Sales of Apple's iWork office suite surge 50% in 2009 - Page 2

Reading your post reminds me to finish reading the whole thread before posting: You've said what I was thinking and you said it better ... good job!

I have always been impressed with Keynote. Simple, functional, and creates amazing presentations. I wish there were more competitors to Keynote in terms of graphical prowess. But just because a program comes loaded with effects or clip art, doesn't mean you have to use it all, all the time. I love the simple presentations that come out of keynote. Now if they only had a version for Linux distros!

The reason iWork did so well is that its focus was on the Home, not the office. iWork (except for keynote) cannot compete in the business world. Lack of a database, linked info, SQL, VB scripting, etc... (you can only go so far with Automator and Applescript) that makes the MS suite the standard in the professional world. But at home, many people don't deal with that, the biggest database being a mail merge for sending out holiday cards. I think Pages is able to do that (though I haven't tried) just fine. Numbers is limited, great for finances, making good looking charts for science projects, and other basic numerical statistical things. Again, people won't be dealing with a huge array of data coming their way from some outboard gear, they just need the app to do what they need it to, and nothing more. That's where iWork shines.
The programs take out all the unnecessary stuff and make it easy for people at home to create decent things in a few clicks. Instead of the high price MS is asking for, the lower price of the iWork apps is very attractive to the home users (and education)... Apple's primary targets.

To be honest, comparing iWork to MS isn't a great comparison. They both perform similar functions, but are both geared for two totally different work styles. iWork at home, and Office in the Office.

However, I do wish it was easier to take files between the two software titles. Maybe someday they'll play nice. Any wonder it went up 50%? Not really.

When I finally returned to Mac this year, I went wholesale. I bought the family pack of iLife for both the iMac and MBP. I use Pages fairly extensively, Numbers a bit less and haven't had occasion to use Keynote yet. Quite honestly, as long as there is compatibility with opening Word and Excel docs, I'll stick with iLife and beyond. I'm happy with both and don't miss MS products. I use the Wintel setup at work anyway.

We, at work, also began using FileMaker, mostly because of it's web sharing capability. I've become pretty proficient with it and so when it came time to build my own database for my home business, I went with FileMaker. After 20 years or so, I've made the decision to cast off MS and return Apple, after having cut my teeth on a Macintosh Plus in college (with its whopping 1 meg or RAM!)

Given that they already give iLife away and that they used to give Appleworks away and I assume they still include a 30 day trial of Office for Mac, I just don't see a problem, but then I haven't had my second cup of coffee yet so there's a lot of stuff I'm not "seeing".

with all the EU garbage about MS and IE, it wouldnt surprise me if the EU whined about that. thats why i think foul would be cried.

They used to offer the Office for Mac Test Drive. When they came out with iWork, which only contained Pages and Keynote, I think, it was a 30-day trial. Once iWork added Numbers for iWork 08. Sometime in 2008 that they stopped including either on the machines or on the restore discs. There was no trialware to be found on Macs with the removal of those two apps gone

I wouldnt say that iLife is given away. Its part of the Mac sale and any major iLife upgrade require a new purchase for $79. There is no way MS could get away with including a comparable suite on apps with their OS.

PS: Only QT 7 had the simple and professional versions for an extra charge with Leopard. With SL even that was removed. Macs are now free and clear of trial or partial apps. I had to set up a few non-Mac PCs this past week for people and it was a pain to clean out all that crapware.

My sentiments exactly. I get Office with a significant University discount. I find the current version of Word very nicely designed, and easy to use. Further, there are very few compatibility issues when sharing docs with Windows users. Pages converts Word documents OK when there isn't any advanced formatting in a Word document, but as soon as you add a text box or graphic things fall part quickly.

I own the current version of Pages and I like it. It, however, is lacking in a lot of features I use in Word. If, however, I had to pay full price for Office, and/or I didn't have to share documents, I probably could get by just fine with Pages.

In my mind, Microsoft did make a mistake by not including full macros compatibility with this version of Office for the Mac. The main reason people use Office on a Mac is for compatibility with Windows versions. Still Office for Word has a nice Mac feel, and I think Microsoft did a nice job on it [I only use Word]..

