Drop, charge, and lose the cords
Entered CNET Catalog: 01/12/2005
SKU: M9610Z/A
Manufacturer: Apple Inc.
Manufacturer description
Got ideas? iWork '05 brings them to life with Keynote 2 - offering cinema-quality presentations for everyone - and Pages - a word processor with an incredible sense of style. Pages, a streamlined yet powerful word processor, lets you create everything from letters to newsletters to brochures. Keynote set the standard for stunning presentations. Now Keynote 2 lets you build gorgeous photography portfolios, animated storyboards and self-running, interactive slideshows. With its built-in iLife Media Browser, iWork is the perfect complement to iLife.CNET editors' review
- Editors' Choice: No
- Reviewed on: 01/11/2005
Keynote 2 comes with several new themes and the ability to animate text and create interactive slide shows. It also adds the ability to export a presentation in flash or QuickTime formats, improved compatibility with Apple's AppleWorks productivity suite and Microsoft's PowerPoint, and a presenter mode for addressing large groups.
Upside: For Keynote 2, compatibility with market leader PowerPoint is vital, and time will tell how well this version's improvement works. Of the two iWork apps, Keynote remains the easier to use, thanks to automatic guides and layouts. It also produces prettier and more interactive results than Pages. The Presenter mode, in which you can preview and manage a presentation running on a projector, is a welcome addition.
Think of Pages as an Adobe PageMaker/Microsoft Word hybrid: the way it makes creating an attractive document with integrated graphics, including graphs (Pages comes with a powerful and intuitive graph creation tool), is absurdly simple. Pages should be a boon to those who can't afford to, or don't want to, learn QuarkXpress or Adobe InDesign just to make a professional-quality newsletter. Thanks to Mac OS X's powerful rendering capabilities, Pages lets you flow text around any graphic by simply dragging the graphic in place. Pages can also export documents to PDF, HTML, and Microsoft Word format.
Downside: The first version of Keynote didn't always export to and import from industry leader PowerPoint, and we're guessing that some conflicts will remain in version 2. Keynote 2 also faces an uphill battle against Microsoft's market-dominating Mac product.
Power word processor users will find Pages' feature set limited, despite excellent font handling and support for footnotes. We doubt anyone would want to write a book or even a long academic paper in Pages, given its emphasis on style. And perhaps worse, its compatibility with Microsoft Word is limited; Pages documents exported to Word show layout disfigurement, though the text survives. Also certain popular features, such as Word's Track Changes, aren't supported.
Outlook: Apple's new iWork software is less than a full productivity suite but more than an application. It's not the Microsoft Office killer that some prerelease rumors suggested. As a package, iWork is certainly worth the price if you want to create sparkling newsletters, brochures, and office presentations. But if you don't make presentations and you're already a master at making attractive documents with text and graphics, you may not need iWork. Apple may find that ease of use and more attractive output may not be enough to entice switchers from Microsoft.
User opinions
Select a User Opinion to view: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
User Rating: 
7/10
Good but still room for imporvment
Pros: inexpensive
Cons: some features are missing
iWork is a great application suit and has most of the stuffs a regular user would ever need. It is not hard to find Apple had put in a lot of work into it.
After using iWork for 2 month, I still can't find myself removing MS Office from my Mac. I am an engineering student, so I have to work in a ground a lot. Therefore compatibility with MS Office on Windows is vital to me. I can't work together unless my teammates and I are looking at the same thing. Most of the common files open without a problem. I only find formating problems in files with advanced editing (Most of the users would not use them). Although most of the time, iWork would tell you where the problems are and try to fix it. But often removing the format is the only solution on there.
I also found it is hard to do my works without feature like trend line and other data analysis kits.
I will recommend iWork to common user who looks for an application to write simple letters, and tracking resource. However, for advanced users who work in teams with mixed environment, Office is still the choice.
User Rating: 
9/10
Intuitive, elegant office suite
Pros: Easier to create more professional looking documents/presentations
Cons: Numbers lacks features found in Excel (but many won't need)
That said, there are some features you might find in MS Office that you cannot find in iWork, but the ease-of-use and other advantages outweigh the missing tools that most people never even use.
Pages is both a word processor (a la Word) AND a page layout program (a la Quark or InDesign). The pro layout apps can do much more, but Pages will suffice for most small businesses and individuals.
Numbers is more flexible than Excels 'grid' and uses plain English for formulas. Tables, charts and graphs are clean and elegant.
Keynote is the star of the show in my opinion. Simply compare any Keynote presentation to a Powerpoint presentation and you'll see why. There are many professional looking effects and templates.
