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

Most important part of TFA

[Staplerh]

Damn. This was a dissapointing read. The most important paragraph IMHO concerned 'Pages' - I'm a Mac user who relies on MS Office and was mildly excited about being able to switch to iWork in lieu of Office (and the inevitable $$$ upgades). Unfortunately:

In our tests, Pages imported our Word test files with only minimal changes in page layout. And there are still plenty of features where Pages needs to play catch-up with Word. For example, Pages lacks a grammar checker and revision mark-up abilities. Also, there are none of the collaboration, tracking, and security features that make Word so excellent in business settings. Pages lacks Word's long-document features and Word's (sometimes shaky) ability to combine multiple subdocuments into one master document, as well as the ability to split a window so that you can work on two different parts of a document at the same time. We were also surprised to find that Pages loads and saves files slowly compared to other modern applations.

Damn. The revision abilities in Word are excellent - even better in Office X than in the MS Office XP version. "Minimal Changes" in page layout? Damn.

Now, I'll admit that much of this is Microsoft's fault - they have their proprietary .doc format, and it's probably a bitch to crack. But other things.. revision could have been aped by Apple. Heck, the feature to split the window so you can work on two different parts of a document at the same time. These are all things that perhaps the standard enduser doesn't work, but I'd say the cost/benefit analysis would have argued for the inclusion of these features!

Now I know that Pages is just going to be a 'page layout' feature, and it does look beautiful - but damn it, for a minute there I was hoping that I could finally have a Microsoft free Mac.

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.

I'm not there yet.

[Lonesome Squash]

It's not really a replacement for Appleworks, since it doesn't have spreadsheet, drawing, or painting components, although the FA hints that there might be a spreadsheet in a future release. Those get used a lot in our house, where three school-age children use Appleworks (and occasionally Office) to prepare their lab reports, papers, and projects.

On the plus side, it:

does'nt have a grammar checker, Who need's 1, anyway's?

imports/exports Word docs

integrate with iLife. It's a matter of hours until my daughter has a garageband track backing her history report. Wait, maybe that's a minus...

Apple's site (cited in the OP) is short on details. But from what we see, I'm going to wait until the product fills out a little more. Appleworks with the occasional resorting to Office is working well enough that I don't need to spend $80US.

But I would tell anyone who wanted cheap, high-quality presentation and layout software to grab it. The samples on the Apple site look just lovely.

Early adopter

[Laplace]

My wife and I have been using Pages to write letters and resumes. So far the only complaint that I've had is that it can be a bit tricky to change the style and formatting of some of the sample documents.

One thing that confuses me is why Apple doesn't buy The Omni Group's productivity software (Omni Graffle and Outliner). Adding those to iLife would bring it much closer to being an Office competitor (no such thing as an Office killer).

iWork was well worth the $79 for Pages alone.

Re:Early adopter

[ColdGrits]

"They are slowly killing their business by duplicating it themselves. The Konfabulator story comes to mind"

WTF?

You mean Dashboard in OSX 10.4, which is an OS X implementation of features from OS7 and earlier, are somehow ripping off Konfabulator (which itself was nothing more than a ripoff of MacOS 7 and earlier's features anyway)?

Interesting revision of huistory there!

It's the interface, stupid

[legLess]

The article also explains that the suite is strong in typographic and visual features - the areas where Office is weakest.

Speaking as an ex IT manager and someone with many Office-using friends, the weakest part of Office isn't it's formatting. What most people I know hate about Office is Word's attitude. "Did you really mean to do that? How 'bout if I correct it for you?" "Are you sure you wanted to paste that? Don't you want me to change the styles a little?"

Word encapsulates Microsoft's condescending attitude towards its users; it tells users that they're idiots and need hand-holding. Apple's software tells its users that their time is valuable, that they're probably right most of the time, and that they're smarter than their computers.

Being a geek forum, I can see the responses now: "Ha! Those lusers just don't know how to use it. That's their own fault." Wrong. Microsoft's UI and workflow are driven by program managers with a list of market-driven features. Apple does the same thing, but adds list item zero, non-negotiable, absolutely primary, that Microsoft doesn't understand: the user experience.

Re:It's the interface, stupid

[Lonesome Squash]

When I used to teach a course on MS Office (pauses while PTSD-style flashbacks ease off a bit) I used to explain it like this. "Office is like having a big, friendly, eager-to-please giant with an IQ of 80 standing helpfully between you and your work."

Don't worry, I'll capitalize that for you. When do I get to pat the rabbits, George?

Re:It's the interface, stupid

[kaan]

The parent post is right on. In fact, I think it barely touches on the differences between Office and Pages (or any other Windows-based software vs. it's Mac counterpart).

For example, look at iPhoto: fairly minimal on features. In fact, when iPhoto was released, I recall hearing all kinds of important sounding people say a bunch of unimpressive things, that iPhoto lacked features, that it didn't have the power, blah blah blah. But what they missed was the simplicity of use. iPhoto is so much easier to use that it absolutely nails 90% of the things you want to do in a perfect, simple package. For the remaining 10% of your photo tasks (advanced editing, for instance), use something else.

