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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."
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.