Apple iWork '05 (Mac) [Old Version]

by Apple

Product Features

• Create, present, and publish work quickly and easily
• Cinema-quality slide presentations; streamlined, yet powerful word processing
• 40+ professionally designed templates with multiple page designs
• Freeform graphics canvas; easy-to-use text styles, charts, and tables
• Integrated iLife media browser and photo masking

Product Details

Product Manual [3.15mb PDF]

• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S. and to APO/FPO addresses. For APO/FPO shipments, please check with the manufacturer regarding warranty and support issues.
• ASIN: B0007GCXZ2
• Item model number: M9610Z/A
• Date first available at Amazon.com: January 11, 2005
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,519 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

Got ideas? iWork ’05 brings them to life with Keynote 2--offering cinema-quality presentations for everyone--and Pages--a word processor with an incredible sense of style.

Pages, a streamlined yet powerful word processor, lets you create everything from letters to newsletters to brochures. Keynote set the standard for stunning presentations. Now Keynote 2 lets you build gorgeous photography portfolios, animated storyboards and self-running, interactive slideshows. With its built-in iLife Media Browser, iWork is the perfect complement to iLife.

Introducing Pages. A word processor with incredible style.

1. The Pages pop-up menu provides access to the numerous page designs for the current template. 2. Easy to apply, paragraph and list styles build consistency into your documents. 3. Use the Toolbar to easily insert tables and charts or wrap text to suit your needs. 4. The handy Inspector palette lets you format your document precisely as you work. 5. Masking images lets you zoom in on what’s important. And it’s non-destructive, so no regrets. 6. Simply click to select and paste to replace placeholders with your own photos and text.

Pages showcases amazing typography and a freeform graphics canvas with 40 easy to use, Apple-designed templates. From letters to invitations, from reports to newsletters, you’ll be building full documents in minutes. Quickly add your favorite photos, movies and music with the built-in media browser. And, of course, share your work by importing and exporting Microsoft Word or by easily creating amazing PDF documents.

Word Processing Key Features
Pages offers a wide variety of features to help you write, edit and format your documents. With Pages you can:

• Globally find and replace words, phrase--even styles
• Check spelling with the built-in spell checker
• Easily create charts and tables of contents
• Create and manage styles
• Insert "bookmarks"--that let you jump to other pages within your document--or hyperlinks--that take readers to the Internet or their internal intranet
• Divide documents into sections and create left- and right-facing pages--great for bound documents Easily format a page for multiple columns
• Add time stamps, page numbers or page counts to document headers and footers
• Turn hyphenation on with a click
• Add footnotes: Pages lets you number (using Arabic or Roman styles) continuously through your document or restart footnote numbers with each page or section
• Select and apply formatting to noncontiguous elements
• Customize the toolbar with the tools you use all the time

The Basics
You’ll find Pages most intuitive. And responsive. Create a new document and, the first thing you’re likely to notice is a streamlined interface offering access to the powerful word processing features in Pages. Just by pulling down a Toolbar menu, Pages lets you add a page design, change the number of columns, apply paragraph or list styles, insert a table or chart, or change the way text wraps around a graphic.

Formatting Help Just a Click Away
The context-sensitive Inspector window, meanwhile, puts all of the commands you need a click away. The Text Inspector, for example, lets you set alignment, pick font color, specify line and paragraph spacing and other common formatting chores. You’ll also find tabs that reveal additional commands for List formatting (a great help for anyone creating outlines), Tabs and more.

In all, the Inspector window offers convenient access to formatting commands affecting the document as a whole, its layout (columns and sections), the size and positioning of graphics and how text wraps around them. Handy tabs even provide complete formatting control for tables and charts.

Writing with Style
Styles make it easy to control the way your text looks and to assure consistent formatting throughout your document. Want the first line of every paragraph to be indented an inch? Styles allow you to do that--and much more--automatically. In Pages, you can easily create and assign paragraph, character and list styles with a simple click of your mouse.

To get you started, all Pages documents for titles, headings, subheadings, footnotes, captions and more. And should you want to modify existing styles or create new ones, Pages makes that easy, too.

Turning the Tables
Like to include tables in your documents? Most of us do. Whether you’re creating price lists, product specifications, photo collages, stock portfolios, schedules or progress reports, tables offer a great way to present information to readers. Pages lets you easily create beautiful and informative tables that you can fill with text, graphics or photos.

