PC Mag Review of Apple iWork '05

sammykrupa writes "PC Mag has a review of Apple's new office suite, iWork '05. iWork '05 includes a word processor, called Pages (though the article refers to it as a cross between a page-layout program and a word processor) and presentation software, called Keynote. They say that iWork '05 is a 'small but significant assault on Fort Microsoft.' The article also explains that the suite is strong in typographic and visual features - the areas where Office is weakest."

Comments

great programs

[e**(i pi)-1]

Pages and Keynote are both great programs. Both are easy to learn. I tried out Pages a week ago the first time and liked it immediatly.

• Both Pages and Keynote has good templates which makes it easy to get started.
• I found already the first version of keynotes more stable then powerpoint, especially for presentations with lots of movies. I did not find any flaws in Pages yet but I must say, that I write almost everything with LaTeX myself.
• Both Pages and Keynote store their documents in an XML form with pictures, etc stored seperatly. This makes things more stable. Pages stores the XML file in gziped form. To look at the XML source of Pages (which does not have line breaks), just add some newlines with :1,$ s/>\r if you use the vi editor.
• Pages can read and export MS word documents. This works fine for simple documents, more complex layouts get tossed around a bit but it is easy to rearrange things.
• Keynotes can read and export powerpoint. Similarly, if Keynote exports to powerpoint, there are things which need to be touched up.
• What I like especially about keynote II is the ability to export the presentation in SWF form. If only one could chose the size of the exported file. There is an easy way around: export as quicktime movie in a smaller format and toss that into Flash.

Missing information

[Anonymous Coward]

The PC Mag review is missing a number of fairly significant points. They fail to cover:

Word compatibility - this has been perfect so far for me, although I have only used it on a few documents. The import and export has been just as good as that in Word so far.

HTML - the HTML export feature produces clean and readable HTML with each character or paragraph style mapping to a CSS style. Again, I have only tried a few documents, but this is much, much better than Word's HTML output.

Other formats - Pages can output to text, rich text, and PDF, in addition to HTML and DOC. The native format is a container folder (similar to applications) containing the file in an XML format, and all binary resources. This makes extracting an image, sound, movie, graph, or whatever easy on any platform.

Missing formats - there is no option to output a customized XML, OpenOffice format, WP, Appleworks (import is supported), or Latex.

In general, pages is fairly usable, and seems like a great replacement for reading and writing basic documents in word, and great for general home word processing. I'd like to see more templates, cross-references, and the inclusion of a good thesaurus (will be in tiger).

The review mentions Word's long document support. We had to abandon word at one of my previous jobs simply because it could not reliably open and save documents more than about 150 pages with a medium number of graphics. My preliminary tests with Pages seem to indicate no problems with documents about 200 pages long. The review also mentions long open and save times. It is actually about 3 times faster to open and save the same document as word (with each using their respective formats) and almost as fast as word at converting and opening a word document. I can't believe how little recognition the DOC and HTML capabilities of pages have been getting. Perhaps I will write up a thorough review myself, at some point in the near future.

One nice thing about these tools...

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

...is native PDF support. For example you can create diagrams in Omnigraffle or Adobe Illustrator (say) or equations in LaTeX (dragged and dropped from here) and insert them easily into your document as vector graphics. This means that they can still be scaled, rotated or otherwise transformed without any loss of quality even though they are no longer in the package that created them. This is a great boon for people preparing technical presentations.

Re:Most important part of TFA

[searleb]

I think there is an important thing to note about the page layout problem. Conversions between Mac Office and Windows Office have always resulted in "Minimal Changes in the page layout" as well, even if they are the same version number. You still always have to check (and fix) your document on a Windows computer.

This is particularly noticable in Mac Powerpoint to Windows Powerpoint. For example, a couple of years ago I gave a small presentation I wrote on my mac with (the then new) Office.X. They wanted me to do it on their Windows computer and so I decied to wing it. I was horrified when all my tiff graphics didn't come up and all my properly (mono) spaced fonts were converted to san serif (nothing lined up). I learned my lesson and never trust the (or any) converter anymore.

I haven't tried the new Pages and Keynote yet, but other positive reviews of the conversion features suggest that Pages/Keynote to Word/Powerpoint is probably not any worse off than where current Mac Office users are now. I'm not going to ditch Mac Office, but I'm going to buy iWork next time I get to the Apple store. The new features not included in Office, such as the Keynote to QuickTime converter (programs to do movie demos cost high hundreds to thousands of dollars), are my motivation.