WARNING: Long time MS Office users will need to clear their minds before working with iWork. The interface and methods are significantly different than Office. I believe most will find iWork more intuitive and better organized, but you need to leave your MS baggage behind or you may become frustrated.
User Rating: 
8/10
Good, but could be better
Pros: Easy to use. Very low cost.
Cons: Not 100% Office compatible.
HOWEVER, iWork 07 is on the horizon and it is going to include a spreadsheet, database and it could well indeed close the gap on Microsoft. So if was looking at iWork 06... I'd suggest doing what I've done. Play around with the trial and then wait for the new version in early 07 sometime.
User Rating: 7/10
Still not as many features as MS office - but much easier to use
Pros: Simple interface, far more intuitive than any other office suite, extremely good templates
Cons: different paradigm than MS office (you really need to spend some time getting used to how it works), not as many features as MS office, mediocre office compatibility
Die-hard word and powerpoint users may find this suite quirky at first. But I recommend spending some time learning how the whole thing works. It's wholly different from the way Word and Powerpoint work. After that, I assure you you will start to like it more and more.
I disagree with those who say pages is not good enough for anything beyond a 10 page document. I have written several 10-50 page reports with Pages and now believe it is not only easier to use than word, but the look of the report is also far superior.
User Rating: 8/10
Great artistic word processor and PowerPoint application.
Pros: Incredibly easy to add media into it; creates stunning Power Points and Newsletter etc.; easy to use.
Cons: No easy way to access fonts, font size, font color, etc.; No grammar check.
User Rating: 
2/10
Too original
Pros: Nice looking templates
Cons: Too original interface for long-time Word users
The user interface is too original for the long-time Word user like me: inserting and aligning images, adding textbox, even changing the font size or color are absolutely different from what one does with the MS Word. It actually took for several days for me to find out the basic procedures, and yet I have to admit this still drives me crazy sometimes. Adding to this, the exported html file appears terribly different from what it does on Pages.
This originality might be what people expected Apple to do, but I have to say, this is far from productive.
User Rating: 
1/10
is this really an application or is it a virus?
Pros: none at all, unless you are a masochist
Cons: simple tasks unintitive at best, impossible at worst
Someone else had a similar problem with a 3 page document she wanted to shorten to 2. After spending an hour on the phone with some tech support person she was finally able to fix her document, but to do so was a process that consisted of *12 SEPARATE STEPS*.
This is really bizarre. How a company like Apple could release such utter garbage just boggles the imagination. One would think that they would be embarassed!
User Rating: 7/10
Apple's word-processor, Apple's presentation software.
Pros: Beautiful, easy end-user experience.
Cons: A bit finicky in terms of robustness.
This software is actually a bundle of 2 programs: Apple's Word processor, and Apple's equivalent of Powerpoint.
The templates in the bundle are way better-looking than what Word in Office: Mac offers. a hundred-million, light-years away.
However, when writing in one of the 2 column sections of a template in Pages, the typing becomes unuseably slow.
On the other hand, for a guy who uses graphics as much as he rents a car (oh, about 3 times a year) the controls are highly intuitive. I think generally speaking if I change the templates they start looking worse. (Of course, friends who know design say they HATE Apple's graphics, but the package is a hundred times better than what I could come up with on my own.
BTW: Words templates look like the aesthetic equivalent of typing on a **** word-processing terminal compared to WYSIWYG: Blocky, dated.
Pages says, "Oh, would you like to save this as a Word document?" and you do it, then you open it in Word, and it produces a shade of its former self: Some elements are there, but not in the way they were arranged.
I'd bet if I had a dual-processor G5 that stuff with the 2 column layout wouldn't be happening. Then again, I wouldn't expect to have that kind of problem on $80 bundled software.
Another issue with the word processing software is it doesn't always offer alternate keystroke commands... sometimes you have to go through menu levels just to change things -- at least, that's been my experience with resizing fonts. If anyone knows differently let me know.
So, overall, definitely worth a buy. Especially for Keynote.
Keynote is a beautiful presentation software program. The templates, again, are beautiful, and easy to use. It became a bit crashy after I started getting low-res photos stretched out and music playing in a kind of "video" I was making.
I'm not exactly a "power-user" so I'm not exactly thinking outside the box. But what's "inside the box" is okay enough at a very reasonable price.
User Rating: 9/10
Easy and effective
Pros: Powerful presentations are easy to make.
Cons: Not a full suite
User Rating: 9/10
A worthy alternative to Microsoft Office, with all the simplicity and quality of Apple's work.
Pros: Beautiful themes, transitions and animations; Drag-and-drop interface; Alignment Guides; Great graphics, font, and footnote handling
Cons: Much fewer animations than PowerPoint (albeit much more impressive ones); Exporting to Microsoft Office formats has layout issues.
