iWork 08 - Page 2

I've just tried to export some of the included templates with a few adjustments that I've made. With one very small change in test format (i.e. added brackets to one word which can be deleted) it worked flawlessly. I am going to purchase my copy of iWork '08 and rid myself of MS altogether. I find many keyboard shortcuts thesame thoughout all other Apple applications which is also a big plus!!

I think the target market is designers who need good looking sales presentations and only lightweight number crunching. Our CFO said it's good for 'creative accounting' (as a joke). Everything I've tried so far worked perfectly - importing and exporting Excel, and it is pretty fast on the quad 3.0s.

Something minor I hadn't noticed until just now:

Plant your mouse cursor in (or at the end of) any word in Pages and hit "escape." Pages will offer dozens of words in a floating menu for completing the word you've selected. It's a lot like how Japanese word processors allow you to select from multiple kanji selections when you type out a word in hiragana. Did Pages always do this?

I wonder what designers are going to use the statistical functions?

Me, 2 semesters of Statistics, but very Excel-centric. Haven't checked it out in Numbers. Does it work the same?

That's an OS/X feature, it's not Pages specific. Try it in Text Edit, Mail, anything basically, it'll do the same thing.

Gamrin, thanks for the clarification. Sounds like this is the iWork package for me.

MS may never see my hard drive again.

IMPRESSIVE...

iWork 06 took up 1.2gb of hard drive space... iWork '08 takes 687mb...

How did they add a 3rd application (numbers) and cut the HD space required nearly in half? MS could NEVER do that!

~ Keynote '06 = 1.15gb
~ keynote '08 = 282.7mb

I am impressed ~ although I do think that Keynote '06 moved a little quicker on some things.

It doesn't open every Word document correctly. It also doesn't open every RTF document without format loss either. Now, I can say that this is because I have a custom header in each file, which I had to make in both MS Word 2003 and Nisus Writer Pro which I have come to love. However, Pages is quickly taking me by the hand. Pages is nice and I may have been the biggest critic when it came out but this time, they have a better grasp of what is going on in Word Processing. My brother and I may be switching but I don't think Corporate America people will be ditching MS Office just yet.

One last thing. I have had some unexpected program crashes with Pages too. Usually when working with iPhoto.

This may sound really out there, but I wish Apple would make a PC version of iWork also, and then give both the Mac version and PC version away for free. Why free? Because it would make a serious dent in how many people buy MS Office. In fact, why would most people buy MS Office ever again? Apple would gain big time market share in office suite software and also in mind share. If people run mainly Apple iWork, why should they buy a PC in the first place?

If I were Apple, I would gladly trade the money from iWork sales for market share in Office suite software. Apple has like 15 billion cash on hand. They can easily trade a few million for market share.

This would seriously hurt Microsoft and in fact, give Microsoft back exactly what they did in the browser wars. Give software away for free. However, Microsoft can't haul Apple into court as a monopoly.

However, I think Microsoft may try to retaliate but I think Apple could get an ace up it's sleeve itf it bought Adobe. Why, because Apple could threaten pulling Adobe off the PC if Microsoft did anything in retaliation. Talk about the big guns firing broadsides!

The other thing Apple really should do is sell OS X for PCs. I know everybody says no way but here is why. Apple would still get a nice profit off every copy sold and MS would sell far less copies of Vista. What would MS do to earn money - sell more Xboxes? They are losing billions on it currently. Microsoft's stock would plunge and the press would start writing articles about Microsft being doomed. People would flee MS and flock to Apple.

Again this is giving MS back its own medicine. MS can cry all it wants but they couldn't haul Apple into court for being a monopoly. Apple needs to leverage their advantage and attack MS hard right now. Being in business is not just about creating the best hardware and software possible; it is knocking off competitors who steal away sales and profits away that allow one to create in the first place.

I truely think Apple wouldn't get too lazy at the wheel. While I think MS just sees software and computers as a vehicle to make money, Apple creates products because they want better tools to do their work - the money is secondary. That is why market share has never been the goal for Apple.

Buty this needs to change. Apple should go on the attack now. Buy Adobe, give away iWork, sell OS X for PC, and buy up any other software product that has a lion share in its domain. Apple can do this and stun everybody. The press would be all over this and that is worth millions in free advertising.

