Don't come to this website if you don't like it here.

Is that so hard for you to do, Mr D*** Head?

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"What kind of Mac user gives a damn about spreadsheets, anyway? Oh yeah, I forgot--this is TUAW, the Mac community's castaway island of rejects."

The kind that are switching back to Windows because of the lack of a real office suite on OS X with a full Exchange client. I started realizing that the only reason I was planning on buying a MacPro was so I could run parallels at a decent speed.. Not everyone makes a living being 'creative', some of us have real work to do.

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Spot the bug in http://www.apple.com/business/profiles/iwork/sara_2.html hardware list.

Everybody knows Canon EOS-1D mark II is not compatible with EF-S lenses.

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!, stop being a Mac-o-fascist.

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Everyone, please step back and just ignore the troll.

I work for an engineering company. A colleague of mine built up a nice-looking 3-page document using Pages (for internal use, but he wanted to give the iWork test drive a spin). It looked super but he was vexed by the constantly spinning beach-ball o' death.

We tried it on my 2 GHz MacBook (2GB of RAM) and got the same thing. Turned out that Pages was choking back most of my available memory and was swapping like crazy. Unfortunately it got so bad that he threw in the towel and had to re-do the whole thing in Word.

So my takeaway was to avoid iWork in business situations and stick to products like OmniGraffle (excellent) and Office (mostly works). If anyone has more positive experiences with iWork I'd be interested in hearing them.

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I like Pages, it's a nice and simple DTP. I think iWorks power comes from simplicity of pages and effects in Keynotes. Designing powerpoints slides is not fun at all, i prefer use keynotes :-)

Nezron:
What is your real work anyway? Is it Parallel's bug hunter?

If you want to use spreadsheets go download neofiice or openoffice, both are has compact and excel compatible spreadsheet.

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!, if you think defending the platform by flinging poo is a good idea, then you are mistaken. It's only going to make people think that the other side is better because they aren't being as much of an ass.

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Well I have telecom consulting company and we run excusively on iWork. We all have office installed for compatibility purposes, but all our documents are created in Pages (partially because they look good and templates let you make very good looking documents), partially because Word is insecure (keeps in teh file old versions of document).

I personally give a lot of presentations and Keynote ROCKS. I have given presentations to many different audiences: from small IT departments (100% geek content) to executive boards of major multinationals (think ABN-AMRO, SHELL, UNILEVER, etc) and everything in between.

EVERY single one of those audiences was awed by presentations that did not look like Powerpoint. Mind you - I have seen some kick-ass powerpoint presentations (made by a team of dedicated graphic artist and concept author). But I have no budget to hire those and I have still managed to outshine guys like Accenture, Arthur D. Little and Atos-Origin. Now if a 79 dollar worth program (and Mac laptop) can deliver such a significant adventage (read tens of thousands of euros) - then the choice is very clear.

One can run a small business on Mac's. Ability to distinguish my company, ease of use and overall stability and ability of my Mac-only setup in my opinion significantly outweighs ocassional problem in getting the setup right (with cross-platform situations) or small problems with using different patform then most others.

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"Nezron:
What is your real work anyway? Is it Parallel's bug hunter?"

It seems that way. I work on databases mostly and need Parallels to run my ER diagramming tools and for accessing the databases. The tools I have seen for OSX are years behind what's on the Windows side and the lack of a real Visio competitor is also a shame. (I tried the Omnigraffle, didn't like it that much.)

Mac Office is ok, but it lacks PST import making it virtually useless. And Neo office isn't much better.

Wasn't trying to be inflammatory, but I am tired of hearing how spreadsheets and other business related apps are useless.

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Andrew, I'm a Mechanical/Aerospace engineering student. Thats strange you say that... I've used Pages whenever possible, and for every important report my or my [windows-based] team has had to hand in since it's been easy to get the reports looking really nice and also make last minute changes without screwing up the entire report. I've never had a major problem like that with the beach-ball, and some of the reports have been 50+ pages with lots of images and tables.

