the AddressBook so that people could do mail merges. This would obviate a huge percentage of the need for a flat file database application of the tpe included in AppleWorks. In point of fact, what I'd really like to see is some form of plug in architecture that would allow the user to draw from any data source to populate their documents, AddressBook and FileMaker Pro would be a great start.
As to the absence of a spreadsheet, I really don't spreadsheets them that often but I have to admit that it seemed a slightly glaring omission to me. I have not had a chance to mess with the table/charting abilities built into iWorks yet but I would like to see the spreadsheet integrated into Pages rather than having it as a separate entity. That's sort of a round about way of saying that I hope the tables functions have some elementary spreadsheet abilities built in that can be expanded as the product matures because it would be nice to have more good looking spreadsheets floating around in the world...

I'm impressed with Pages, and plan on using it often. Word is overloaded with gadgetry, buggy, and delivers sloppy rendering of fonts. Pages is like a mini version of PageMaker/In Design, with access to useful templates and a nice, uncluttered menu. I love the printed results of Pages, even with simple letters, on a cheap ink-jet. There is definitely a qualitative difference in the finished product.

Pages is definitely not "release level" software. In fact, calling it "beta" would be too flattering. My guess is that someone at Apple forced the developers to get something out the door to coincide with the Mac mini release. I can't imagine that any professional development team would not feel embarrassed to release a product with this many problems and unfinished pieces.

Without a doubt, Pages looks really nice. The templates are well designed. The photographs used in the templates are perfectly sized and matched to the surrounding colors. You are left with no doubts that Apple has some great graphics designers. In short, it's a product that you can easily do a "gloss over" demo with. The problems start when you actually try to do something with those templates.

One of the nicest features is the integration with iPhoto. It's very easy to replace a template photo by dragging a photo out of the "media" pop-up window and dropping it on the existing photo. Doing so, however, most likely means that all that expertise that went into selecting the surrounding colors in the template is now wasted (unless your photo happens to have the same general color scheme). Changing those surrounding colors is easy, except when it's not.

Usually, you just bring up the color chooser and drag a new color into the area you want changed and drop it. However, in some (hard to understand, let alone predetermine) cases this doesn't work. You have to select the area first, bring up the inspector window and then change the color in the background "color well." In one instance, trying to change a background color the normal (intuitive) way didn't work (not good). Instead, it actually ended up changing the text color in another area of the document (really not good).

Signs that Pages got rushed into release get really obvious when you try to export your document. I've not found any of the more complex templates that can be successfully exported to RTF, Word or HTML. This is not a case of there being "small differences;" there are major problems with all of the exported files. The worst is the HTML export. One would think Apple should know how to code HTML pages that put things in the right locations. Think again. The code doesn't even fix the width of the content area, so resizing the window causes all of the "document layers" to go sliding all over the place. Nothing lines up. None of the overlays work. Areas that were on the left in the document are now on the right, some that were above are now below ...

Worse, when you've placed text in what is called a "fixed text box," the box and the text in it gets converted into an image to display in the web page. And worse still, if you've used a small font, the text is no longer readable in the generated image. (This is actually true of the doc in Pages, as well. I didn't notice this at first because the program, apparently, defaults to a zoom level of 125% and at that level, for example, text in an 8pt Futura font looks fine. Zoom back to 100%, though, and it's also unreadable.)

There are a number of performance and behavior issues with Pages, as well. Resizing can be a jerky, slow process (on a G4 iMac with 1 gig RAM). There's also some mysterious goings-on when working with what are called linked text boxes. You can click on one of the "link handles" and all sorts of things change all over the place ...

If you've been thinking about buying iWork because of what Pages appeared to offer, save your money. They should have named it iDon'tWork.

"Apple clearly had no intention of creating a word processsing program but rather one that packages text in neat design templates with graphics and multimedia. For me, it is a major disappointment as I had my hopes on a full-featured word processor that would replace the need to have MS Word ... iWork 05 as a whole is not ready for prime time. But, what else is new? Apple is notorious for getting its customers to pay for the privilege of Beta-testing its software."

I'm a bit disappointed, too. In the few minutes I've spent with it, I could not find a thesaurus or word count feature, and I can't find a way to set defaults for invisible characters. While the replace feature works with invisible character, it is not intuitive.
What is there, seems to be nice, it is what is missing that makes it not ready for prime time.
One might consider Mariner Calc for the missing spreadsheet. It is fast and easy to use, and can deal with Excel documents, but not AppleWorks.

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Guest wrote:
In the few minutes I've spent with it, I could not find a thesaurus or word count feature

Word count is in the Inspector. Word count (and much more info) of a selection is available from the Statistics... service. Sherlock includes a thesaurus as part of its dictionary function.

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