And let’s not forget about charts. All about relationships, charts help us illustrate how much snow fell this year compared to last, how pulse rates change over time, how actual compare to budgeted costs. When it comes time to include a chart in your document, you can create it without leaving Pages. Just insert a chart and enter your data in the Chart Data Editor. You can easily create six types of charts, and Pages offers a complete set of tools to edit and format them.

The Tools You Need
If you create structured documents with multiple chapters or sections, facing pages and headers and footers that change throughout the document, Pages makes all the tools needed to create such documents readily available to you.

Students who write essays or scholarly papers will also enjoy Pages’ aplomb with footnotes. What’s more, Pages offers a facility for generating Tables of Contents that’s remarkably easy to use. Just use the TOC tab in the Document Inspector to mark the paragraph styles you want to appear in the Table of Contents. Pages will track and index them all. Then, when you’re ready, simply pull down the Insert menu and choose Table of Contents. You’ll be amazed at how simply, quickly and effectively Pages manages this tedious operation for you.

Copy and Paste Styles with Ease
It’s always nice to have options. Here’s another neat way you can assign character or paragraph styles: copy and paste them.

Here’s how simple it is: select a word or paragraph with the character or paragraph style you’d like to copy. Then choose the appropriate command--either Copy Character Style or Copy Paragraph Style. Next step: select the text or paragraphs to which you’d like the style assigned, and choose either Paste Character Style or Paste Paragraph Style.

There’s more. Not only will you find keyboard shortcuts to accomplish the above, but you can add buttons for copying and pasting styles to the Pages Toolbar. Then style copying and pasting will always be just a mouse click away.

What’s in the Text Inspector?
Of the ten panes available in the Inspector Window, you’re likely to spend a fair amount of time in the Text Inspector. A veritable clearinghouse for text and paragraph formatting, the Text Inspector lets:

• change the color of selected text
• align selected text: left, right, center, fully justified
• set vertical alignment (top, center, bottom) within a shape or table cell
• adjust the character spacing of selected text (from -40% to 400%)
• set leading or line spacing
• set the amount of space before and after a selected paragraph
• set the margin inset

And that’s just one of the four tabs available in the Text Inspector. Separate tabs offer a variety of formatting options. The List tab lets you assign indent levels to list items and select bullet and numbering options. The Tabs tab offers virtually total control over tab formatting, letting you set the default tab stops, add tabs, set alignment options for tabs and more. The final tab in the Text Inspector--More--lets you control widows and orphans, set what style will follow the assigned paragraph style for the selected paragraph and more.

Dazzling documents. Amazing graphics, design, and layout.

Pages offers opportunities for formatting text, graphics, pages and entire documents beyond the capabilities of most word processing applications, providing all the tools you need to create stunning documents that look as if you had a team of designers at your beck and call. Most important, Pages makes it easy.

Customized Pages
When you’re using one of the Pages templates, you’ll find an assortment of complementary page layouts for your cover page, back page, feature stories and text pages. These complementary pages provide choices for three-column spreads, back pages designed for a self-mailer, layouts that include one large banner photo or numerous photos of different sizes.

And here’s how easy it is to access these complementary pages: Just pull down the Pages pop-up menu in the Toolbar to see the complete list of page designs available for the template you’re using. Select one and Pages will add it to your document.

And Pizzazz
Let’s not forget that if a newsletter or brochure looks great, it’s going to attract attention and invite someone to read it. Photos, illustrations, call-outs, charts, graphics, tables--all emphasize what you’re saying, help move the eye down the page and delight the reader, as well. After all, words and pictures form a complete package--that’s just what Pages lets you create.

A beautiful package. Say, for example, everyone sits huddled around the iMac G5 to create a family newsletter. It’s become a tradition. You each contribute an article or two, sharing stories about visits to the aquarium, hiking trips, snowboarding adventures, what’s up in school--anything and everything you’ve all done together lately.

That’s a Wrap
For each new issue, you open the Family Newsletter template and decide which articles will go where. The iLife Media Browser makes it easy to import photos. And Pages lets you drop them into an existing placeholder or use its handy alignment guides to place them precisely

Tantalizing templates. Create eye-catching page turners.

