Customer Reviews

Apple iWork '06 Family Pack (Mac DVD) [OLDER VERSION]

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I have a PowerBook, an iMac, and an eMac at home that are used in different ways. The kids use the eMac for school work, and my wife & I use the other 2 Macs for home business.

Although most school work was required in MS-PowerPoint or MS-Word, exporting from iWork '06 Pages and Keynote was very simple to do with 90-95% accuracy. Our kids said they just do minor editing at school before submitting the work.

For home business, we use Pages to do our proposals, bills, and receipts. And use Keynote for presentations. One thing that I thought was amazing, is the fact that I can display the notes and the succeeding slide on my PowerBook, while projecting just the current slide for the customer to see.

For the price of the Family Pack, we were licensed to use iWork '06 on 5 Macs on the same network. The cost fitted our budget perfectly. The only thing I wish was available in Keynote was timed transition (example: after 3 seconds show bullet#1, after 5 seconds show bullet#2, after 2 seconds show the chart)

I got the iWork software after buying my new iMac 24 and was excited to learn how to use the word processing program with all of it's graphics capabilities. I even subscribed to Lynda dot com training for a month to learn all of the program's capabilities. I have not used the presentations software program yet but the word processing was extremely frustrating to a person who has spent the past 15 years using WordPerfect and Microsoft Word for word processing. I prefer to be able to set up short cuts with icons and I found it extremely confusing trying to learn how to combine graphics boxes, etc., etc., with my word processing docs. And that's really what attracted me to the iMac in the first place! Even after going through the professional on-line training I still can't get around inside the program and function effectively. After several frustrating days of working at it I purchased and installed the new "Parallels" program on my iMac along with a full-priced new version of Microsoft XP and reinstalled my do-able windows programs on my new iMac. So far, buying iWork was a mistake for me and combined with having to purchase Parallels and a $200 Windows XP, an expensive one. I love the screen colors and hd resolution on my iMac but found the Pages program to be too confusing for me utilize as a researcher/writer. I needed to be able to customize the way my documents look with adjustments that are not part of Pages. If your documents are for school or are fairly simple and you can figure out how Apple combines graphics with word processing, maybe it will work for you and it will be cheaper than getting the windows programs. Pages comes with dozens of ready-made templates which look great but as soon as you try to change the way they look confusion sets in, at least it did for me.

Apple's iWork software presents two applications: Pages and Keynote which is Apple's answer to Microsoft's Publisher and Power Point. As someone who has used both, I can honestly say that iWork blows Publisher and Power Point clean out of the water. Keynote has some added features such as 3D graphs and the capaibility to add numbers in charts (like a very limited spread sheet) added in this version. You can make truly professional looking mind blowing presentations with Keynote that will make any presentation look like a multimedia jewel. Pages allows you to do desktop publishing and print media with the finesse and end results of professional looking print catalogs and brochures. Both applications are well designed and, just like all of the iLife apps, feature the classic Apple interface whereby all of your media content is available and intermeshed into the work flow. There is not really any new earth shattering features in 06 from the 05 version, but mainly just tweaks and enhancements.

By far, the biggest disappointment is in the lack of upgrade pricing availability for users of the previous versions. You will have to pay full price even if you bought iWork '05. The family pack version for $99 is a really good buy as you get five licensed copies versus the single user copy which only gives you one installation for $79. The family pack is definitely the way to go especially if you need to install to more than one Mac. This is an excellent product that works really tight. I only give four stars for no upgrade pricing and for no new applications bundled with the package. If you need to do slide show presentations in front of a group, then the purchase price is worth the cost of Keynote alone. It really rocks.

I'm a big fan of iWork and have always looked for new office apps that out-perform Microsoft's apps which have become so feature-rich that functionality has become akward. I love Pages and the formatting features it provides. I do more layout work than word processing so I'm real happy with the way Pages works for me. Keynote is nice too. I don't believe in lots of slide transitions and builds when making a presentation so a lot of the flash and panash that PowerPoint tries to interject is useless to me. You have lots of capability with Keynote but its clean, simple interface and robust formatting and import capabilities really works for me.

Nice package to be sure! I would love to see a spreadsheet tool incorporated into iWork that is cross functional moreso than with Excel 2004 for Mac. I think that Appleworks is a great start but needs to be taken to the next level. Perhaps capture the spreadsheet piece from OpenOffice and build into a component of iWork and call it "Tabular" or "Sheets". (just a suggestion)

Apple has created a new version of iWork, and they provide no upgrade pricing, effectively sticking it to customers and vendors. If you buy this product, you will be stuck with the old version and have to pay FULL PRICE for the new version that contains a spreadsheet application.

And, yes, Apple deleted any comments complaining about the upgrade policy on their discussion boards.

I got this for Pages 2 (I'm upgrading from Pages 1) - and I don't really see much difference, aside from some new templates. Nevertheless, it is a better program for page layout than Microsoft Word - and about equal as a word processor. Since there is no upgrade version, I had to pay full price to get it - but then it isn't that expensive. At under $90, the price is quite reasonable. If you're doing page layout on a Mac (newsletters, brochures, etc.) & don't want to shell out the big bucks for Quark or Illustrator, this is an excellent choice.

iPhoto 2006 is a huge improvement over the last version.

R u board with PowerPoint? Business meeting seem to go no where! U think u have seen it all till u try KeyNote! Folks I landed a promotion thanks to KeyNote just last week! I had a major presentation for a major central monetary agency (dead serious types) and I can tell u that they have never seen anything like KeyNote!

I have yet to try PAGES but Keynote is the best presentation tool out there. Takes a bit of getting used to since we (the business users) have been on PowerPoint like forever! The best part is after I finished my 57 page presentation it was exported flawlessly to PowerPoint (without the special cinematic effects of course) and PDF and QuickTime movie!

You can also import from Powerpoint but u must use your styles carefully so u don't end up tweaking each slide in keynote. Next time I am starting my entire project in keynote. (it does a flawless job of exporting but importing needs some work)

If u wana wow the crowd with simple and graceful presentations (like the one's Steve throws @ Mac Expo) You open your mind to Keynote! A must have.

Other wow products BTW I have been using on my MacMini is Merlin (the best Project management software ever) Good Luck to all

Well its definetly improved version since the last one, but they still have a lot of things to do. The biggest problem is Pages. If text has specific symbols, like Greek letters and u try to export your file to doc, forget it. u'll have the same problem as 10 yrs ago, either funky symbols or underline dashes. Keynote is much better. But if u r a scientist and not a sales man, both packages still have a lot of room for improvement. However, I'm still happy with this purchase, because it's Apple soft and looks much nicer than any MS software will get in the future.