Customer Reviews

Apple iWork '08 Family Pack [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(39)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

For the price, this office suite is a good choice for any Mac user. The family pack - for households like ours, where we have three macs - this is an obvious choice.

I'll not review Keynote - I abhor presentations and just avoid them like the plague. Nothing against the powerpoint (or in this case, Keynote) jockey - I just am not one and don't care for it. No, not even to open a presentation. I just don't.

Pages has advanced a lot as a word processor, and it is the most intuitive page layout system I've ever seem. In minutes you learn how to use text boxes, move them around, and add graphics to produce documents that look amazing. Pages is a ton better than neooffice's (free software) word processor and it holds its own to MS Word (that costs much more and has the usability and performance of a hog swimming in molasses). Apple provides a ton of useful templates, but I wish there was a community effort to produce more (there are some third parties selling templates).

Numbers is an interesting thing. It changes the idea of a spreadsheet by making the sheets independent of the printed page. You can have many independent or related sheets in the same page and arrange that in the most amazing layouts. My only complaint is the keyboard support - If you are entering a formula you will be required to use the mouse. For anyone that has used a spreadsheet application it is just natural to press the = sign and start moving around with the arrows to select cells. That simple, mindless act, is prevented in Numbers by the choice of having a formula editor that floats over the sheets. I suppose that makes sense since you can have disconnected sheets and the keyboard would not help navigating them, but I would prefer to have some keyboard navigation (maybe in the sheet where I'm placing the formula) than none. I've put in a request for a software update, but I'm not holding my breath. The conversion from and to Excel formats seems to work just fine (saving excel files has a small issue that is solved by running a command in terminal). If you need (or want) spreadsheets that look beautiful, you can't beat Numbers. If you are just looking for a quick way to munch on tabular data and make some calculations, neooffice (free software) is a better choice. Heck, if your needs are simple even Google spreadsheet will do the job. Nobody needs excel, since even Neooffice (and Google, and everyone else) does a good job opening that format too.

I bought the 06 version and loved it.
I downloaded the trial version for 08 to see if it is worth the new price, afterall, I bought the 06 just not so long ago (maybe less than 3 months).
The new Numbers and Pages are just wonderful. It is so much more intuitive than MS Office. I have the Office for Mac and I have been using Office in Windows for the past 10 years. But ever since I started using Pages and Keynote, and now Numbers, I have to say hands down, iWork 08 is near perfection for 99.9% of all office needs.
I wish there were even more templates for all three apps. But with the included templates, one could modify them to create new templates fairly easy and quick.
My trial period is coming to an end in a couple of weeks. I will buy the iWork 08 for sure.

I didn't purchase this from Amazon, as I didn't want to wait that long. I went to an Apple Store instead.

This is an amazing product. Keynote, which is quite possibly the best application available on any platform has gotten even better. Pages finally added a much needed word processing mode, which means I can finally throw out Word.

The real shining jewel here, though, is Numbers. Numbers takes the concept of the spreadsheet and adds a sort of publishing spin to it. Instead of sheets of cells being the default paradigm, you have canvases with embedded blocks of cells, giving you amazing flexibility over the layout of the rest of the document.

Since many documents are more than just spreadsheets, this opens up a world of possibilities for documents that are heavy with tabular data but need flexible layout options.

The included templates give excellent examples of ways to use Numbers that should help you explore the possibilities.

That being said, I have found some things in regards to filtering and coloring items based on dates to be counterintuitive, and there are a couple of other minor quirks. But for a 1.0 product, Numbers is astounding.

I can't think of any way to improve on Pages and Keynote though. I'm giving the suite 4 stars because I can't give it 4 1/2. The next version of Numbers in another year or two should put this over the top. The price for a 5 user family pack is incredible. I bought it, even though there are only two users in our house. The price is significantly better than even two educational licenses.