And don't tell me how hard it would be to support OS X on Windows. After all, the OS is already written; it just needs new drivers and such. However, many of the devices that need drivers already work with OS X. I'm not saying it is totally easy but it is not that hard.

I really doubt Apple would lose sales of hardware either. Theoretical lost sales would be gained back eventually when the user ends up buying Macs in the future. After all, once a user switches, they hardly ever go back. Also, I wonder how much profit Apple makes off each Mac anyway. It can't be that much more compared to the profit margins it would make selling OS X for PCs.

So iWork '08 finally allows Apple to go on the offensive. I say "Seize the day."

Yes! In our 50/50 Mac/PC environment people are always asking me how to do something or other in Powerpoint. They usually can't do what they want in PPT but if they had a Keynote viewer, they could create it on their Mac and send to the client with a link to a viewer download.

Is this including everything iWork installs in Library?

This sounds almost too good to be true.

I'm a research student, doing lots of work in APA format, etc. with lots of tables. Everybody uses Word (of course). Is iWork something that would help me, or will the passing-around of documents to Windows-centered colleagues, etc. slow me down too much because of exporting issues?

If this issue can be confirmed, then can you save some room on the bandwagon for me?

Keynote '06 is actually 115MB once you remove the extra languages and Pages is 163MB. Also, Pages '06 had two sets of templates that were basically the same in English.lproj/templates. I just left the ISO one and it still works fine.

I just hope they do this with all their apps in Leopard so that I don't have to clean up after them.

Pete, honestly, I made an MLA formatted template in about five minutes. It was foolishly simple (though I disagree with how Apple makes you jump through a few too many hoops to modify pagination as necessary for MLA format). Chances are you can make an APA formatted template in a similar span of time. I haven't toyed around with tables in Pages and Word documents. I literally do *all* my layouts in InDesign. I refuse to try to use shorhorned page layout functions into a word processing program... unless they're freakin' awesome. Though I'm sure Pages can make those tables easily, I don't know how well they'll export (if at all) to Word. Has anyone else out there tried exporting tables?

As far as getting others with Word to be able to read your documents, I honestly think you'll be fine (though I can't remember if APA uses footnotes and I haven't tested exporting footnotes from Pages to Word and vice versa yet). Just think of exporting to .doc format like a different version of "Save As." It's not at all complicated or time-consuming. As far as opening .doc documents, Pages does that just fine, at least in my experience. Complex documents, as others have mentioned, may lose a bit of formatting, however. In my case, though, 100% of my documents have been opened and modified back and forth between Pages and Word with no loss of information or formatting. Just remember that if you make any changes to a Pages document (or, say, a collegue's Word document) that you want others using Word to be able to read later on, export it, don't save it. It's too bad there's no key command in Pags for exporting. InDesign has one. o.O

And lastly: Pages is just a joy to use. It doesn't lock up for five seconds when I delete a paragraph, it's much more space friendly (once you hide the relatively useless toolbar), and it costs much less. I simply haven't been as impressed with a piece of Apple software since Apple bought SoundJam and turned it into iTunes.

I've used the export to Quicktime presentation for displaying Keynote's on Windows PC's a number of times. In the Windows version of Quicktime, you can run it just as a presentation, with clicking through the slides and all. In fact going back a slide actually reverses the animation, something that Keynote doesn't do itself.

CONS: With a lot of animations and such, it takes a LONG time to export and creates a LARGE file. Also, there is a loss of quality on the PC side, but in most situations, your average, low-quality conference room projector won't even show a difference. Finally, it can be a bit of resource hog on the PC you're running it on.

You can assign key commands for any cocoa application, including Pages, in System Preferences >Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard shortcuts. Scroll to the bottom of the list and choose Application Keyboard shortcuts for All applications or select Pages.

There's also no presenter notes or viewing next slide. It's just not good enough, a windows player would be great.

I write reports all the time which contain lots of statistical analyses. For the most part I use JMP and Office 2007 Excel with Q1 Macro add ins on my Wintel. I will check out Numbers in the next few weeks but I think it will be too low power for what I do. Hope I'm wrong. I'd love to have something usable on my Macs (I don't use the Mac versions of MS Excel or Word anymore---there just O-ful).

I spent about 5 minutes on this. Just for demo purposes of course

Funny cause Keynote '06 is 198.6MB on my computer.

