iWork 08 - Page 3

Will I need to buy MS Office 2008 or not?

I'd like to be able to do reports using Pages, but I heard it only word counts the entire document, not selections...amongst other things has the range of options been improved in the new version?

And (off topic), will iLife 2008 come with the Leopard or will I have to buy it separately?

iLife comes with new machines, not OS upgrades, so yes, you'll have to buy it separately.

Gosh I don't know? Maybe it would be useful, in some situations, TO KNOW WHAT STATISTICAL DISTRIBUTION THEY ARE PULLING THE NUMBERS FROM!!!!!!!!! Uniform? Poisson? Normal? Gaussian (ha ha)? My Ass?



As far as locking cells. There are companies that have lost millions because someone didn't lock a cell in Excel. There are people that have actually been killed because someone did not lock a cell in Excel. Locking cell is that important.


Apple is off to a bad start. We have an Excel clone where all the stuff that's good about Excel is not there and all the stuff that sucks about Excel is there.

Negativity! What a way to start my morning on a holiday! (Today is a big holiday in Japan)

A bad start was originally creating iWork with no spreadsheet of any kind (iCouldn'tWork); that has been fixed.

Numbers '08 is a Version 1.0, but a very welcome and major one at that. Sure, it has some growing to do, but it IS now available, and so some users, but not all, have a new option. It would be an amazing feat of design for the first release of a product to be perfect.

Anyone using Numbers should provide Apple with feedback so that the app can be improved and then more people can be happy with it.

BTW: Numbers is so radically different from Excel that it cannot be called a clone. I actually think of it more as a further extension of an element of Pages.

Does Pages have language support? I mean I am studying French and it's really useful to have not only a French spell-checker but also grammer checker, it helps a lot when you're writing in a foreign language! Word has pretty good language support so can someone tell me if you can do the same in Pages???

PS I tried downloading the trial but I keep getting "codec overun" messages...It's sh*tting me to no end.

Clone? *looks around* What app are you using, because it's not Numbers...

If you wanted an Excel *copy*... just go buy Excel. Really. I think Numbers is a great new direction to take in usability, but again... it's a 1.0. If what you need or want is Excel (which I think is a pretty horrid app), then it's out there for you.

For my money, the biggest 'sucks' feature of Excel is the UI. Thank god that Numbers didn't clone *that*. The rest is simply ensuring that particular features are added. But if you screw up the general UI approach, you're pretty much screwed no matter how many features you throw at it.

Wow! That is sweet! So, you're telling me in Pages the formulas in the table will remain working and update as you change the data?

Or just that they remain in the table albeit un-functioning until you copy back to Numbers?

I've got to go try this now!

But it's the same bad fscking graphs that Excel has. AHHHHHHH!!!! KILL ME NOW!


Do an x-y plot and ponder why on earth you would include the horizontal grid line and not the vertical OR why you wouldn't get rid of both? They only reason can be because Apple copied Excel.


I know a lot of you guys are graphics artist but I'm a data artist. I live for data analysis. Numbers is barely an amature level of data analysis.

I looked at the "science" example. Style over substance. They are even double counting in the BS histogram they setup. A stupid picture of plans growing? I'm sure the height of the plan in the graphic has no correlation to the averages in the tables.

At least they didn't use a pie chart.

Yup.

Apple did a brilliant trick under the hood - the tables in Pages and the Intelligent Tables in Numbers are the *same thing*. Just the UI into them is different.

Exactly! And it is always wise to start out with no extra features beyond the very basics and ensure that the basic UI "works" without all the distractions that fancy features offer users. If you think about this is how Keynote began as well and that is now a remarkable app now that is has matured a bit (*sniff* makes me so proud! ). Powerpoint can't even come close.

In fact, Apple seems to have followed this philosophy not only with their applications but also with the OS (remember 10.0?), the iPod, and now is doing the same thing with the iPhone. In the short term, it means not everyone can immediately switch to new products no matter how enticing they may be, but in the long term, it ensures that after 3 or 4 generations you have a product that the competition cannot even compare with.

