iWork a quiet hit with sales up 50% this year

@Jordan,
You must have never used anything else if you think Office "works well." I preferred WordPerfect and Lotus123 to their Microsoft "give away then monopolize" knockoffs, Word and Excel.

The only value is that these are defacto business standards, so there is no format Tower of Babel. I already didn't like them much, and the Office '07 versions lose the main value of the product line - the familiar interface. I may get used to the attempt at a more graphical interface, but I doubt I'll be a fan even after 15 years of Office.

When Apple purposely leaves out the ability to write documents or do spreadsheets, of course sales of iWorks will go up as sales of their overpriced laptops go up. Why is this news?

Well how about price?
50 bucks against 150 makes choosing iWork a lot easier
I do use it most of the time however I'm not ignoring the compatibility issues

The only reason I have Office on my Mac is because the bi-weekly purchase card reports I need to sign and submit for work come as RTF files that, even though they should look correct in Pages or OpenOffice, only look correct in Word.

Otherwise I use iWork for everything.

When my Brother got his iMac, his wife (a Windows/Office PowerUser) hated it until something just clicked and she realised everything was easier and made sense on a Mac. They ended up getting Office for Mac 12 months later for compatibility with Online Schooling (Word '97 format only) and Accountants Spreadsheets (Excel '97 format only) - no PDFs, docx or xlsx.

When my father needed to redo his Resumé on his new iMac, I was a bit hesitant. He could never wrap his head around Structured documents in Word and the original Author of the document had never even heard of Structured documents. Whenever editing it in Word, changing one word would change the formatting and layout of the entire document.
We opened it in Pages, selected a few Paragraphs which should have been headers, changed them in the Style Drawer and everything started to fall into place. In half-an-hour *He* had fixed all the formatting in the document, including Paragraph spacing, re-structured the document with Columns and even done customized Bullet Lists. I was so proud of him!

That half-hour of using Pages taught him concepts that Full-time Secretaries and Journalists can spend a lifetime of Word mastering.

I've used Pages and Keynote since the first versions, and will continue to do so even when Office2010 is released. I use Pages to export reformatted files to PDF and RTF for my eBook reader.

I do prefer Excel over Numbers, probably because I've used Excel since the first version on both WinPC and Macs. Excel is great for producing forms and the like, not just for number crunching.

I always use Excel over Numbers, Pages when possible, and Keynote if I can use my own mac.

I cannot stand Word 08 (I love Word 07 though) - its just so sluggish and uncooperative for me. I love Pages' smooth scrolling, full screen mode, and general feel. As for features, I don't demand too much so I haven't noticed any difference. The Keynote templates are much more stylish than the Powerpoint ones, if not only because a lot more people use Powerpoint. Exporting for use on Windows, however, is painful. Numbers just doesn't have enough features for me.

That being said, I'm almost at my threshold of fanboyism from this blog. Seriously? You can't simply say "iWork sales up this year?" Is it really necessary to call it a "quiet hit?" Your brief review boils down to "I like it. I've used it. I think it's pretty." with maybe one fragment of a detail.

Yeah, does anyone seriously use this over Office? And not the special-needs Office for Mac. I mean Office 2003.