You're truly living up to your username here, this idea completely appeals to my attitude, you are a bit of a genius me thinks.

What's really, really confusing me is the fact that iWork '08 doesn't comes free on new Macs.

If you search Apple's iLife page, it says that it'll cost $10 dollars to upgrade a system that didn't come w/ iLife '08 as long as you bought it on August 7th.

http://www.apple.com/ilife/uptodate/

So? Numbers doesn't seem to offer an ability to protect cells? What a blunder if true.

It's default graphs are as bad as Excel. You'd think Apple would do better?

Someone at Apple read this book please.

Can't find a way to make supper or subscript in titles of graphs.

One nice thing about Excel is that you can get the help on a function by clicking it's hyperlink right in the spreadsheet. It's like Apple copied the worst and not the best.

Played with iMovie and Keynote today (more the former than the latter) and found an oddity in the pro-level of the apps: the add narration function on iMovie is far superior to that of Keynote.

Keynote allows recording for the entire presentation, but does not include recording level, mic settings or an of the goodies that iMovie does.

The free-floating windows are also beginning to look old; I think they should create an all-in-one layout that would work better.

Just a couple of thoughts.

I spent several hours yesterday playing with Numbers. It took some time to adjust to the idea that the tables and charts are freely movable objects on any given sheet. Not that I think it's a bad idea, just that it is different to the Excel layout which I have been used to using for the past decade.

I used it to set up a case-log and started to extract some statistics.



I love the ability to add checkboxes and the pop-up lists. It takes Numbers from just a spreadsheeting program to a lightweight database program. As the months go by and my number of cases rises into the hundreds, it will be interesting to see how well Numbers handles the many entries and just how deep I can mine the data.

So far: two thumbs way up!

With the hell that Apple is receiving for iMovie, good news about Numbers is probably very welcome.

I created something far more basic just to play around with the sliders and jumpers, which both worked very nicely, and the instant changes to the graph were great. It indeed was fun. If I had only had it 16 years ago when I started my first business!

Completly agree with this - found it to be really useful & easier/more friendly than Excell so far!

One thing I am struggling with in numbers is excells freeze pane - can this be done with numbers?

Thanks

You can do the same thing in Excel only better. You can do SQL queries in Excel that will automatically update when the data changes in the cells.

I use it to auto-fill information in excel forms that I created. Then when I modify the database I have excel update its information and compare to the data in the spreadsheet.

Numbers has a long long LONG way to go to catch up to Excel.

The documentation of the random number generator is incomplete. It generates random numbers between 0 and 1? That tells me almost nothing.\

I just tried to send feedback on RAND can got a 404 when I submitted.

Why does the MacBook page say it comes with iLife '06 ?

That's normal for a random number function. Multiply it by 100 and you've got a random number from 0 to 100.

eg. 0.567293 * 100

Make it an integer if you want ie. =INT(RAND() * 100)

You can also use =RANDBETWEEN(0, 100) which will always give you an integer between 0 and 100

Useful, although slightly dangerous in the wrong hands.

Somewhat disturbingly, I've just noticed Numbers doesn't have an Applescript interface at all. Both Pages and Keynote do, but not Numbers. I was hoping they would have had a script function in Numbers to do what you'd do with VBA, Applescript or SQL in Excel. Hmmm. Maybe that's one for Numbers v2.

You haven't installed all the templates with all the languages and you're not counting the stuff in your /Library/Application Support folder perhaps.

aegisdesign is dead on. Random number generators almost always, in my experience, return [0.0-1.0]. What more did you want to know??


I was going to ask you if you were actually submitting feedback for all of these complaints, or just complaining...

From my perspective, Excel has had 20 years of development. Number has had... 1? 1.5? Maybe 2? The fact that Numbers is, already, heads and shoulders above Excel in the usability dept means I can forgive it for a few odd missing features. (Except lack of AppleScript. That's just... wrong.) I think the strangest bug you found (and it is a bug, IMO) is the super/sub-script issue in Chart Titles. That text field should be editable like any other. I'm also sending feedback on that one, after I confirmed it myself.

As for lockable fields, copy and paste the table over to Pages. It loses much of its editability for formulas, etc, but not data. (You can copy and paste it back to Numbers and get *back* the full functionality - very cool under the covers programming design.) See if that removes editing for formulas, etc.