I used iWork '05 and '06 since they came out, and let me tell you, the upgrade to '08 is startlingly packed. I started using iWork when it became clear that Apple intended to dump the long-suffering Appleworks that I had so enjoyed for years and years. It always seemed unfair that such a feature-packed piece of software was left to languish in the OS X era, so I was excited to see what Apple had to offer in the way or a replacement when the original iWork was released.

I was sorely disappointed. Where was the spreadsheet module? Where were the drawing and painting modules? Why was word processing so slow and clunky? Granted, Keynote was great, but Pages left a whole lot to be desired. From the beginning, it didn't really seem to know what it was. Was it supposed to be "lite" desktop publishing? Were you supposed to be able to use it for standard word processing?

The '08 version of Pages changes all of this; finally, Pages is a worthy competitor to Microsoft Word in addition to its now-formidable desktop publishing abilities. It borrows the best ideas from both the Mac version of Word as well as the Windows version, and it's gained a truckload of features, like change tracking (finally!), grammar checking, easy Wikipedia lookups, a super-useful context-sensitive formatting bar, and what feels like a five-fold increase in performance.

Granted, Word has plenty of features that Pages lacks. But for that matter, Pages is full of things that Word goes without, like easy integration with iPhoto, the context-sensitive formatting bar, and the high price point. The basic point is that Pages is a stable, mature, full-featured word processor, and it feels a hundred times more like a proper Mac application than Word. If you're just now looking for a word processor, I strongly recommend you to take a look at Pages. It's got the features to stand up to the 800-pound gorilla or Word, and its compatibility is top notch; it can natively read and write the new .docx files, which the current Mac version of Word still can't do, embarrassingly enough.

As for Keynote, it just keeps getting better and better. It already blew PowerPoint out of the water in terms of ergonomics, usability, and output quality, so Apple just loaded it up with features. The non-linear animation in particular is just mind-bogglingly well implemented. I'm used to it through Maya and modo, but Apple has somehow managed to make it seem 100 times more comprehensible and accessible. I don't use Keynote ad much as Pages and Numbers, but it's also been substantially improved.

And now finally iWork includes a spreadsheet. Numbers is simply wonderful, plain and simple. It's just packed to the gills with useful time-savers, like the ability to drag in common mathematical operations, such as sum, average, min, and max. What's blindingly obvious is that Apple didn't just want to clone Excel. What they did was look at common usage patterns among spreadsheet users and make the common tasks amazingly easy. Need to sum up a couple of cells? Easy as pie, no typing required. Want to quickly find out the average of some other cells? Simply select then and you'll see that it's already been computed for you, and you can even drag that live average count into a cell to paste it as a formula. Genius! I can't even begin to express how much time this routinely saves me.

Numbers even includes an easy way to figure out the printable areas of your tables and easily adjust them accordingly. I remember this being a problem in the ancient version of Excel I used in middle school, and that Microsoft still hasn't really done anything about it is just embarrassing. Numbers also lets you make multiple charts and drag them around relative to each other, and Apple spends an awful lot of time going on and on about this feature. Really, it's cool, but to me, the much more valuable aspects of Numbers are the shortcuts I listed above that save truly enormous amounts of time. Numbers doesn't skimp. iWork finally has a spreadsheet, and it's not just another spreadsheet--it's my Excel killer. Finally!

You might have noticed the word "finally" an awful lot in this review. That's because iWork 08 is really the first version of iWork I confidently recommend to my friends when they ask me whether or not they should buy the Mac version of Word. iWork is really and truly ready for prime time for the first time in its life. To be honest, I can hardly contain my joy at Apple's phenomenal progress with iWork '08. It truly seems like iWork is a worthy competitor to Office, and the word that was put into iWork is shiningly obvious. iWork '08 is a diamond in the rough. No, scratch that, it's the diamond you've always wanted to replace the roughness of Microsoft Office with.

Keynote is a great presentation package which I have no qualms about using. Besides standard presentations I also use it to make title slides for slide shows and movies.

Pages won't substitute for Word when you really need it, which happens frequently with collaborations. It does a very good job otherwise, only failing in the details when you really need a professional documentation/layout package. For me that would be long document support.