Whether you keep a journal, teach a class, manage a restaurant, send out faxes, write term papers, circulate your resume, create brochures for your home business or publish a newsletter for a non-profit organization, Pages offers dazzling templates. As easy to use as they are beautiful to read.

Forty Professionally Designed Templates
Each time you create a new document, the Templates Chooser dialog provides ready access to more than 40 professionally designed templates. And we haven’t left anyone out.

You’ll find templates to use at home--for journals, resumes, invitations, and stationery (complete with envelopes, in fact). Templates students and teachers can use at school--for term papers, quizzes, lab notes, syllabi.

Run a business? Pages comes with templates that let you create a wide assortment of highly polished documents, including brochures, catalogs, data-sheets, flyers, white papers, invoices, stationery--even restaurant menus.

And anyone who has found it particularly challenging to publish a newsletter will find the Pages newsletter templates an absolute treasure. Like other templates in Pages’ arsenal, newsletter templates come in matched sets with up to ten coordinated page designs, common design elements that tie pages together and template-specific paragraph and character styles.

Easy to Use. Lovely to Behold.
Adding a new page to your document is as simple as clicking the Pages button in the Toolbar and selecting the type of page you need: a Feature page with four columns to begin a new story; a three-column spread with a sidebar; the Back Page with room for credits and a large space to acknowledge new donors; even a Mailer, ready for addressing.

Pages makes it just as easy to replace the copy, photos and diagrams that serve as placeholders in template pages. A single click will select an entire paragraph, letting you type in place and preserve formatting. Or you can copy and paste in several paragraphs or pages worth of text. Pages will take care of the rest, adding as many pages as needed to accommodate the text, automatically flowing it from one column to the next.

Browse and Replace
Thanks to the built-in Media Browser, you also have access to all the digital assets available to you in iLife. Photos are a natural for printed documents of all types, and the Media Browser puts your entire iPhoto library at your disposal. Peruse albums, books and slideshows and even use the handy Search field to find photos by keyword or title.

And when you find a photo you want to include in your newest publication, simply drag it from the Media Browser and drop it into your document. That means you can personalize the Moving Postcard template announcing your new address with a digital photo of your new house. Invite friends to Sarah Jane’s christening with a photo of the guest of honor. Add sizzle to your restaurant menu with a photo of the Shrimp Fajitas.

Thanks to the flexible and beautiful templates that come with Pages, you have practically endless creative possibilities to explore.

Templates that Click
In Pages, you’ll find templates for a variety of purposes and occasions. Beautifully designed, the templates offer an easy way to create compelling documents. Paste your copy into the text placeholders; drag and drop digital photos or graphics into image placeholders. Use the more than 40 Apple-designed templates included with Pages:

Newsletter

Family

Education

Club

Financial

Design

Non-Profit Keep a Journal

Travel

Photo

Daily Send Invitations

Formal (w/envelope)

Festive (w/envelope)

Announcement Postcard

Moving Postcard Communicate in Style

Personal letterhead (w/envelope)

Classic letterhead (w/envelope)

Memo Do Business

Business letterhead (w/envelope)

Invoice

Fax Present Your Resume

Personal

Classic

Business Create Collateral

Brochure

Three-panel Brochure

Catalog

Flyer

Menu

White Paper Show & Tell

School Report

Term Paper

Lab Notes Teach a Lesson

Syllabus

Evaluation

Quiz Capable and compatible. Pages plays well with others, too

We live in a highly collaborative society. Some of us work on a Mac; some, on a PC. We use many different applications and create all sorts of documents. And, of course, we trade them back and forth. Designed for just this type of interactive environment, Pages offers a high degree of compatibility, letting you easily bring information in to develop and enrich your documents and making it easy for you to export and share your finished work with others.

Imports like a Champ
Whether you’re creating a resume, preparing a business plan, designing a newsletter for your photography club or writing a term paper, you may have information you’d like to appear in your next Pages document that already exists elsewhere. It could be a series of columns from a spreadsheet. An illustration or call-out you’ve created in Adobe Illustrator. Or perhaps an entire document written by someone else in another application. Maybe not even on a Mac.

