- Average user rating: 3.5 stars out of 40 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
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2 out of 3 people found this review helpful
4.0 stars
"Excellent, intuitive, package that does most things Office users want, and some things better"
Pros: Clean, intuitive, interface. Makes tricky things easy.
Cons: No database or direct interchange with Filemaker or Endnotes.
Summary: I started using MS Word with version 1 and stuck with it through to Office 2004. I had a lot of "investment" in knowing how to do things with it.
Today, though, I find I pretty much always use Pages for word-processing unless I have a powerful reason for sticking with Office. The new version has pretty much completed my "conversion".
Simply put:
1) if you are putting together a substantial document requiring extensive integrated graphics, neat text wrap, variable formatting and the like, it is easier and faster to do with Pages than with Word.
2) If you want to simply whip out a simple few pages some purpose, Pages still wins because of the clean, simple, user interface.
"Keynote" has always had the edge over Powerpoint. Even PC "hard noses' that I work with usually prefer me to whip their stuff into Keynotes and then use it from my Mac rather than leaving it in Powerpoint.
"Numbers" is new, and still needs the addition of some bells and whistles for full "compatibility" and "functionality", but it, too, makes good presentation a breeze compared with Excel. Not for the hardest nosed number crunchers yet, perhaps, though it is still a very powerful program for such things, with an excellent set of functions, but it beats the pants off Excel if you want to produce something quickly with numbers or tables that actually looks good.
I'd still like to see proper integration with Filemaker, or perhaps a Filemaker compatible database component added, though
All in all, I'm very impressed. For many Mac users it really makes sense as the "first choice" for a work package, not because it is cheaper than MS Office, but because it actually does many things better and more intuitively.
