Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 6-10 of 114
 Numbers in the Courtroom September 18, 2007
G. Ware Cornell Jr. (Weston FL)
29 out of 35 found this review helpful
In connection with a trial I was about to start I used Numbers to create a jury selection template. After a small bit of experimentation and some refining I was able to provide a tool that quickly entered data and helped in evaluation.
Now that may not sound like much, but I have tried for years to create an Excel spreadsheet to do the same thing.
Jury selection seating varies from courtroom to courtroom, and the ability to adapt charts quickly to the courtroom configuration is absolutely incredible. Using popup menus for standard answers (prior jury service, military service, etc) and conditional commands I am able to see the status of the venire at a glance.
This is a great product.
 iWork Lite: Not What I Expected July 19, 2008
NewsView (Los Angeles, CA USA)
19 out of 19 found this review helpful
If Apple took its cues from Microsoft, we wouldn't have merely one version of iWork. iWork 2008, in Microsoft parlance, could more aptly be described as "iWork Lite". Alternately, this version might best be billed as iWork Home. What about iWork Office and iWork School? Or iWork Superior to include all of the above? Don't count on it, at least not from iWork '08.
If the other reviews on Amazon and Apple are any indication, the only application in this trio that truly rises to the Microsoft Office challenge is Keynote. My beef with this suite pertains to my primary reason for purchasing iWork: word processing. Microsoft Office 2008 amounted to a series of alarming 1-star reviews at the time I purchased iWork 2008, and aside from that is enormously overpriced. More importantly, however, I wanted to reward any developer who dares compete with the Goliath that is MS Office by casting a vote with my pocketbook in favor of their product. Apple, after all, has been updating iWork long enough to give it time to mature. Or so I thought.
While I appreciate the beautiful templates and intuitive interface that iWork offers, what remains when all the pretties are stripped away? iWork Lite: The version you weren't bargaining on but should have expected for a mere $79.99 (MSRP).
My hope was that Pages would reference Webster's New World Dictionary, which is regarded as a superior reference in hard copy form for capitalization and proper hyphenation. While Pages approaches this level of accuracy, it doesn't quite make the grade. This calls into question its usefulness for English majors, journalists and writers of all stripes. Worse, Pages proofreader is a poor substitute for MS Word's grammar checker. As a result, Pages is also a questionable choice for teachers, students and professionals.
Other purported iWork limitations include:
* Few keyboard shortcuts (native Mac users once prided themselves on the ease with which they could zip through tasks with minimal mouse clicks);
* Cannot change the "save as" to default to an export file type;
* No auto-save/recovery;
* No auto-correct;
* Pages lacks an outline function;
* Weak on functionality: Does not support right-to-left language types. Cross references and the automatic numbering of legends, equations, references are missing. Limitations using the chart editor. "Start count at" and indentation level controls frustrate some users. No HTML import/export;
* iWork Server/Client works on an intranet using Rendezvous, but does not support Internet networking;
* Pages supports only basic citation and footnoting. Cannot use footnotes and endnotes simultaneously. Can accept Grapher/LaTeXiT services but does not support bibliographies (fails to interface with EndNote, for example);
* Opens Appleworks files only via the "import" command;
* Cannot add images -- such as company logo -- to Pages headers or footers;
* Numbers will not satisfy technical users, nor those who wish to include some of the following in a Keynote presentation: It does not support pivot tables. Cannot plot a graph with two y-axes. Will not graph error bars. Does not support Visual Basic macros. Cannot perform trendline analysis or basic statistics (t-test). Does not permit users to freeze/unfreeze panes;
* Apple reports: "Your ability to open a large Numbers file or import a large Microsoft Excel file into Numbers '08 may be constrained by the amount of memory installed on your computer. This constraint adjusts with the addition and removal of memory from the computer."
* Users porting complex Excel documents to Numbers report the need to perform numerous corrections;
* Does not include a database application. Lacks SQL database integration, among others;
* Does not support envelope printing within Pages (envelope printing is left up to Mac Address Book);
* Does not support mail merge (except from Mac Address Book);
* Cannot email a page from within an iWorks application;
* Does not include a standalone email application (relies instead on the integrated email application in OS X);
* Apparently, native iWork files are actually packages, which many web-based email servers do not support. To overcome this limitation, iWork files must be exported and/or saved and subsequently attached to outgoing web-based email messages as archives (zipped files);
*iWorks users who are borderline on system compatibility or whose machines place them at the lower end of iWork's system requirements may encounter sluggish performance (I encountered a number of pauses during which the rainbow colored beach ball appeared while working in Pages).