Numbers is a first effort, but is pathetic. The major defect for me is that you can't lock the top row and left column titles to scroll around large spreadsheets. It's the only spreadsheet program I've ever used that doesn't do that. Even the early 1980's Visicalc did it! It's also very poor for function and graph support and is missing solvers.

Finally, this product replaces and extends upon Appleworks. So where are the drawing, painting, and database programs. Especially the first two which I could use for any document. Also there is no equation editor in iWork, while that is present in Word, OpenOffice, and AppleWorks.

I hope Apple understands what they are doing right and keeps doing it. I have multiple computers at home, they used to be windows machines but recently switched to Macs. One of the reasons I switched was the cost to keep legal with my families licenses was outrageous with Microsoft, not just the OS but the Office suite too.

The Mac has a nice port of OpenOffice called Neooffice, but with how cheap the family pack of iWork is I went ahead and got that too. It does exactly what I need it to do, for the most part I create basic documents and spreadsheets and it works great.

I'm pretty excited to use Keynote also for some presentations, but have not done so yet.

Overall a good product at a great price.

I converted to the iWork suite a couple of years ago, and this update is a nice improvement.

I use Keynote to do presentations constantly; presentations are easy to create and edit, allowing the user to define multiple "master" slides to control the design (PowerPoint, on the other hand, only allows the user 2 masters - the title slide and a bulleted text slide). The text editing options are very flexible and the presentation a snap. There's no way I would go back to PowerPoint or OpenOffice after using Keynote -- does save to .ppt if necessary, though.

Pages is a nice design app - a bit over featured for simple form letters (TextEdit is simpler to use and free with the Mac OS), but works very well when dealing with graphics and text. I've used Pages to design large posters and longer documents with figures and have been very happy with the results. The only complaints I have are table editing (slow and cumbersome still :() and the default font (Helvetica. I can change it, but it's not that simple). Converts easily to .doc and .pdf if you need to share your results with others.

Numbers (the new addition for '08) is not quite enough to replace Excel...but I expect it will be in the next revision or so. It just doesn't have the calculation/analysis options (creation of histograms, for example) that Excel does. The view options and charts are a bit more flexible than Excel, so this app shows promise - its just not there yet. Fine for balancing checkbooks or creating lists, but not quite for data analysis.

This is a good start -- and it will keep MS Office off of my Mac, with the exception of Excel. Word and PowerPoint are no longer necessary. Pages and Keynote alone are worth the cost...the only reason this is 4 stars instead of 5 is the limited features in Numbers.

Keynote is the star of this suite. I routinely use it to create presentations that people can't believe. I work in an all -Windows shop, but I'll bring my Mac to do presentations with Keynote because I want to make sure I do as good a presentation as is possible, and I always have people telling me that my presentation is the best they've seen and that their presentations never seem to look as good. (Then they complain that their department doesn't let them use Apples.)
Pages is a decent page layout and word processor program. I usually use MS Word, just from habit, but I'm slowly converting. Numbers is the newest and weakest part of the package, and it will need an upgrade before I use it. But the suite is easily worth $99, even if Keynote is the only product I use.

And I know that some people complain about not having an upgrade price from earlier versions, but for those people, my recommendation is just to treat the $99 price as an upgrade price; it's still cheaper than a lot of other applications' upgrades. (And when you sell your machine someday, you can legally include the older version on the machine.)

Great product for basic users ... easy to use, but may take a little time to get used to if you're used to using Word or Excel. Keynote is WAY better for slide shows than the microsoft version!

I believe this product to be just as good, if not better, than Microsoft Office. Plus, it's got a better price. I have noticed a few functions from Office that I can't seem to find out how to do on iWorks, but I'm sure with time I can figure it out. I would definitely recommend this product to anyone looking for a good and inexpensive word processor/spreadsheet program for the Mac. I'm wishing now that I had a similar program to this for my PC.