Just to confirm, counting selections has been added to Pages 08. It's under the Edit menu in writing tools.

Office does the same thing. Nothing "brilliant" there.

Since *when*?

Make a table in Word, copy and paste it into Excel. Does it become a first-class spreadsheet? Or is it a table sitting on top of the spreadsheet grid as an object? Can you refer to cells within it from formulas?

I'm not talking about embedding a spreadsheet from Excel into Word with OLE.

Not a table. You can add tables or spreadsheets in Word. They two are not the same.


Having said that the spreadsheet created in Word are buggy. But I'm also using Office 2000. Our IT department has no plans to update.


I'm talking about the windows version mind you.

Right. And what I'm saying is that the spreadsheets (Intelligent Tables is what they call them, for a reason) in Numbers, and the Tables in Pages are *exactly the same code* under the hood. They unified them. You can move a table from Pages to Numbers, and it automagically becomes a spreadsheet element. You can move a spreadsheet from Numbers to Pages, and it becomes a table, in that it acts like (and you can act on it as) a table, but invisibly retains all the elements of the spreadsheet you imbued it with in Numbers. Edit a number, formula cells update. It's still a spreadsheet. Copy it back to Numbers, and you can edit those formulas again.

Word and Excel do not have that unification of tables and spreadsheets, as you point out, and they are distinct data structures with two completely different implementations. Apple has, correctly, unified them into a single element that can be worked on in different ways. This is an application of the Model-View-Controller software design pattern, which is pervasive throughout MacOS X. That *is* brilliant, because no one else producing an office suite has bothered to put that much thought into it.

This is all good, but what about the languages...

So that is what you do. And now you expect version 1.0 of a consumer spreadsheet app to cater to your needs

Sorry, but I find your expectations of this app to be a bit, well, funny

I for one really like numbers and yes, I also work with large datasets with lots of calculations and the need to create publication grade graphs from data with dimensions up to 1000000 x 20, but it never once occurred to me that numbers might be the app for that. Yesterday I used numbers to create a financial overview for myself and today I'll be happily using igor pro and origin to create graphs...

So can Numbers beat Excel's limit of 65,536 rows? I work in Science and have often needed more than that.

I just tried it, and numbers can't import more than 65533 rows. It gives a warning and truncates larger files. But to be honest I wasn't expecting it to either because it obviously is not meant for needs like these....

I work in (neuro) science as well and can recommend igor pro for working with files like these. It does have a bit of a learning curve but produces great graphs and is very well suited for automating your analysis/graphing needs. I also work with origin, which is a bit more spreadsheet-oriented but windows only and has a 'not-so-intuitive' UI.

That isn't true, entire companies and industries run their businesses on Excel, I have seen a nations weekly lotto results worked out in Excel (I kid you not), worked for insurance companies who's premiums are calculated in Excel macros, seen various business sales pipelines, cash-flow projections, project issue and risk registers and even business to business electronic messaging all using Excel.

It is by far the best part of MS Office and well regarded.

I haven't looked at Numbers yet, its probably good (I like Pages so far), but its not going to kill Excel, not in a millennium of Sundays - and to pick on Excel like that, is a bit out there....

Widely used, I'll grant you. Well regarded???!!! I have not met anyone who does not complain about Excel usability, no matter how much they enjoy its feature-set.

From a purely data processing perspective it's not that bad and is nearly everyone (I know) first choice for data storage/processing. Only when you run into limitations in Excel do you tend to go for more powerful data processing/graphing or statistical packages. I think the limitations in Excel are more due to the Spreadsheet model itself as a method of data storage when compared to a proper database. Access has and always will be a nightmare and is not that intuitive or user friendly. If Microsoft had any sense they should merge/redevelop Excel and Access into a database/spreadsheet hybrid offering the entire feature set of both in a user-friendly fashion.