It really doesn't take long to learn iWork and it will save time (usage time). The interactivity and shared functions (for example, almost the exact same photo editing pop-up menu in Pages, Keynote, Numbers, iPhoto) of the apps really makes it a breeze. I'm certain that for some of your work you will save time and energy, plus let you have more fun and be more creative, using iWork. And yes, I have used Office.

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I'll second the comment about Keynote and Powerpoint; there really is no comparison.

The age difference between the suites is incomparable and so also it is in terms of features, I love MS Office 2007/8 - and it will be many moons before iWork comes close... here's to hoping.

There is nothing to prevent Apple from adding more depth to Numbers. Doing so would have zero impact on more casual users. In fact such capability is one of Excels greatest strengths, the entry level for trivial usage is extremely low.

The very use of the word depth should highlight for you that we aren't expecting huge changes to the top level user interface, it is capability below that that people want beefed up. Also note many people beyound accountants and engineers use math in their daily lives, a person is not inhuman just because they can add and subtract. You seem to be displaying a rather radical disregard for mathematics.


Dave

You make a good point, but I think you over-make it a bit.

iWork will likely never be up to the task for some of the intense business related things that a Fortune 500 company needs, at least for it's executives and salespeople, but that's not the whole of business by any means. iWork is not going to replace Office for hard-core intense business users, but it can replace Office for *most* business users in that most businesses don't need the complication and excess of MS Office.

Most businesses have no need for a complete programming language like VB script and at best merely want to automate a few interface tasks in a document or two. The combination of Automator and AppleScript far more than suffices for that and together they can do almost anything that can be accomplished with VB script. Certainly anything intended by those that originally added VB script to Office.

If you used iWork in a business setting, you would also be using FileMaker which throws Access to the floor in terms of usability and again, is far far more database than the average business user needs or wants.

Business is about more than just doing complicated things with VB basic and Excel. Most businesses, don't need or use anything much beyond the basic functionality of the Office suite, and most small businesses, do all their accounting with a separate accounting software package, not Excel.

Microsoft's plan is to make a product for Fortune 500 companies, and sell it to the masses of regular users and regular business users. Apple's plan is to make something for the masses of regular users and hope that it becomes enough of a standard that Fortune 500 companies might want to use it.

Like a lot of software lately, the movement is away from "do it all" suites of software and towards more task focussed software. I think that Microsoft will (eventually) figure this out and would expect them to produce a dumbed down "consumer" Office split off from their regular business Office when the competition heats up a bit more.

iWork's features far outweigh Office in quality & simplicity, but diversity is still lacking in Apple's spreadsheet features.

Still, Pages is more comparable to Publisher in the type of documents you can turn out & Keynote blows PowerPoint out of the water in ease of use & bling. Keynote also has a lot of neat features (like save as quicktime movie) that make it far preferred over PowerPoint.

The Office compatibility has actually gotten pretty good as of late but I still find it so frustrating that it makes you save as a new doc anytime you want to just make changes to a word document.

One other thing they need to do to increase adoption is to really advertise the ability to export to PDF. A lot of people think Office is better because Microsoft provides plugins that lets users read documents even if they don't have Office. What they don't realize is that iWork has the same capability except you likely don't even need to install anything at all since most people already have Adobe Reader for viewing PDFs. It also gives you some of the deeper publishing features you get with Adobe Acrobat so that you can tag information into the file laying claim to copyright on the content.

Apple's Advertising is really quite pathetic, they really need to spend a lot more of that moola they have in reserve on some great ads promoting both iLife & iWork. I really don't get why they do so little advertising of anything except the iPhone.

Id argue that coming close in features is only important to a select group of users that Apple doesnt even serve with their consumer and small business focused machines. Id say that having the right features with ease of use and superior design is much more important for the average user than simply trying to include all the same features as MS Office.

I doubt Ive used 0.1% of the feature set in any MS Office app and have used only a couple of their 11 or 12 apps, which doesnt include all those server ties that do things that i cant even conceive of. Hell, I only break out iWork a couple times a year.