Sometimes I've noticed it can really lag if you you're typing values into huge table, but for the most part it performs extremely well, even when dropping in 20MB tiff's or PDFs as images (I've used it on my Dual 2.5 G5/3GB RAM and Macbook Pro 1GB RAM). Maybe it was something in the document... an image, or something Pages didn't like...?

In my opinion, the biggest drawback is that Pages doesn't support equation editing yet, so I'm stuck using Grapher and dropping in equations as PDFs. And when you import Word files, sometimes the equations in the .doc file look crappy, especially when there are fractions involved. On the bright side, you can hit alt+0 for the degree sign, and you can add subscript/superscript buttons in the toolbar... huge time savers.

Other than the equations thing, Pages is by far one of my favorite programs on the Mac. And Keynote blows away Powerpoint too... I was real disappointed when iWork '07 wasn't released at Macworld.

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I thought the "troll" was just joking around. Perhaps the poster was just being ironical?

Anyway, I for one, AM EXCITED about this development. I run a copy with 90+ installed Macs, and we use both MSOffice and iWork.

We use MSOffice for spreadsheets and about 25% of our documents. Keynote is used for 100% of presentations and the balance of the documents.

We have budgeted to upgrade EITHER iWork or MSOffice 2008 this year.

Everyone here hopes that given the poor design and quality of MSOffice, Apple realizes that iWork is neither an AppleWorks replacement nor a .Mac for documents and released a suite of applications that allows us to be creative with our documents. In short, allows us to create beautiful documents that sell, communicate, without using a layout program and a design team.

iWork should be the "Final Cut Express" of a pro document design suite. Lots of powerful tools, but not everything and the kitchen sink, in a fast and easy to use solution.

Fingers crossed. We're rooting for Apple here. Let's hope they get it and can deliver...

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No, the troll has been carrying on like a twit for probably weeks now, it's just turned to fascist trolling in the past few days.

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These have been up for about 2 weeks (since the 18th)... Slow!

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What Apple should add to iWork is a database app. Think of it as FileMaker Lite, a DB app for the rest of us who don't need FM Pro's bells, whistles, and high price. Let's call this new addition to the iWork suite a simple name: Data.

Maybe Data could bridge the gap between DB apps and spreadsheets, with easy-to-use elements of both. Now THAT would be revolutionary thinking!

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See detailed comments on Pages in previous TUAW post re "Pages Templates", including mine here. Behind the flashy front, Pages simply lacks basic features present in WP and page layout apps as long ago as 1990.

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Well, here are the links for my comment above (the engine ignored my fancy html):
"Pages Templates": http://www.tuaw.com/2007/05/20/pages-templates-1-0.
My comments: http://www.tuaw.com/2007/05/20/pages-templates-1-0/#c4999393.

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I personally like iWork and I try to use it as much as possible. When Pages doesn't do something that I need, or I need to test compatibility, I go over to Word. Not a big deal. Keynote is the best presentation software on any platform in my opinion. Pages shines in its ability to create simple professional-looking documents very quickly. If you need something that does more, by all means, go give Mellel, Nisus Writer, Word, etc. a try.

I can totally see iWork as being a great option for small business and home based businesses. No need to whine about it not being a full fledged office suite. It's not intended to be. If you need a spreadsheet application, there are plenty of choices (NeoOffice, Mariner Calc, etc.).

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Good catch on the typo! You are correct! I do in fact not use a 60 mm macro. I have the 50 mm 2.5 EF Macro. It is least expensive lense I have but I totally love it for those great tight details shots! I should probably mention it to Apple. I am sure they have no idea that the writer made that mistake! Thanks for pointing it out!

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On the discussion of iWork I would love to add my two cents too. I use Pages for all my documents, DVD Cases, and so much more. I love the program, obviously! Excel is still something that I use from time to time. The don't think you need to choose one or the other. Pages and Keynote are incredible tools and they kill their direct competition in my eyes...For sure! I am sure when Apple comes out with a competing product to excel it will knock it out of the water also. Until then. I own and use both for completely different purposes! Just my two cents!

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