iWork/iPhone compatibility

Posted:
in Mac Software edited January 2014
So much for the iPhone being a seamless portal to my "digital life". Apple's iWork '09 is actually incompatible with Apple's iPhone 3G, yet the iPhone has no problem opening MS Office (specifically, Excel) documents.



I'm embarrassed for Apple: I sent an e-mail invoice from my Mac to a client, who has a Mac and an iPhone, with .numbers, .pdf and .jpg files attached. All the files opened fine on the other end EXCEPT .numbers, because my client uses MS Office for Mac instead of Apple's own iWork '09 (and I thought the whole point of iWork was that it was "100% compatible with MS Office" - which should mean that MS Excel would open a .numbers file, right?). Then I tried to look at the attachments on my iPhone and, again, all the files opened just fine EXCEPT the .numbers file. So I converted the .numbers file to .xls on my Mac and sent it to my iPhone again - and it opened just file. Bottom line: the iPhone works better with an MS app than it does with the equivalent Apple app.



Tsk, tsk, tsk to the iWork dev team and to Apple for selling a software product (iWork '09) for business users that is actually incompatible with its own hardware. If Apple is serious about getting bigger share in the business market, this sort of thing simply can't be allowed to happen. Yes, we certainly hope this will all be corrected with iPhone OS 3.0, but more importantly, we hope this doesn't indicate a decay of communication between dev teams at Apple - that could mean the end of Apple's advantage over MS in user-interface.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 1
    exporting your numbers or pages docs and .xls or .doc doesn't take that long. i agree it seems weird that apple doesn't support their own format properly. but apple is full of contradictions..."hey devs, make 64 bit software!" (ignore that aperture, final cut, and everything else made my apple is 32 bit and fails at using multiple cores). hopefully these things will be remedied in the future.



    just for compatibility for now, export everything as office files...(sad i know)



    cheers
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