PS: I will be trying the next Office for Mac specifically for Outlook for Mac. I like Mail but I really want my contacts, calendar and mail to be accessed from one app.

I want real numbers. How many people are using it? More importantly, how many suckers like me are using MobileMe? I really hope that server farm they are building is for boosting speed and bandwidth for the service.

I hope they'll release iWork 10 or 11 ASAP, because I'm looking forward to dump Word. Keynote and Numbers rock and beat MS Office to the ground for me. However Pages is missing features that are a must for technical documents such as auto-numbering of tables/figures, cross-referencing etc. I hope that these features are coming in the next version and will be done the right way, because Word is not exactly good in these either.

Also not requiring to buy MathType and EndNote separately for formulas resp. bibliography would be nice.

That's good news for Apple, and users as well. If sales are up, that should encourage Apple to keep improving it.

I don't think this tells the whole story though... I'd be willing to wager that 2010 sales will be even better... There are some folks who are hold-outs, including me...

I'm fairly confident that Apple is working on a 2010 version of iWork that will take advantage of many of the new core OS features of Snow Leopard. As soon as they do release a new version, I plan to buy 'family pack' box sets for *both* home and the office. That'll be another $458 in Apple's pocket - which I don't mind at all - it's an incredible deal for 10 copies of an OS & Office Suite.

I do have some hopes for the next version, namely improved spreadsheet features, inclusion of a database app, and support (at least via import/export) for ODF and MS' bastardized XML format.

In business everything is a risk, and this is a very minor one considering they have less than 4% marketing share in Europe.

I'm interested as well. When 10.6 came out I was focused on school work and some business items so I didn't have the time to invest in updating the OS. I'm going to to do it when the new apps are releases since I'm still using iWork '08


Agreed on the drawing app. I'm surprised there is nothing comparable in the iWork suite. Thanks for the tip also, like others I completely forgot about creating keyboard shortcuts like that.


To be honest, comparing iWork to MS isn't a great comparison. They both perform similar functions, but are both geared for two totally different work styles. iWork at home, and Office in the Office.

However, I do wish it was easier to take files between the two software titles. Maybe someday they'll play nice. Any wonder it went up 50%? Not really.[/QUOTE]

Agreed on both points!


You know you can download a free 30-day trial of the entire suite?

http://www.apple.com/iwork/download-trial/

I love iWork's usability but it has problems with mailmerge being undeveloped (no SQL linking possible; inability to fully read all csv files eg semi-colon delimited) and also with most things related to databases in both Pages and more importantly Numbers. I work in Finance and I still need OpenOffice to sort out these problems, otherwise I would use iWork exclusively because I can do stuff so fast in it.

Not sure why Apple has not sorted out Database linkage, either direct or via exported csv files -maybe they had to do a deal either with Filemaker or with MS for them to develop for the next five years last time the MS contract needed fixing (about the same time Windows started to include even more OS X type features/look n feel.

I hate the fact that the best way to merge letters is using Address Book though, that's just so amateurish and not at all businesslike.

It's completely different. 4% monopoly, watch out!

Love iWork. It's all I've been using since 2006. It handles MS documents very well, but with such great PDF features built into it I never really have a need to save in an MS format.

MobileMe works beautifully. I've been a .Mac user for years now and the service has come a long way. Syncing is much more reliable than it used to be. I work off the iDisk "cloud" exclusively and the service has held up with 4gb of synced data.

I'm not quite sure what makes bundling iWork with a Mac verboten when iLife has raised no such concerns. Seems like a stretch.



I don't care about interface compatibility or having evvvvery feature in the world and I like the iWork GUI quite a bit - but I stick with Word because of the file-saving fandango I have to go through to create universally shareable (.doc) editable documents. Just what the world needed is another incompatible document file format that 98% of the world can't open (including most Mac owners!). And just what I need on my hard drive - duplicate file names for every doc I want to share, or take the time to manually weed out all the Pages versions all the time.