Not to worry. Pages supports industry-standard graphic formats--GIF, JPG, TIFF, PDF and PSD--and deftly handles documents created in AppleWorks, Microsoft Word and other word processing applications.

Simply Opens AppleWorks and Word Files
In fact, here’s how easy it is to open an AppleWorks or Word document in Pages: find the document you’d like to open and drag it onto the icon for Pages in the dock or on your hard drive. If you already have Pages running, you could also simply pull down the File menu and choose Open. The dialog lists AppleWorks, Word, Text Edit and documents saved in Rich Text Format (RTF), making it, once again, easy to select and open them. And, by the way, those Word and RTF documents could be PC documents. Pages doesn’t care.

Introducing Keynote 2. Create stunning slideshows easily.

1. The slide organizer provides a clear overview of your slideshow. 2. Pull down the Themes menu: you’ll find 20 new Keynote themes from which to choose. 3. Drop in a photo from your iPhoto library; then use new Keynote 2 tools to Mask it. 4. Alignment Guides let you precisely position text and images. 5. A click opens the new iLife Media Browser and provides access to your photos, movies and music. 6. Use the Build Inspector to move text and other objects into and out of your presentation.

With its professionally-designed themes, cinematic transitions, animated text and powerful slide builds, Keynote lets you create stunning, interactive slideshows certain to engage and hold the attention of your audience. Use Keynote’s built-in iLife media browser to add your own photos, movies and songs; or import data and media from other applications. With new interactive and timing features, build storyboards, self-running presentations, portfolios and more.

What’s Your Story?
Perhaps you’d like to make a business proposal. Tell visitors about the latest exhibits in your museum. Highlight the quarter’s results for investors. Create a documentary about the Inuit people of Alaska. Introduce incoming freshmen to campus. Dazzle viewers with your photos of the southwest.

If you have a story to tell, Keynote can help you tell it convincingly. A powerful application for making exquisite presentations, it has all of the tools you need to deliver your ideas clearly, effectively and professionally.

How so?

A Head Start
Few of us are lucky enough to have an art department at our disposal, but with Keynote the design team practically comes built in. Just choose one of the 20 professionally designed Keynote themes from Apple to get your presentation off to a great start. Complete packages, the themes offer color-coordinated templates that let you maintain a consistent look and feel throughout your presentation. From the opening title slide to matching tables and dynamic charts to the closing Q&A slide, the templates include complementary fonts, graphic elements, color themes and backgrounds.

Get Animated
Keynote 2 offers an expanded set of cinema-quality effects including new transitions, built-in text animations, and advanced timing and slide animation controls.

With Keynote, we set the standard for cinema-quality effects like the cube transition. In 2.0, we’ve added page flip, iris and many more animations that play smoothly. You’ll also find tools to help you introduce the unexpected into your presentation. Hollywood has long used animation techniques for title sequences. Entertaining, the effects keep our eyes focused on the screen, effectively holding and directing our attention. Like to use the same techniques in your presentation? You can. Keynote lets you easily assign studio-quality animation effects to both individual characters and words, offering control over timing, direction and bullet grouping.

Create animations faster than ever with advanced control over the entry, exit, motion and timing of objects.

And when it comes to adding rich media to your slides, Keynote makes it extremely easy. That’s because the integrated iLife Media Browser offers immediate access to every photo, movie, song or narrative file available in your iLife libraries. Browse through iPhoto albums, books, slideshows or the entire library; play movies right in the browser; preview any song or spoken recording you have in iTunes.

The Right Tools for the Job
Found the item you’d like to add? Just drag it from the browser and drop it on your slide. Keynote provides a complete arsenal of positioning tools to help you precisely place any object. Tools include horizontal and vertical rulers, alignment guides and a Metrics Inspector Window you can use to change the size, position (to the pixel) or angle of objects you place on a slide. Talk about control.

Mask Your Photos Without Leaving Keynote
Have a great photograph that you want your audience to see only a portion of? Mask it using the tools Keynote provides. Completely non-destructive, these virtual frames help you focus attention on that element in the photo that best illustrates the point of your slide.

Present with Confidence
Would you like to present your slideshow with total confidence? Got you covered. Keynote lets you easily configure two separate displays. The one your audience sees. And the one you see on your laptop. Purely for your own use, your screen can be set up to fit your needs. Display the current and next slide, slide notes, a clock and a timer. Or any combination. Keynote gives you all of the information you need to stay on track and on time. You have your talking points at hand. You know what’s coming next. You’re in control and exude confidence, an attitude your audience can’t miss.