Of course where Excel and Word both fall down is in their formatting, presentation and organisation and I see this is where Apple is targeting its efforts! I've always kept formating to a bare minimum in Word cause it only ends up making things screwy and inconsistent. Writing a thesis in Word can be a nightmare.

Usually because:
1) it's on their machines
2) it's dictated by their employer
3) well, golly, everyone else is using it, so it must be good

\


Or you realize you can make a buttload of money as an 'expert' and secretly thank Redmond for making it hard to use.


Or make a reasonable database app at *all*, and strip out the DB features from Excel - mashing together grid and DB features into one app has *never* made sense to me. While they superficially look the same, their implementations are utterly different. Tables and spreadsheet grids have much more in common, to be honest.

Now, that's not to say that you couldn't map tabular data to a DB - that's pretty easy to do. What might be truly interesting is to see cells/rows/columns in Intelligent Tables be able to be imbued with DB query/store features that can access backend DBs. Provide a third app to work with the DB elements of the ITs. Copy/paste the ITs from Pages, Numbers, or Datum () depending on how you want to work with it. Of course, better would be something like LinkBack, letting you operate on the *same* IT instance from three different controller UIs, and giving us true linking/embedding, but I'd settle for the copy/paste approach.

ie, unify the back end, not the UI.


No argument here.

This thread is more active than the other iWork thread, so I'm going to repost a question that I had asked over there:


So is the only difference between the two modes that one has the page text and the other doesn't? Or is there something else that I'm missing? Switching a word processing document to a Page Layout could just turn the page text into a text box linked from page to page (which is what it really is, anyway).

And why can't you switch between the two modes, instead of having a document locked into one or the other?

What are you talking about? I can paste cells from Excel into Word and have the link maintained. If I change the numbers in Excel it updates in the Word document. And you can put spreadsheets in Word. How you you even know if they did or didn't use the same code base Do you really think Microsoft would recode it from one to the other?

Your whole premises that Apple made something great that Microsoft doesn't have is wrong. Microsoft had this functionality year and years ago. It's not some revolution from Apple. It may be done better but it aint new.

This is the point -> .

This is you -> u

Notice they're not near each other. Nevermind mydo, you're not getting it.


Nope, still not getting it.

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Edit: Oh hell, let me give it one more shot.

Office supports: Link (embed) Excel spreadsheet into Word document. A spreadsheet in one is the same as a spreadsheet in the other, and use the same implementation. No argument there. That's not, and never was, what I was talking about.

Do the following: Make a table in a Word document. Copy and paste it into an Excel spreadsheet. Does the table *become* a spreadsheet, or does it stay as *solely* a table? It stays a table.

Take a spreadsheet grid, sheet, cell range, what have you, and copy it from Excel into a Word document. Does the spreadsheet *become* a regular old Word table, or does it stay *solely* a spreadsheet? It stays a spreadsheet.

Tables and spreadsheets are *two different things* in Office. They have entirely different UIs, behavior, and implementations.

Now do the above with Numbers and Pages - a spreadsheet (Intelligent Table) in Numbers *becomes* a table in Pages, and vice versa. They are the *same thing*, only a bit of the UI differs. Same behavior and implementation. It's the same data object for a table in Pages and a spreadsheet in Numbers. Same. Office does not, and never has, done this. No one's done this, to my knowledge. Every one has tried to clone Office, and haven't taken a step back and gone "duh, they're both grids/tabular data..." Apple did.

I really don't know how much more clear I can make this, on the umpteenth time through. If you still don't get it, I can't help you.

I'm a high school student, so presentations on crappy school PCs are a must, but I'm getting iWork anyway. Good to know that Quicktime works really well--I'll have to find out for sure that the school computers have it, though.

How big is a 20ish slide keynote presentation with moderate animations? I need to know if I need a bigger memory stick thingy or something like that. x.x

Perhaps it's just me, but I went to export a document I created in Pages '08 to HTML and found they removed HTML as an export option. In the past, HTML was one of the export options. Now only PDF, Word, RTF, and Text are options. Did they change something?