Ridiculous - and no more inherent sense than Sony trying to force feed us Memory Sticks, Atrac files and every other proprietary off shoot which either remains stuck in a niche or dead-ended.

Yet when I do save a Pages document as a doc, Pages has no problem opening it with everything I put in it. So why not simply add one simple option to save by default in in Doc (and, I suppose DocXJ) format. WordPerfect's done that on my PC for over a decade and Apple clearly understands the Doc deal.

Oh well. I dislike Word and even having it, but it's the least kludgy way to go for me. And I suppose all productivity programs are headed to the cloud anyway where we'll be debating other aspects.

Meanwhile this (below) just in from a few fantasy land fans who clearly believe the Mountain's about to come to Mohammed. Not in the first half of this decade at least, pals.......

Yes, very different. Microsoft can't claim that they don't have a huge market for Office outside of the Mac, so they'd have nothing to complain about if Apple bundled iWork with the Mac. Which I think they should do.

Agreed, heartily. This is yet another example of people assuming that their needs are serious, and others less so. We've been using iWork for all our word processing since the first version. It was fine for this purpose then, and has only gotten better. Numbers I hardly ever use, except to open Excel documents others send to me, which 95% of the time are just simple tables that don't include a single calculation anyway. When I tried to import a fairly large database into Numbers, it choked -- so I'll continue to use FileMaker for that task. Obviously, Numbers needs more work.

First let me say I'm not a heavy user of "Office" type apps at all. That is the case at home or at work.

Given that I installed NeoOffice on my early 2008 MBP after spending years running Linux for my home computer. Let's just say it is OK, but not much more than that. I installed iWorks when Snow Leopard came out and have only used it a little. Part of the problem here is that I'm more inclined to use simple text editors, python or web tools rather than "Office" tools.

That being said I can see myself expanding the use of numbers in the future, especially if the feature set expands. One thing I'd like to be able to do is to generate plists for software development. Numbers may be able to do this already, I really haven't looked as I've been using Python for that. Also the ability to tightly control rounding is a must.

In any event continued use of future versions of iWork requires that Apple keep the cost equation under control. I actually don't want to see it bundled with the operating system. There are a number of problems with bundling, one of which is interference from the highly regulated EU. A bigger issue is that it is anti innovation in my mind, especially for a product that has a long ways to go development wise. In some ways I see NeoOffice as a better solution and that it will continue to be developed as long as people have to make a choice. If Apple where to bundle iWorks then there will be far less energy focused on alternative software.

My MS Office experience is entirely PC based at work. Of the suite, Excel is the only offering that really impresses me and is actually a productivity tool. That even with a rather large database that i developed in Access. In reality Access is a marginal buggy piece of crap from what I can see, but that is an older version of Access. Word while usable I find strange. Excel is just the opposite and very handy. This can be seen in the number of Excel documents that I get E-Mailed to me that contain nothing but text. It is pretty obvious that Excel is a tool that many people reach for first. Interestingly that dies not seem to be the case with Mac users and Numbers. Mac users are more incline to reach for the "right" tool when creating a document. What is even funnier is that Excel seems to help some people with their compositions.

So for me the value in iWork for use at home is not clear. Even further down the road where I imagine running a business value isn't certain. I'm actually hoping that the tech in Snow Leopard, especially GCD, leads to a vastly improved version of iWorks. There should be extensive focus on Numbers. I'd like to see more depth in Numbers including an interface to sqlite3.

Why sqlite3? Well the database capabilities of Excel are nice but an Excel file can hardly be called a database. So while I'd live to see more features in Numbers to handle spread sheets as databases I'd be far happier to see Numbers provide an interface to Sqlite3. Sqlite3 is a simple SQL environment that would go well with numbers and simplfy the deliver of novel solutions to problems. No it is not a replacement for traditional databases, but is rather a solution to the issue of spreadsheet complexity.


Dave

Powerpoint is a 2.5/5, Word 4/5, and Excel 5/5.

Why use iWork? Because it does things MS Office wants to do when/if it grows up...