Present Even When You’re Not There
Keynote 2 now lets you create self-running, interactive slideshows. Assign links to any graphic that will take someone another slide, to a web page or even to another Keynote file. Set document-level attributes like ‘auto play on open’ or even assign an audio track to the whole show directly from your iTunes library.

Product Description

iWork '05 is the perfect companion to iLife. It consists of two applications: Pages, a word-processing application, and Keynote 2, a major upgrade to the Keynote presentation application. By combining the graphics power of Mac OS X with the rich media integration of iLife, Apple is building the successor to AppleWorks with iWork. Pages is a streamlined, yet powerful word processing application that makes it easy for anyone to create great looking documents, from a simple letter or invitation to a monthly newsletter or three-panel brochure. Pages includes essential word processing features, including easy-to-use text styles. Pages makes it easy to communicate with style. Keynote 2 makes it easy to create compelling presentations and interactive slideshows. Customers can enhance their presentations with animated text, new themes, and advanced build animations. Keynote also allows presenters to view upcoming slides, stay on track with a timer, and even change the flow of a presentation on the fly. Presentations can include photos, movies, or music from an iLife library, live Web content, or even links and automatic timing for an interactive slideshow mode.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

59 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Good Start, January 24, 2005

By 

Gary Carpineta (Maryland, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Apple iWork '05 (Mac) [Old Version] (DVD)

iWork is a nice start to an alternative to Office on the Mac but for most people it won't replace it.

Pages is a fine v 1.0 product. It has its flaws and isn't for everyone. If you need .doc compatibility you may want to stick with Office. On the other hand if you want to creat great looking documents for printing or saving as a PDF which most people can view then Pages is perfect. The templates are of the highest quality and you can really create stunning documents very easily. Think of Pages as Publisher for the Mac, but better.

Keynote which is also included is probably the finest presentation software you can buy. It really puts anything created with PowerPoint to shame. File compatability with PowerPoint is a little less important especially if you are running your own presentations off of a PowerBook or iBook.

I'll give it a 4/5 because Pages doesn't play too nice with .doc or .html files but I hesitate to even do that since it has so many positives. At $79 it is worth it for Keynote alone at $49 educational price from Apple, I highly recommend it to any student that needs to do presentations, they really stand out.

41 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fun and easy to use!, January 30, 2005

By 

rjpryan "Ryan" (Pittsburgh, PA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Apple iWork '05 (Mac) [Old Version] (DVD)

As a long time AppleWorks user, it's great to see that Apple finally got around to writing a *modern* word processor in Pages. AppleWorks had grown quite long in the tooth and the user experience was basically unchanged from Mac OS 9. Not a big fan of Word (too slow, UI inconsistent with the rest of OS X), I had grown used to using the bundled TextEdit program which comes with every Mac. TextEdit takes advantage of OS X system wide features like as you type spell checking, speech, floating font and color palettes, etc.. However, TextEdit can't do advanced things like multi columns, wrapping text around pictures, etc.. So the choices on the OS X platform were rather meager - slow an inconsistent Word, underpowered TextEdit, or old and clunky AppleWorks (aside from a few other third party tools which aren't very widely used).

Pages is basically TextEdit on steroids - all of the major features 95% of people expect a word processor to have are present and much easier (and faster) to use than in Word. The regular OS X features such as customizable toolbar, floating font and color palettes, as you type spell checking, etc. are all present. Moving graphics around is quick and seamless even on a slightly older Mac (667MHz G4). Also, the import and export options seem to work very well from my limited testing - most importantly, it imports and exports from Word without any problems that I can see.

Sure, there are some things which Word can do that Pages can't, but most of them are not things I'll ever use any way. I'd much rather have an easy to use and efficient word processor than have to deal with Word.

Keynote 2 (the other half of iWork) is also a great program. I can't really compare it to PowerPoint since I haven't used Powerpoint much, but I have to say that it was incredibly easy to learn how to use. The master styles are very handy for applying consistent features across your presentation, and the transitions and animation effects are nifty looking as well as easy to create. The import and export from Keynote to Powerpoint also seems to work seamlessly. It also allows you to export as QuickTime, Flash, PDF, etc..

