Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 11-15 of 114
 Great office suite October 8, 2007
Pete Paxton (Portland)
12 out of 13 found this review helpful
This is just simply a great office suite. I no longer use MS or any other office suite because iWork has everything I need. The templates in Pages are great and working with them couldn't be easier. Numbers may not have everything Excel has but it will probably do what you need 90% of the time. Keynote is just flat out fun to work with. While my wife scrapbooks, I create great looking slideshows with animations that outdo PowerPoint. I'm really enjoying iWork. It's put the "fun" into an office suite.
iWork '08 is worth it's weight in gold December 17, 2007
Eric D. Knapp (New Hampshire, USA)
12 out of 12 found this review helpful
I've reviewed iWork in the past, and have always thought it was well worth the $79 asking price. However, with iWork '08, these applications have become MUCH more valuable to me.
Some context: I am a marketing executive by day, and an independent writer by night. During working hours, I use Pages to create whitepapers, sell sheets, and other items that we used to have to outsource to a designer for a few $K each. Pages makes documents look so professional, we've been able to take most of this work in house. In fact - I do it myself, and it takes less of my day to do it myself than it would take for me to manage the outsourced help. ages is just easy to use, and creates fantastic looking documents.
I use Keynote when I give presentations myself, but use Powerpoint normally (because no one else has Keynote, and I don't want to have to keep converting files). Keynote opens powerpoints fine, so I can watch/present a presentation without having to have Parallels open. It exports well to powerpoint, too, so I can work in Keynote exclusively if I want to: for example, when working on a plane and tryin to conserve battery life by NOT running windows side-by-side with OS X.
Similarly, spreadsheets open fine - but I'm a marketing guy, so I may not be the best judge of number-stuff.
For my alter-ego as a wannabe writer, I use iWork even more. I wrote, edited, designed and produced by newest novel (Cluck: Murder Most Fowl) entirely using Pages '08. For anyone who has written a book, this means not only writing 100,000+ words, but it also means re-write upon re-write. I tracked nearly thrity minor drafts of my manuscript through the life of the project. Some points about Pages:
1. It handled the large files easily. Scrolling through 300+ pages was fluid on a MacBook Pro. Even when the illustrations were put in place (27 individual 400dpi images) the file remained easy to manipulate.
2. The spelling & grammar checks work better than expected. Of course, you can't rely on these, but they are a necessary aide when dealing with massive amounts of text. The 'proofread' function was markedly better than MS Word's grammar check, although I missed an "ignore this rule" button.
3. Searching for certain words seemed to miss results on occasion, especially when the text was formatted specially or the search term contained punctuation (I submitted this as a bug to Apple, and it will likely be resolved in a future revision)
4. Pages was able to create a print-ready .pdf easily without requiring any extra software. The high-resolution of the images was preserved (I worried about this, since the app handled them so easily in-line I figured maybe they' been downsampled), ad all formatting remained intact.
5. Sepaking of formatting: I was able to design the interior block of Cluck: Murder Most Fowl with absolute precision, and I was also able to adjust the design along the way with little effort.
The bottom line is that Pages '08 is even better at producing quality, professional-looking and print-ready documents than the original Pages. Cluck is "searchable inside" (or will be, soon) so you can see for yourself how Pages can produce results.
Keynote
I also use Keynote for personal uses other than corporate presentations. Interestingly enough, Keynote '08 has been critical to me in the development of promotional videos for my book. Now, I'm no move director, but with Keynote I can:
* animate objects along a path
* chose from a variety of quality transitions
* imbed movie files (AVI files from my Flip Video Camcorder: 60-Minutes (Black) )
* add text (again, with great font handling)
* control the timing of everything
* export to .mov videos
I was able to create some great-looking (well, I am an amateur, but I think they look great) videos, with hardly ay effort (and about 30 minutes, tops). If you want to see for yourself, you can find them on YouTube is you search around for "cluck" and/or "book promo".
Overall, I would recommend iWork '08 to anyone who needs professional results but isn't professionally trained ad/or who lacks the serious $$$ required to purchase more "professional" tools. The applications are easy to use, well-integrated with the "Mac experience", and produce amazing results. All for small change.
In the business world, iWork has what it takes to bring smaller projects in-house, which could save huge amounts of budget money AND save time.
I would give this ten stars if I could.
 Pages is still useless. September 2, 2007
James R. Strickland
10 out of 36 found this review helpful
I recently downloaded the free trial of iWork 08, to see if Apple had managed to fix the Appleworks import crashing bug that has been present since the original release of iWork. They have not. In addition, they have discontinued support for Appleworks. If you're considering purchasing iWork with the idea of reading all your old Appleworks documents in this new post-Appleworks world, you will be sorely disappointed, as Pages bombs on importing about half the Appleworks documents I've tested with it. Appleworks 6, by contrast, opens them without complaint.
 OK, but not Great October 17, 2007
B. Ueno (Hawaii)
10 out of 15 found this review helpful
After receiving Apple iWork 08 I am impressed with what you can do with Keynote,Pages and Numbers. However, even though Apple says it will work with MS Word and Excel, it really only reads those files. If you create or edit a document in either Pages or Numbers users of Word or Excel will not be able to open or view your changes.
If on the other hand all you want is a way to print hard copies to be shared (or shared with other Mac users) iWorks is a wonderful program. If you need to share your work with MS Office users than I suggest purchasing MS Office for Macs. I will.
 More Mature October 20, 2007
AppleDoc (Western USA)
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
I work in a highly integrated setting with Windows/Mac and mostly MS Office generated media. I have both Office and iWork on my computer. Up to the most recent release of iWork, Office has pretty much been my workhorse because there are no document conversion issues and Office still did the job better.
Now with the most recent iWork release, I am using the Apple product for a greater percentage of my work. The conversion from Word, Excel and Powerpoint is about 90% accurate. Pages still has the most formatting foibles - mostly misplaced tabs and indents leading to unsightly spacing. Keynote does a fine job of importing Powerpoint with few formatting problems. Numbers does a great conversion of Excel files though my spreadsheet needs are limited.
As far as generating new documents, iWork has finally surpassed Office and is less bloated for features I never use. The automatic appearing, context sensitive format bars are very friendly, very Apple. I t has really matured as a stand alone product and I would convert to iWork exclusively if not for my need to seamlessly convert to Office documents. Very happy with this release and would recommend it to users who do not need to work in mixed environments.
|
