Personally iWork has always seemed a pretty weak offering from Apple. Sure Keynote is an amazing presentation application, but pages has always seemed to be designed for those too lazy to design and create their own templates, and the lack of a spreadsheet on a Mac has always seemed strange.
Well at least we now have a spreadsheet, thanks to the addition of Numbers to iWorks 08, although how good it will be compared to the well established Excel remains to be seen.
“Numbers introduces the concept of intelligent tables on a flexible canvas, a new approach that makes it easy to organize information, create calculations, analyze results and make spreadsheets look as great as they work.”
Skeptic that I am, I am not sure spreadsheets require a ‘new approach’, they are a tool to do a job, not something to get excited over – and that maybe is the issue I have with iWork. It is promoted as a productivity tool, which has PC written all over it, so how can that be sexed up for the Mac? Anyway Steve thinks it is awesome:
“Pages and Keynote make it incredibly easy, and even fun, for anyone to create stylish documents and presentations very quickly,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Numbers rounds out the iWork suite, which is far more intuitive and easy to use than anything else out there.”
Via [Apple Press Release]
First off, it's iWork, Keynote, not iWorks and Keynotes.
And for the record, Pages is an excellent app for doing page layouts if you want to have a fair amount of control over the document. I've actually never used the templates, but they're good if you have something quick you want to make and you don't want to reinvent the wheel. And the new Page Layout mode makes my life much easier (I was actually using it today to edit some cheat sheets I was working on at work today). It initially was a pretty weak program, but Apple has been putting some effort into it and it keeps getting better and better. It's obviously not Office, but it doesn't aim to be.