Apple's approach in general is to nail the common use cases, and nail 'em to the goddamn wall, whereas the Microsoft approach (and again, a majority of apps on Windows) is to offer you 4,000 features that you can't understand or figure out, so you kinda hobble along with the app, barely able to get your tasks done.

So could Apple have added multiple sub-document support? Yeah, probably. Do I even know what that is, aside from having read someone else's rant that it doesn't exist in Pages? No, I don't, and I don't think I care. I could say the same thing for a lot of the other "features" that are supposedly "missing" from Pages.

The Omni Group also gets this same design principle - do something well, and keep it simple. There's a huge reason why OmniOutliner is an app that I (and thousands of other folks) use on a regular basis, and it's not because it has all kinds of complicated, contrived "features" that some marketing group in Redmond came up with under corporate sales pressure.

Re:It's the interface, stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

I second that.

When I wrote my thesis, I had a choice to go with LaTeX or with Word. Being a so-so LaTeX user and seeing that Word supports LaTeX features such as cross-referencing etc., I went with Word, believing that I would save time.

Big mistake. Word kept changing the heading levels, lists, figure placements, widows/orphans. It was not consistent from the point where I saved the document and the next time I opened the document. It corrupted some of my equations (which made the file unsaveable -- had to hunt down the offending equations, open Equation Editor and replace them). And the worst offending problem was Word's automatically starting header numbers not from 1. Sometimes Section 1 became Section 3 and therefore, Section 2 became Section 4 and subsection 1.1 became 3.1.

It was so problematic that I had to spend much time with Word than with writing my thesis. But I already invested much time with it and it'd be foolish to change to LaTeX.

Word's "features" are more likely to be a hindrance than a help and there is nothing to convince Word that we know what we are doing.

Dear Apple,

[cryptochrome]

iWork needs a spreadsheet and database. In fact I often find Office for OS X's poor database functionality (and in particular relational database functionality) to be a constant source of frustration. Unfortunately there are no integrated alternatives.

If this/these programs are in the works and simply waiting for Tiger's Core Data framework, that's fine. I'm planning on upgrading to Tiger ASAP anyway. But if iWorks with the spreadsheet/database is included on new systems, I will buy a new machine.

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.

excellent security in word?

[compactable]

From the article:

"Pages lacks ... the collaboration, tracking, and security features that make Word so excellent in business settings."

Can someone hilight the securuty features in word? I'm not trolling, I'm serious. The only mention of Word and security I know of comes from cases where Word has shown more than it intended.

Lack of grammar checker is a *feature*

[revscat]

Look, I'm all for tools to make our lives easier. But if someone doesn't know their native tongue well enough to write a complete, well-formed sentence, grammar and spelling checkers just exacerbate the problem. Maybe I'm being somewhat Luddite-ish, but I believe that a firm grasp of language allows for clearer thought, not just A's on papers in college and high school.

Moral of the story: Grammar checkers -- when they even work -- perpetuate stupidity.

Re:Pages not an Word competitor

[hunterx11]

Apple doesn't want to replace Office. For a lot of people, Office is the killer app. If MS stopped making Office for Mac, no amount of "switch" campaigns would make up for it.

No Grammar Check?

[thedbp]

GOOD. I think that grammar check is a lousy feature. Not because it doesn't work, but because it encourages laziness and encourages people to rely on automated helpers rather than learn their native language. If I'm reading something that someone wrote, I want to know that they wrote it THEMSELVES, that they know how to construct sentences and use language effectively and properly. It is important in making hiring decisions as well. If someone comes off great on paper, but can't make conversation on the same level as their augmented written works, then they will be less effective employees.

How is this different than spell check? Dictionaries have always been readily available to double-check your work, and it is much harder to memorize the exact spelling of every word in a language than it is to master the much fewer rules of sentence structure and the like. Also, in speech, spelling doesn't matter, only pronunciation. So as long as you can form sentences correctly and pronounce words correctly, you don't sound like an ass.

Grammar check is contributing to the dumbing down of culture. If we continue to rely on automation to provide us with the basics of communication, communication will begin to break down and fail more and more often...

Re:Pages not an Word competitor

[nine-times]

Well, I think the whole "not wanting to step on Microsoft's and Adobe's toes" certainly provided incentive to keep Pages simple.

However, I suspect that there's another big reason, one that was probably at least as influential in the design of the final product. A lot of the Geek/Linux crowd really DON'T understand Apple's design philosophy.

If you look at Microsoft products, for example (and I'm not trying to start a flame-war, just noting a different design method), and version 1.0 is usually crap. I can't think of an MS program that was even usable before version 3.0, and it's usually not very good until version 4.0. Why?

Microsoft will create a version 1.0 application with 1000 features that barely work, and the program will be a PITA to use. By version 4, they've spent years redesigning, taking things out, putting things in, until it's a patchwork program with 700 useful features.

Apple, on the other hand, will put out a comparable application with version 1.0 having only 500 features, but most of them work decently, and the program is fairly pleasant to work with. It won't do everything the Microsoft version 1.0 program will do, but what it does, it's pretty good at. They use this product as a base, and spend years carefully adding features in places that don't disturb the original design. By version 4, it's a solid program with 700 useful features.

So it gets to be a question of what you think is better-- to throw in all sorts of features all at once spend years sorting it out, or use a smaller set of more targeted features as a base and then build off of that?