iWork '09 user reviews

Pros All the power most users will ever need
Keynote beats Power Point hands down

Cons Some of the formatting doesn't port well to MS Office

Summary For the price you'll be hard pressed to find a better suite to use for the Mac. It's quick to open, full of features and solid in operation. I'm not a heavy spreadsheet user, but Pages and Keynote absolutely are worth the money, and Keynote is a dream to use. The review stated that MS Word has better layout features, but I don't see it. In fact, I do better with Pages than Word in the layout.
If you don't have to have Word/Excel you owe it to yourself to try it out. The only reason I didn't give it a solid 5 star is some trouble I had porting some documents over - not all the formatting transferred as well as I would have liked. Other than that, no problem and worth the money for a native Mac program.

Pros Pages templates, Numbers number crunching and Keynote updates are very good and well worth a look.
Keynote is still the one to beat.

Cons Poor handling of tables, line numbering as well as word/excel compatibility and auto save issues still make Pages and Numbers the second choice when it comes to word processing and spreadsheets. Although the gap is closing fast.

Summary Why is line numbering such a pain in the neck?
Nearly there but not quite.

Pros Intuitive, easy to learn, excellent handling of graphics

Cons Weak support for Website designers, no html support

Summary I switched to iWork from Mac Office some three years ago, and once I realized there would be no problems sharing documents with MS Office users I have never looked back. I liked MS Office, but it was unnecessarily complex where it didn't need to be, and it was at times buggy. iWork is very stable (?It just works?) and refreshingly intuitive. I quickly learn to carry out complex formatting and document creation tasks in a refreshingly easy manner. Keynote is a lot of fun to use, and is at least as powerful as Powerpoint, if not more so because of the Mac's unexcelled graphics abilities.

For those still concerned about letting go of Office, I can without hesitation recommend taking the step both in terms of productivity improvements and because of the cheaper costs in keeping up with new versions.

Pros Just similar enough to MS Office to make for a smooth transition from one to the other. Many more templates than MS Office. Nice looking, smooth graphics. "Inspector" in each of the programs makes for simple and precise corrections and edits.

Cons Would love to see an auto-save feature. A few small bug fixes here and there for the first version are needed.

Summary Overall, iWork '09 is one of the best office clients I have ever encountered. It is simple and familiar for even the computer-shy. Runs logically; If you would like to drag and drop something, or resize something to exactly the size of the item above it, there are actions in place assisting you with all of this. If any program can read your mind and give you what you want... it's iWork '09.