I had to export to a Word document and then use Word to export to HTML.

Please don't tell me they removed the HTML export option from Pages.

And I never said it would kill Excel. I'm saying that for a 1.0 release, it puts Excel (which is on it's 12th release at the very least) to shame.

It's not 'a bit out there' to pick on Excel...Excel is garbage when you think it's had 20 years of development behind it. Tell me it isn't garbage with a straight face...go ahead.

where is cheapest place to get iWork 08? amazon got $4 discount...

i will be getting iLife 08 & Leopard with new iMac once Leopard released

There's something called "Send to iWeb" that wasn't in the old version- but the options were grayed out for me. I don't use iWeb so I couldn't try it. I'm guessing that Send to iWeb as Pages document will convert to HTML.

Right now I have only two real issues with iWork '08. Otherwise, I'm extremely happy with what Apple came up with.

1) When doing bulleted lists, the buttons to move the tab level are not on a toolbar by default.

2) Opening word documents is seamless, but saving them is not. To save the original document back as a word document instead of a pages document, you have to select export. I'd much prefer the export options as a menu in the save box.

I don't feel it's a helpful argument to ascribe the lack of features or functionality to Numbers being a "consumer" software app. Why should Microsoft retain the monopoly on "professional" software across a plethora of industries (my field of education being just a small one of these!)

As Mac users, I think we've waited long enough to break free of the bondage of Microsoft development times. I love Office (but passionately dislike Microsoft) but would so much rather get out from under its thumb in favor of a compatible Apple branded software suite.

As loyal users, it's our responsibility to tell Apple what we need, and to expect they give it to us. We're the customers - so we're always right! They don't have to listen, of course, just as we can choose to continue using Office instead of iWork.

(By the way, I ordered iWork and plan to give it a good try - but I don't plan to justify anything I don't like by saying it was designed for someone other than me!)

Anyone working in my lab that gets caught using Excel will get shot on sight.

Seriously, Excel is not a tool for scientists, and Numbers is certainly not suitable for science. It pains me to see people banging their heads agaist brick walls trying to get Excel to produce professional quality scientific graphs and data analysis. If you want a serious data analysis tool, use somthing like Igor Pro (www.wavemetrics.com) - an app written specifically for scientists. It blows excel out of the water in every single department (especially the user support - I recently found a bug in Igor, e-mailed the company, and they e-mailed me back a fixed version within 4 days!). Other options are Mathematica, MatLab, etc. Anything but Excel (you'll thank me for it)!

Cheers

Rich

I'm very impressed with Numbers so far, it zips along nicely and the table 'styles' are a doddle to use, it usually takes forever to format a table in Excel exactly the way you want it. Excel's days are definitely numbered in our office. Boom boom.

256 columns is the max too. Sucks. Excel '08 will have the ability to go beyond that and for me, that is a deal breaker.


While I somewhat agree with your stance, you can't totally dismiss Excel in the scientific community. I am sure that a lot of people do not need the extreme features offered by WaveMetrics (for example) where Excel is good enough and that is enough to keep people coming back.

True, but most of us are stuck on PCs at work and have little to no say in the software available to us! I'm aware of some of the better graphing programs, was simply asking out of curiosity that's all. There must be a reson Excel is limited to that number (which is 2^16 by the way!)

I just 'bought' iWork today and after experimenting with pages and numbers a bit, I can say that I like it much better than MS Office. This is my first time using iWork ever and I have used Office forever. I was even able to do routine things that I couldn't figure out in Word previously that I did in pages.

I know how you feel.

I had the iwork demo installed for all of 10 minutes. Once I realised that it couldn't open a simple Excel spreadsheet that I use for our household budget (and have used for years), everything was uninstalled. Thanks, but I'll stick with the power of Excel, Powerpoint (although Keynote is nice) and Word (and thus be able to share without converting). iWork is for those who are relatively isolated from other users (or Windows users), although I still struggle to figure out what the average family of four, who could use Pages to do letters and Numbers to track their budget, would use Keynote for?