Yes, I use MS Office too, but I have taken to using iWork more and more. I hope to switch completely some day, but only if Apple improves spreadsheet features, adds decent forms features to Pages, and makes import/export to MS Office so good you won't have to reformat your files after opening them in the other program...

So what does iWork do that's so special? Well, I don't have time to list everything here, but here's two major points:

Keynote. The whole thing. I can't even stand to use PowerPoint at all anymore. In fact I don't. I've switched completely to Keynote and have not looked back. I know of no capabilities in PowerPoint that are not 100% better in Keynote, plus Keynote has capabilities PowerPoint only dreams of.

Graphics. Create a chart in Numbers and then an identical one in Excel. There is no comparison. Numbers charts are smooth, professional, and photorealistic. Excel charts look like stick figures. Excel charts are fine for throwing around typical office crap to colleagues, but when it comes time to put together a professional presentation, I turn to Numbers to generate all my charts, and then I can place them in whatever presentations or printed documentation that I need to distribute to clients.

MS Office can't be replaced just yet - I have found continued requirements in the business world (because unfortunately, everybody uses it). OpenOffice seems to be the most compatible, but does nothing to improve upon Office. iWork is less compatible and still a little immature, but produces far superior results.

One fine day, hopefully one fine day, an alternative suite will be a sufficient replacement for MS Office, until then I'm okay with using iWork and Office together. I would really like to switch to iWork completely, but Apple needs to build in lots of additional compatibility, and a Windows version of the suite would be nice too. Apple, are you listening?

I do hate that Apple no longer offers even a basic drawing app for their OS. I have found the free and simple modern version of MacPaint app called Paintbrush that is easy to use. Its more akin to MS Paint than the drawing app in AppleWorks.

http://paintbrush.sourceforge.net/screenshots/

Yes, my point was its no longer is included with Macs.



I dont see how people can complain about MobileMe as a whole. The increases features since .Mac are great and well worth the $65/year.

The speed could be faster but I think that is being worked on. The new iDisk app for the iPhone seems to work much faster. I stream movies Id put on my iDisk smoothly. I do wish Apple supported more codecs and containers but that is for a different thread.

That's an artificial distinction. There's no reason that Apple to not make Numbers more functional to accommodate the 'accountants/engineers' as well (without losing its simplicity for 'people.')

Add: Just noticed that Dave (#50) said it much better than I did!

Since switching to a Mac, all the time and money I gained from the Mac's better OS ( backup, security, etc ) I have then lost trying to regain basic office capability ( enter numbers into spreadsheets from business partners, update my CV, ... ).

MS Office for Mac is that much worse than MS Office for Windows to cause that much of a usability hit?

I was going to do more with iDisk but had a couple of worries. Firstly, that a dodgy sync could wipe out a big chunk of data and sync the wipe to my Mac ( I've seen bad sync's reported and my first ever MobileMe sync failed horribly ). Plus files in iDisk are excluded from Time Machine.

numbers, Excell or whatever I often fine that people try to use spread sheets for databases, generally to save up front time. I never really understood this myself as even a bad database program like Access has significant advantage ls over a spread sheet type program when handling data. Well data of any size, don't get me wrong here, I don't want to see a reduction in spread sheet data handling capability. Just that current solutions don't cut the mustard with sufficiently large or complex data sets.

That is why my previous post mentioned a hybrid approach where something like Sqlite databases are tied to the spread sheet capability of Numbers. Not as a huge page of rows and columns like is done today but rather as an object that can return data to a cell. Personally I think this sort of approach would have huge benifits and lead to more robust spread sheets. In some cases it might actually simplfy things. Better yet your data ends up in a more or less standard container. The nature of SQLite means you would always be able to get to your data in the future. I just see this sort of hybrid approach offering unigue solutions to many problems.


Dave

What I don't get is why so many people use a spreadsheet application to make a simple table. If I saw this only occasionally, I'd write it off -- but it happens constantly.

I started by trying Pages and its ability to open Office documents, given that this is promoted as a capability and there is discussion about being able to live without MS Office (which I wanted to do).

After that turned out to be a no-go, I tried OpenOffice which was also mangling my documents.