All in all, highly recommended - especially for the very reasonable price.

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Two Fantastic Apps (for a great price too), February 23, 2005

By 

Eric D. Knapp "Cluck" (New Hampshire, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Apple iWork '05 (Mac) [Old Version] (DVD)

I use Word and Powerpoint every day, and I still do use them both everyday for many things. However, I picked up iWork for two reasons: 1) both have great export capability, and 2) I was very tired of trying to do a basic newsletter in Word. The frustration of trying to basic desktop publishing in Word was actually what drove me to take a $79 gamble and buy iWork.

I have not been disappointed.

Styles and Templates:
Keynote and Pages are good (great actually) at creating very professional looking documents, from standard sales presentations to highly animated pseudo-movies to basic word processing files to complex brochures and newsletters. There's just something about the way each application handles styles that makes the end result beautiful. The included templates are brilliant also, for those that dont want to delve into styles of their own.

Image Handling:
Both applications handle images one zillion times better than any MS Office application. The only file format that I haven't been able to drag directly into a document is a raw .eps file. iWork displays images well, doesn't mess with the files (meaning you can copy/paste them back out of iWork and have them still be useable) and honors transparencies. In fact, both apps can wrap text around and through an image based on the alpha index. Very powerful. You can paste a picture of a donut into pages, and have text wrap around the curved edges AND in the donut hole. Cool.

Interface:
The inspector is very easy to figure out, and places many features at your command without taking up a lot of screen space. The only thing that seems odd to me is that "Font" and "Text" are two separate items - and only one (text) is available in the inspector. That is, the way text is handled in terms of spacing, wrapping, bullets, etc. is in the inspector, but the actual font, font size, etc. is in a separate Font palette. It works, but just seems disjointed somehow. However, the inspector is very intuitive.

Price:
$79 bucks. 'nuff said. It's cheap enough that you can use it as a supplement--not a replacement--for other suites. Which leads to...

Compatibility:
You can import or export from PowerPoint and Word, you can import just about any graphics file (including photoshop files!), you can export to jpeg, png, or tiff, quicktime and flash. Some work better than others. The two that are of most concern are the Office apps, so I'll start there.

I still use PowerPoint, but I also use Keynote now. I use it every day, in fact. Because it handles images and transitions so well, I create all complex technical diagrams and animations using Keynote. I then either a) export directly to Powerpoint, b) export to quicktime and embed the movie in powerpoint, or c) export to quicktime for direct online posting. I've had ZERO trouble exporting to quicktime. The flash export worked horrible the first time, but after playing with and learning some of its quirks, I've been able to produce fairly reliable .swf files as well. This feature is so important and powerful that I'm willing to go through some pain to try and get it right, but Apple could make some improvements here to save me the trouble.

I use Pages as a mini-PageMaker more than I use it for word processing. It opened my basic word files (whitepapers, resumes, letters) flawlessly, and saved those documents as word files with little to no errors. Complex desktop-publishing-type documents weren't flawless; my newsletter, for example, required some serious tweaking after the import from Word. I eventually gave up and created it anew in Pages, and was pleased because it looked much better after being pages-born. This new version, when saved as a .doc, had a few errors still.

HTML Export:
Didn't even try it. I'm an html purist. If you want web design, study html, xhtml, xml, css, etc. and then buy BBEdit.

However, Keynotes quicktime export will let you create cool .movs to embed or stream online. The Flash export, once wrinkles are ironed out, will kick some serious buttocks.

Performance:
Neither app is light. On my aging Powerbook G4 (867MHz model), both apps respond a tad slow. Not slow enough to annoy me however. I anticipate that on newer machines (or machines with decent graphics cards) the performance is probably much much better.

Summary:
Very powerful applciations. Compatibility issues were minimal. I imported a 90,000 word manuscript from word and then exported it back to word again -- all with no flaws at all. Issues did occur with more complex .docs or with complex PowerPoint/Keynote layouts. The more complex the file, the more likely there would be an issue. However, the image handling (and in keynote's case, the transitions) are worth it. In short - I still use Office for day to day stuff, but I use iWork for anything that needs to be "cool"