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iWork

Absolutley Fantastic Product! Worth every penny!

Written by MK from Carrickfergus

Jan 11, 2009

I have been using Microsoft Office for Mac 2008 up until this point because iWork wasn't stepping up to the mark! With this release of iWork 2009, it not only steps up to the mark, but goes beyond. Welcome additions and easy to use! Love it! Great work apple!

194 of 219 people found this useful

iWork

A mixed bag...

Written by FB from London

Jan 12, 2009

Numbers09 finally delivers error bars! Pages09 still doesn't cope with tables very well. You can't get a TOC and TOF in the same document, but EndNote X2 is supported. Keynote 09 fixes an export bug that caused presentations with presentation notes to be unreadable in Powerpoint. C'mon Apple... you're nearly there!

163 of 200 people found this useful

iWork

Great Improvement

Written by PG from Liverpool

Apr 2, 2009

Pages '09 wipes the floor with M'Word. And a vast improvement on iworks '08. Definite must have for any Mac. Only four stars because unlike M'word it doesn't have an equation editor built in, and if you want that your told you have to fork out an extra £50 odd to a different company.

75 of 84 people found this useful

iWork

Compatible with Word, slightly....

Written by MC from Hebburn

Feb 27, 2009

Yes iWork is compatible with Word. But, it is compatible in that you can open a document in word which doesn't look like the document that you typed on pages. Colours and layout for instance are not what they are when you saved your file as a .doc
I tried this using fonts which are native both to Pages and Word, such as Arial and Times New Roman. So there should be no reason why there should be problems. But there are, and it is really annoying.
Keynote is excellent, but I have not yet used it save as .ppt feature. I have not yet used Numbers for this purpose either.
However, how can you rate a package which says it is compatible with another format, when it isn't compatible in its entirety! I can't, hence two stars.

61 of 68 people found this useful

iWork

Outstanding

Written by NK from AALBORG

Jan 27, 2009

Normally, I had to switch to my old Windows-computer to make spreadsheets in Excel, because Numbers simlpy lacked some important features - with iWork '09, I don't have to. Oh, and Pages' full-screen mode is perfect for people (like me), that are easily disturbed by anything other on the screen!

54 of 55 people found this useful

iWork

Mail merge...

Written by LS from BRISTOL

Mar 2, 2009

I love Pages a lot. But unfortunately I run a small business that relies on a setup where I'm using spreadsheet data to create documents and Pages just doesn't allow me to 'custom' choose the spreadsheet records individually to create my end document.

Also, as another reviewer has pointed out - when you save your document for compatibility purposes as a .doc (because that's what the rest of the world uses) it won't appear the same as it beautifully did on your machine.

If however, you are using Pages for writing and printing at home, with no need for compatibility worries, then it's freaking awesome.

Numbers is brilliant too, play with the pre-created spreadsheets. Again, saving these as .xls will affect the way they look.

Enjoy!

53 of 55 people found this useful

iWork

A pretty good purchase

Written by DG from Tullamore

Aug 24, 2009

Bought this a few months ago because Office for Mac just didn't work for me and I really didn't like it, it just seemed to be too slow. So got iWorks and its a treat to use.

Pages, is very nice to use, the inspector has all the functions you need when writing your docs and you can drag it around the screen to suite your needs. Pages all in all is a very nice piece of software for the price. The layout of the UI is very intuitive and just feels like every thing is where it should be. Any advanced functions you need are in the inspector and you don't find yourself spending too long searching for the option.

Keynote, is very good if not better alternative to PowerPoint. The templates are very crisp, clean and very pleasing to the eye when your doing your presentations. When its connected to a projector it has pretty much the same functions and display as PowerPoint on the second screen

Numbers is very good at working with small sets of numbers. The graphs that you can create again are more clean and crisp then the Office counterpart. But when you have large data sets in the range of thousands, Numbers gets very very slow, much slower that it should be. It is still usable but you could be waiting for 2-4 seconds for any mouse click or update.

All in all, a great alternative to Outlook, the fonts, graphics and design of the UI make it very nice to use and a pleasure to work with.

51 of 54 people found this useful

iWork

iWork

Written by JW from LONDON

Mar 24, 2009

Using Pages in iWork and enjoy its lightness and comprehensiveness. Very responsive and ease of use. The comments bar for making notes to text in progress is a great aid and very clear: just what an Apple Mac needs - at last a great word processing program. Still a few minor things to extend the app, the menu bar could do with a more polished aesthetic - better cosmetics: but all in all a great move away from Word. No problem experienced at all, with documents import/exported to Word, PDF, or PC app or platform. The family pack of 5 is great value. Works with boxes and has great DTP capabilities for image/text/design etc: it is hefty competition for a lot of other packages, one I can only recommend.

51 of 55 people found this useful

iWork

Blows Office Away

Written by SG

Aug 20, 2009

After using Office for Mac, I decided to make the switch to iWork and never looked back. It's intuitive, if you want to do something, there's a button that allows you to do it. The Inspector is brilliant, and I've created some well laid out things in Pages, some easy to ready spreadsheets in Numbers and some amazing Slideshows in Keynote!
Great suite of products, and the perfect addition to any Mac.