Then I tried VMWare and found it killed my Mac's performance and had funny little instabilities that put me off.

So now I'm using Office for Mac for my own documents. Then I use bootcamp/Vista/Office for any document that is sent to me. I use iDisk and MobileMe to send docs from Mac to Windows (horrible) and plan to write some AppleScript to suck documents back into the Mac for Time Machine.

Getting to this point has been pretty time-consuming and also expensive if you add up all the software above.

Whatever dude. Are you trolling?

If you need your so called "basic office capability" go buy MS Office for Mac and you're done. No productivity lost. Or you could download OpenOffice for free. It's nearly 100% compatible with MS Office.

Y'know. We use 'Word', 'Power'Point and Excel at our school.

Seriously, how many beatings do people have to take before they finally bin this dinosaur Office suite into the clunky unusable bin? It's a NASTY piece of crepe.

iWorks is simple, elegant and extremely easy to use while not lacking in much capability. It's like coming up for air after using Word..which I rate as next to unusable.

Speaking from 'just typing' stuff perspective...I don't have arguments with paperclips, objects remaining rooted and bouncing around a page in an unexplained fashion, don't have a new interface which is obtuse but 'hey, looks like apple's aqua...', don't have clutter, don't have to data mine for simple functionality...from the bloated feature sprawl, don't have to get frustrated in general with Word's 'PRESUMPTIVE' behaviour...which is extremely irritating.

Sure, if, you use this everyday and you 'know' how to use it (folks, it's just a bloody word processor and M$ can't even get that right!) then ok, you've got Stockholm syndrome.

Design wise, iWorks is streets ahead. And Apple can keep adding functionality bit by bit without compromising that design.

Word is a turkey shoot. It aint pretty.

With the pending iPhone, App Store, iSlate and the following iWork for the 'Cloud', M$'s reign at the top of the pile is at the beginning of the end.

Lemon Bon Bon.

Remember when Apple Mac fans worried that M$ might pull the plug on Office for Mac?

Go right ahead, M$...we dare ya...

*Looks bothered. (Dripping sarcasm.)

Lemon Bon Bon.

Sorry for your unfortunate experience. I use MS Office for Mac at the office no less, and it has never mangled any document anyone has sent to me. Even complex forms open fine, and their usability is about as good as Office for Windows (which isn't saying much). If you have Office '08 then you could run into an issue with the missing VB script, which is why I run Office '04 and won't upgrade until MS puts it back in.

BTW, if you need to run Win, then Parallels & WinXP works much better than what you tried.

I've noticed many posts here indicating an interest in drawing programs. There are many good solutions on the net for raster and simple vector graphics. I dint want to highjack this thread to list out those.

What I do want to mention is the addition of a "CAD" like program to iWorks. I put XAD in quotes because I think Apple could put a modern twist on the concept to make the app far more useful than the standard CAD program. The sad reality is there are lots of drawing programs out there and as such Apple really doesn't need to offer anything at the simple end. However when it comes to opening AutoCad .dxf files or creating them or PDFs there are far fewer options and even fewer low cost ones. That when today 2 & 3D wire frame CAD is old hat tech. Mind you I'm not talking about competeing with the $1000+++ CAD programs in features or capabilities. Rather I want to be able to open and edit the mechanical drawings often found on the net for various engineering components. Most of the times theses are simple 2D dimensioned drawings. The ability to create such drawings is also required.

What we really are talking about is a product that competes with AutoCad Light and Adobe Illustrator but frankly does not need the complexity of either. The idea would be to deliver maybe 80% of the features at a far more reasonable price.

The flip side of this is that as iWorks natures there is less development, that is useful, that can take place on the core line up. A good professional quality drawing program can go a long way improving the line up.

IMPORTANT NOTE: the support of AutoCads dxf format is extremely important due to the lack of low cost support on the Mac for those data files. However I'm nit talking about a program that is focused in CAD in the traditional sense. It needs the ability to handle CAD quality drawings but also needs the rapid expressiveness of a "drawing" program. If this sounds like wanting the best of both worlds then you understand what I'm asking for.



Dave