Apple iWork '05 (Mac) review:5 stars (Another Apple Home Run) - Apple has been releasing great applications for consumers in the past few years with the iLife suite. With iWork, Apple has refocused their efforts on mainstream businesspeople.
iWork's word processing program, called Pages, has an interface reminicient of MacWrite Pro, a program that was easy to use yet powerful. However, this program offers much more than MacWrite Pro. It has many great built in templates and is great for desktop publishing as well as simple letter writing. Easier to use than Word, it has nearly as much power in the document department. For publishing, though, this one beats Word in every respect, and is a great alternative for those who don't want to deal with a high end publishing program such as Quark XPress. Like iMovie, professional results can be produced with consumer software.
Keynote is far superior to PowerPoint. The PowerPoint templates have been around since 1997 or so, and are starting to get old and boring. Since nobody wants to use hackneyed slides, Keynote offers completely new templates. Like the iLife templates they are very well thought out. QuickTime integration is a real plus. The program itself is easy to use and can be used as a basic drawing program in some respects.
This suite is gradually replacing AppleWorks 6, which has not been updated since 2001 and can trace its roots back to ClarisWorks, which debuted in 1991. AppleWorks isn't much more powerful than the original ClarisWorks and is definitely showing its age.
The only module that this does not have is a spreadsheet. If you're looking for an Excel replacement here, you're out of luck. Fortunately the Mac version of Excel is quite good. AppleWorks has a spreadsheet but the interface is somewhat old-fashioned.
Given the power of Keynote and Pages, this is something every Mac user should own.4 stars (iWork Works Like A Dream) - iWork contains both Pages (a word processing/page layout application) and Keynote (a presentation application). These apps are designed to work as intuitively as iTunes, iPhoto and the other applications from the iLife suite. In fact both Pages and Keynote are fully integrated with iLife so adding files from any of the iLife applications to a Pages or Keynote document is as easy as drag and drop.
I mainly use Pages and have created newsletters, envelopes, flyers and personal letters. I'd estimate I worked an average of 20 to 30 minutes on the flyers I have created, and most of that time was spent on the actual text of the document. Similar projects with all the formatting, colors, images and boxes, have easily taken me double that time using Word and AppleWorks.
Pages let you export your document in Word, PDF and HTML formats, however I have found that the exported files sometimes don't perfectly mirror the original. Drop shadows didn't appear and positioning was slightly off. Keynote has similar exporting problems. If you need to share actual files with others, the exporting problems in iWork will give you quite a few headaches. Thankfully, I'm printing out all my documents or sharing them with other iWork users.
The iWork interface is seamless and beautiful and offers many useful templates. These templates are so good that I'd like to se even more of them included. But if the templates don't offer what you're looking for then iWork lets you customize them to your tastes/needs or else create your very own templates from scratch. A few of the included templates give me a bit of lag when using them but it's nothing egregious. Aside from that minor quibble the only complaint I have is the trouble I have exporting my files to other formats.
If you routinely create letters, flyers or presentations, then you owe it to yourself to pick up iWork. Why? Well, iWork works hard for you by expanding your options and helping you create beautiful projects in a fraction of the time it would take with other software. And it does it all with a pleasing visual flair.4 stars (No Microsoft Office replacement.) - What iWorks does great is what Apple does great, it goes to the hard to do things and attacks them with avengance. Everyone can type a work processing document, but what about create a great looking resume, a great promotional flyer for a club, or even stellar presentations? iWorks adds a visual flare to the world of presentations, but it lacks in one major area: a decent word processor. While Pages does an awsome job at creating art, when it comes down to putting a paper together it's odd and cumbersome to operate.
In the end I recomend this application if you want help creating advertisements, flyers, and presentations like how iMovie helped you with making movies.
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