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iWork

Great Product

Written by DS from Rochdale

06-Jan-2009

Great update to the previous version. Now includes additions such as the ability to undelete actions at last! You can now send documents directly into e-mails as PDF / Word / Excel formats and also publish documents to iWork for others to add notes and also to download. Pages now includes mail merge with numbers, a great full screen view and lots of other additions which makes it more intuitive to use. Numbers at last gives the average user much easy ways of adding formulas and table categories to spreadsheets.

As an average user who uses the software for home and small business, it does everything that i need and now with the easier ways of sharing documents in the mainstream formats i can completely ditch office for mac.

282 of 300 people found this useful

iWork

Great new features but basic flaws remain

Written by AW from Loughton

07-Jan-2009

I love the new outline view on Pages, it will help organise my thoughts as I am writing. Most of the other things seem evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Three things massively disappoint though.
1. STILL no Autosave! Why, o why won't they give us an autosave????
2. STILL no support for footnotes on pasting. If free software such as openoffice can allow you to copy a piece of text and its footnote goes with it, why cant Pages? Would make it work much more nicely with software such as Logos Bible Software.
3. The new iwork on the web is a great idea but crippled by the lack of an ability to edit the actual text on the site and then "track changes" comments are nice, but editting the text would make this a must-have rather than something that has amused me for a few minutes.

14 of 17 people found this useful

iWork

Brilliant!

Written by CP from North Shields

10-Jan-2009

The first time I used this app I noticed the great differences form '08. The effects are really good.

30 of 55 people found this useful

iWork

Absolutley Fantastic Product! Worth every penny!

Written by MK from Carrickfergus

11-Jan-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!

196 of 221 people found this useful

iWork

A mixed bag...

Written by FB from London

12-Jan-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

Finally been able to ditch Microsoft Office for Mac

Written by RH from WESTON-SUPER-MARE

19-Jan-2009

Fantastic product! I have now ditched Microsoft Office and enjoy the ability to create exceptionally professional looking documents in no time at all. Keynote and it's amazing slide transitions and object animations (aka Builds) easily made a recent presentation I gave the best looking I'd ever done. Top marks Apple!

14 of 17 people found this useful

iWork

Pages still limited

Written by PS from Rangeworthy

19-Jan-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

iWork

Can NOT rotate text!

Written by IM from London

22-Jan-2009

I was disappointed that the previous version lacked the ability to rotate text within a cell. Text boxes don't offer the same functionality. Can not believe that it is STILL not possible. Makes my grade book a waste of space... literally.
Having downloaded the trial will I not be buying it this time.

20 of 59 people found this useful

iWork

Pretty Good. Lacks some Office functionality/ease of use

Written by MS from Reading

22-Jan-2009

I'm new to the Mac and consider myself a intermediate/advanced level user of MS Office. iWork 09 is pretty good and seems to handle most of what I want to do, but it isn't as useable as Office it must be said. For example, want to select multiple objects? Word, just select the arrow tool and drag a box around the things you want to select... in Pages you have to hold down shift and click on every item you want one-by-one. Want to have truly floating objects over text, a logo in a header with some text nearby for example, in Pages I can't stop the text being re-arranged as you position the logo, whereas in Word this is easy.

Overall, pretty good, but don't throw away the copy of Office yet!

27 of 39 people found this useful

iWork

yes you CAN rotate text....

Written by CC from Portlaoise

24-Jan-2009

wake up bud and learn how to use the thing... simple

20 of 32 people found this useful

iWork

Nice to use but it's no PowerPoint substitute

Written by KL from High Wycombe,

25-Jan-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

Outstanding

Written by NK from AALBORG

27-Jan-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

Handles movies so well

Written by DB from GLASGOW

29-Jan-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

Great for writers!

Written by RF from København S

02-Feb-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

Excellent

Written by JH from HELSTON

25-Feb-2009

Covers all my needs and more.
Far smoother, intuitive and imaginative than Office 2008, and so thankfully I can scrap that from my MacBookPro.
Now Safari 4 is making the likes of myself less reliant upon Microsoft!
WELL DONE APPLE !!

23 of 29 people found this useful

iWork

Compatible with Word, slightly....

Written by MC from Hebburn

27-Feb-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

Mail merge...

Written by LS from BRISTOL

02-Mar-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

Nice software but...

Written by RB from Cobham

09-Mar-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