iWork '09 Retail

After making the switch from windows to mac 5 months ago and buying iwork, I have finally needed to uninstall it and get the office for mac package. I'm an independent consultant and need to exchange word and powerpoint documents with clients and colleagues backwards and forwards, and there are lots of compatibility problems. You can save pages and keynote documents as word or powerpoint, but still many tables, graphics, etc are changed, not recognised or corrupted.
Also if you save documents as the office version instead of the mac version, it is not recognised in the "open recent" menu. So when you open , say, pages and you want to come back to the last document you worked on, unless you remember exactly the name and where you saved it, it is not easy to find it because it doesn't show it in "recent documents". Also once you have saved it as .doc or .ppt and you want to save it again, the default saving location and the default name are not the ones you used when you saved it as word or powerpoint, but the location and name of the last .pages or .key document you last worked on, even if it was a completely different document. I can't tell you the amount of time I spent just searching for documents because they ended up in the wrong folder. To avoid this, the only option is to keep 2 versions of each document, one in mac version and one in office version, and then making sure they both have the same content. Far too much hassle for me.
It may be that iwork programmes are better products stand alone in terms of design than office. However if you're a seasoned office user, it is actually quite tricky to unlearn and then learn again how everything works in iwork. Simple things like formatting an object or changing bullets to me seem more complicated in iwork than in their office counterparts, because you have to open the "inspector' menu rather than clicking on the icon in the windows ribbon. I can't really see much improvement from word and excel to pages and numbers. Keynote seems to have more multimedia functionality and a very good design, but during the last 5 months it has been tricky enough to learn how to do the things I was able to do in powerpoint, so i never actually got round to the more "wow' functions of keynote. If it had been fully compatible, I would have persevered but for me there isn't much point in creating great graphics in keynote if my clients are going to see them distorted or corrupted. I can see iwork being a good choice if you can create standalone documents and exchange them in pdf format, or if everybody in your sector uses mac. If your clients are in a windows-dominanted environment, for me the discussion of which product is better designed is futile. If you're in the same situation, be warned. I bought iwork on the back of the very good reviews but I wish somebody would have told me about the compatibility problems.

I have been using iWork '08 for a year now and absolutely loving it. I have Microsoft Office for Mac and as I never learned to use it in work (I have never worked in an office) I never got much beyond very basic documents, and always really struggled when adding and images, or even borders!
Then along came iWork...Brilliant! It made everything so easy and beautiful, as only Apple products can. I was producing documents, posters, newsletters and presentations (all for my small business) like it was going out of fashion.
Then came iWork '09. I saw the video's and bought it primarily because of the upgrades in 'Keynote', which are excellent. They have really tightened everything else up as well though, and 'Pages' is much more of a word processing app now, and although I don't use it to that much depth, 'Numbers' now has so much more options and depth as to warrant a full switch from MS Office to iWork, certainly from an average user standpoint.
Since using iWork, my work rate and quality of things produced has increased dramatically, and iWork '09 has really smoothed out a lot of the edges and added some really stunning things to Keynote. Overall, however, the upgrade is only there for those avid fans as there are not enough changes or improvements really to warrant a jump from '08 to '09.

With the release of the new Office:Mac 2008, which in all honestly is some beautiful software (Unlike the PC version! I now cringe when someone say's "ribbon"), iWork is something that will always be overlooked due customers being 'scared' of new software. But with iWork competitively being cheaper than its Microsoft counterpart, how does the latest edition, 09, compare?

One thing that always put me off the previous version of iWork was Pages, which I felt was the weakest point of the software as it just isn't as in depth at Word from Office. Few changes have been made to 09, but any that are included are for speed purposes. The template screen when you open up either Pages, Numbers or Keynote is a welcome addition, as is the slightly different interface which has fatter tabs and buttons in the tool bar. But if you were looking for radicals improvements over the previous version of Pages, then you may feel left out. Saying this, Pages is still a perfectly acceptable word-processing application for at home, and has fantastic image and template layouts. But for Students who regularly need to switch to Office's Word, think again - though they do work with each other, compatibility for the formatting still isn't 100%.

Numbers is actually an app I've always preferred to Excel from Office. To me, it's simpler, more customizable, and easier to form Sum's. This is probably the most updated program of the package, and with the updated graphics/templates, you can again create some even better documents. This is something I find Excel lacks, though to be fair, graphs and spreadsheets can easily be dragged over to Word/PowerPoint.

KeyNote 09 now looks almost identical to Office 2008's PowerPoint, though this is of course a major plus; I love the new version of PowerPoint. Yet more themes have been added and the usual array of fancy slide transitions and effects outdo those of PowerPoint. If its the best looking presentations you want, then this is the app, but for speed, PowerPoint is still the quickest. Integration of the Apple Remote means you can now change your slides of both PowerPoint and KeyNote, which is excellent!

Overall, the changes are few and far to make this an essential purchase. I feel the price is pretty competitive with Office:Mac 2008, but it still feels just like a cut-down version. Never the less, this may be the idea - while I feel Office is still the best for a 'student', iWork is perfect just for at home, which a lot of people forget. If you've read my review for Office 2008, you'll note how I joked about the sheer number of Negative reviews from non-student adults who bought the Student version of Office, and were disappointed it had Academic features!

Cheap-skates...