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Product summary
Apple's new iWork software is less than a suite, more than an application, but it may become something greatly useful.
Specifications: License qty: 1 user ; License type: Complete package ; Operating system: Apple MacOS X 10.3.6 or later ; ; See full specs
CNET editors' take
- Reviewed on: 01/11/2005
- Released on: 01/13/2005
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.
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