Do I recommend iWork? That depends on who, what, where and why you wish to use it. From my vantage point, iWork is not a Microsoft Office competitor but an entry-level trio of applications that are big on potential but small on delivery. Nevertheless, there are some users -- primarily those who require strong visuals and a template-based approach to productivity -- who may benefit from iWork 2008.
 very neat, but not an ms office replacement for those who must be compatible September 25, 2007
The Count (Raleigh, NC, USA)
17 out of 19 found this review helpful
pages and keynote are very polished products, and, if you dont need to be able to work on existing ms doc files you are safe. but, and this is a big but, you get mildly to moderately complex doc files to work on, the constant error messages that this or that does not work will be frustrating. same goes for numbers, in even a bigger way. just too many excel formattings and formulas cause numbers to hiccup.
Good Mac-centric office suite...now outdone by MS Office 08 February 1, 2008
RonAnnArbor (Ann Arbor, MI United States)
14 out of 15 found this review helpful
This is an absolutely wonderful-looking office suite from Apple. For a few months, it was the best you could get for your Mac, especially the new Intel macs.
But as of last week's release of MS Office 2008 for Mac, iWork returns to second place in the Office Feature set. There is nothing here that isn't outdone by MS Office 08.
What iWork continues to excel at is the interface, and the mac-centricity of the program -- everything looks and feels like all your other familiar Mac programs.
For those who have been reared on MS Word and Excel, there is no comparison, however.
The one downside of iWorks -- you can not natively save programs to .doc or .xls format. You need to "export" each document you want to share with your PC-office co-workers. This adds an extra step to every save...eventually you stop doing so and hope that nobody wants any of your files...and when you do need to share them you need to convert all of them.
I installed MS Office 2008 the day it was released, and found myself having to convert hundreds of Pages documents to use them back in Office -- a royal pain, and really one of the reasons that iWork is now banished tot he Application folder. I dare not delete it from my harddrive for fear that I will have files I saved in iWork format that can't be converted in Word....there's the rub -- you MUST convert files using Pages or Numbers, you can NOT convert anything inside MS Office basically meaning you have to keep two office suites on your hard drive.
The other serious (not yet fixed despite being out 6 months) flaw in Pages is the drop color problem -- if using shadowing around photo-image boxes the program changes the colors of your photos on the page. There is no work around for this other than to save the entire document as a PDF, open in Text Editor, re-save it as a JPG, and and then print. This affects all macs across the board. Graphic Designers beware.
My Timeline....up until iWork 08 was released, MS Office 2004 for Mac was the Suite of Choice....then for about 6 months iWork 08 was the clear leader...now with the release of MS Office 2008, there really is no comparison and MS Office 08 wins in the full-feature-full-compatibility realm.
iWork is only OK February 1, 2008
Charles Jahnke (Boston, MA USA)
14 out of 16 found this review helpful
As a student I have found iWork to be only OK.
Numbers:
My biggest problem is with Numbers. Numbers does not have any sort of linear, exponential or logarithmic regression functions, error bars or trends which makes it next-to-useless for any sort of lab work or mathematical analysis. While Numbers does have the basic statistical functions, the input is unintuitive and commands are different from excel which makes crossover very difficult. Numbers does look pretty, but unless you use the templates, creating your own style is difficult. Each portion of the table needs to be changed separately and short of automator I don't see any easy macros (note: you can save a template). Templates are helpful occasionally, but the majority of people who use Numbers are doing some sort of number crunching and in this aspect Numbers falls short, way too short. Too much pretty, not enough function, Numbers is not Excel.
Pages:
Pages is at least somewhat useful. It types, formats, spell checks and prints, which is all most people need it to do. Unfortunately, Apple portrays Pages as a Microsoft Publisher alternative--it is not. It's not even close to MS Word which is a step down from Publisher layout wise. My main complaint is that the dictionary/grammar check are not as powerful as Word. It doesn't make changes as you type, recognize common grammatical mistakes or even register capitalization rules. Templates are helpful I guess (in this way it is like publisher), but honestly how often do you use them.
Keynote:
Better than Microsoft Power Point - hands down. Apple focuses on the `pretty' in each of these programs and for keynote this is actually a good thing.
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