46 of 49 people found this useful

iWork

Great for writers!

Written by RF from København S

Feb 2, 2009

I'm a creative writer and am just loving Pages. It's a really well thought out interface and just an enjoyable writing experience overall.

The full-screen view is fabulous, very useful if you want to cut out distractions and just write. I like it better for this than the equivalent shareware programs.

I'm not normally a user of templates, but Pages has some pretty tempting ones. The screenplay template isn't perfect, but it's a great place to start. I've been itching to get away from screenwriting software and Pages just might help me pull it off. While it would be possible to do the same thing in Word... I never really enjoyed working with the software enough to make the effort

The other notable thing about pages is it's DTP capabilities. While I don't think I'd use it for prepress, I find it easier than Word for combining text and images in the way I want in documents.

44 of 47 people found this useful

iWork

Nice software but...

Written by RB from Cobham

Mar 9, 2009

I have encountered compatibility issues - images going missing, text changes - when saving files as word docs and sending them onto clients; I don't have this problem when using Microsoft Office on my PC. For this reason, I will not be using iWorks as an alternative to Microsoft Office for business purposes.

However, I have bought a copy so that I can read word docs and excel spreadsheets without having to switch on my pc. It's worth giving this software a free months trial to find out for yourself.

But it is a nice piece of software for the money.

41 of 45 people found this useful

iWork

Its good to Share

Written by MH from Ashford

Mar 9, 2009

I must say that the sheer ability to share numbers, pages and keynote documents with a number of people at the same time is somewhat special. The formatting of the documents are retained and the ability to let people comment and then download whatever version you specify is a real treat. Well done apple for this piece of '09. However, not all greatness, the ability to share the same document formatting into the (sadly true) common .doc file type is virtually non existent, even when using cross platform settings such as same fonts and text alignment and tables. For this reason I have to go from a potential 4 stars to 3.

46 of 57 people found this useful

iWork

Perfect!

Written by MB from Normandy

Jul 1, 2009

I love iWork! It is so nice to use after using word! It just works. No annoying little bugs and habits. Everything is really easy to use, and the help is really good and quick to find an answer. Have found compatibility with office to very good. Excellent software, couldn't be happier with it!

33 of 38 people found this useful

iWork

Almost there

Written by JK from PRESTON

Jul 28, 2009

I mostly use the Pages feature of iWork. As a word processing program its pretty good but still needs extra refinements. Some shortcomings already mentioned - mine are:
1. No automatic Drop Cap function
2. No page imposition function for booklet printing
3. Some functions don't save accurately in .doc or .docx

28 of 33 people found this useful

iWork

An excellent piece of mac software

Written by NC from amersham

Aug 25, 2009

Many many times better than office for mac and iwork 08 iwork 09 was the best purchase of my mac carreer

35 of 48 people found this useful

iWork

Handles movies so well

Written by DB from GLASGOW

Jan 29, 2009

Since I moved from powerpoint to keynote, I have never looked back. I make heavy use of movies in my presentations and have always found powerpoint unable to cope well with animations, I have had to resort to using uncompressed AVI or QT files that could be many 100's of MB on either Mac or PC versions of powerpoint. Even then movies can be jerky and unpredictable. Keynote handles movies effortlessly no matter what compression is used.
The only problem is that occasionally conference venues don't allow speakers to use their own laptop, and one is forced to use a Windoze box with ppt, with the inevitable loss of performance and quality. Can't blame Apple for that tho'

25 of 28 people found this useful

iWork

Nice to use but it's no PowerPoint substitute

Written by KL from High Wycombe,

Jan 25, 2009

I am a relatively heavy professional user of Keynote 08 and (when clients demand it) PowerPoint. Keynote has for me, always been the more intuitive, quicker and enjoyable of the two to use, but PPT 2008 leapt so far ahead in terms of functionality that I have found myself putting-up with its slow, clunky interface to gain the benefits of vastly superior range of objects, shapes and superb fills (the 3D options are phenomenal) which can be created then cut and pasted as pdfs or jpegs to be cropped (yes with a proper crop tool), built-up, the vastly superior reference tools, easy insertion of clip art (yes, I hate it too... but sometimes needs must), the auto save function (which has been a lifesaver many times), the smaller and client-friendlier pptx files, etc. etc. I was keenly looking forward to iWork 09 to see how Apple had responded by, hopefully, leap-frogging its adversary. What a bitter disappointment it has been and a squandered opportunity for Apple to regain the lead over PowerPoint. I don't need gimmicky new templates (professional users have their own templates) or flashy animation, I want features that enable me to make higher-quality, more polished-looking presentations. I thought that was what using a Mac was all about? Looks like I'll using PowerPoint more than I wanted to after all.

42 of 62 people found this useful

iWork

Pages still limited

Written by PS from Rangeworthy

Jan 19, 2009

Pages still doesn't support multiple tables of contents, for table of tables and tables of figures. Supporting a single bibliography tool is not great especially when that tool is endnote, which costs more than iWork. Other than that it's nearly there.

Disappointing really. Perhaps iWork '10.

25 of 30 people found this useful