I am a full time student and I use iwork for all my school work. It is not only very useful but much more cheaper than microsoft(word, excel, power point, etc.) and it is compatible, I am able to share, with anyone who may use word, excel, etc. The only thing that could be fixed is, whenever I open a file that is microsoft power point, with key notes it is kind of mixed up. I am able to fix the power point but sometimes I have to go through it slide by slide. Other than that it is an overall awesome software!

48 of 50 people found this useful

the best eighty bucks you can spend on productivity software

13 of 20 people found this useful

iWork does not seem to handle large spreed sheets. Can take many seconds to scroll down more than a few rows. L large spreed sheet of a few thousand rows means minutes of scrolling. Very cumbersome operations compared to excel. I bought this because I want to switch to Lion in the future and apparently excel will not work with Lion. iWork is a terrible substitute for excel.

9 of 9 people found this useful

I'm no fan of the latest MS Office version, not a 'power user' so all the fancy new features that I don't use, and cannot turn off, cause the features that I do use to be buried an exta layer deep making more work. So I tried Numbers and was diasppointed that transferring files from Excel is not seamless (I had to re-work a lot), Numbers cannot do some of the simple things that I have built into my Excel spreadsheets, and many of the formatting items are much more awkward in Numbers than in Excel. So, I'm sticking with MS Office 2008.

11 of 11 people found this useful

I downloaded pages for iPhone, then pages for mac, i didn't want the 70+ iWork's. i want to be able to have my pages on my phone and mac (i don't have an iPad) to sync immediately in the cloud, its ridiculous i have to "share" them and it take 5 minutes or so. i have multiple papers to write, presentations to do and not enough time to do them, especially when they get lost. I would recommend if you want an apple version of microsoft word. If there is a way to share them QUICKER between the two devices i would love to know, apple tech support does not.

The website however says that you can "easily" share them. Including MAC and iPhone!

5 of 8 people found this useful

iWork is a great suite of programs. The applications that come with iWork, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are well laid out, and easy to use. In many aspects they compare very favorably with the applications from Office. If you don't need 100% compatibility with the Office suite, iWork is a cheaper and more intuitive option for many.

34 of 36 people found this useful

I carefully researched iWork v Office for Mac before purchasing software for my new MacBook Pro. I am a medical professional and researcher so I need slightly advanced graphing and presentation capabilities. Despite mostly rave reviews for the software, there are a lot of things I'm not happy with...

While it is nice that you can interchange with office documents, you have to create a new copy and save it in an office-based extension. Kind of a pain.

Keynote: As someone who is a little advanced with Powerpoint and likes to animate, the options on Keynote are rudimentary at best. I can't find an easy way to manipulate the animations, either. Definitely doesn't match up to PowerPoint unless you are a novice and will only use pre-formatted options.

Pages: Nice display. The above interchangeability problem is my main gripe.

Numbers: As mentioned by others, the ability to format your graphs uniquely is limited. Not something helpful when trying to get things publication-ready. Others have said they were successful in adapting graphs to publication form, but the increased effort it takes is not worth it to me.

Conclusion: For basic functionality, go with iWork. For any advanced manipulations, however, it doesn't meet my expectations. I am ordering Office for Mac and will have to see whether the crashing problem is really as bad as people say. I love my new MacBook Pro and would hate to not be able to use the programs I actually need the most for my job.

11 of 13 people found this useful

It's disappointing that Number's lacks the functionality of a full-featured spreadsheet program: it's geared more towards fancy graphs. Still, simple features like rotating the text in a cell are absent. With functionality missing on both the design side and the math side, one wonders to whom Apple is marketing.

49 of 64 people found this useful

I came to iWork because of iWeb. I was so impressed with iWeb's flexibility in working with images and documents, I thought I would try Pages. So good, so glad I did. Of course it's intuitive--of course its stunning. Minor quibble, I wish you did not need to drag those Word docs to the Pages icon in the dock. It would be better to just double click the doc but perhaps that will come at some point. I had intended to buy Microsoft Word as well just to communicate with my PC friends, but . . . . I keep putting it off. There's no need. Wow--you did it again Apple. But, hey, don't forget about iWeb--that's how I got here--and it is a great program--same flexibility --so pay some attention to it make it a true part of iWork.

50 of 63 people found this useful