Don't know. I tried it as an alternative because I've been battling with Word bag of bugs for 48 hours because it freezed before realizing it was just the bloody infamous Grammar Checker of Mister Fat Ass Ballmer that freezed Word. Finally deactivated the damn thing and Word is fine again. Problem is that bug exists since Word 1998 and Fat Ass Ballmer and his goons never corrected it.
Other flaw in Pages : when you create a note, you cannot navigate back from the note to the note entry by clicking on its number, as you can in Word.
I'd have to say as an advanced user of PowerPoint and Word that I prefer Keynote and Pages. They are just way more comfortable and faster to use. Now if I had to do a few complex macros -- sure, I might break out Word -- but it's absolutely horrendous for anything remotely like page layout. Image positioning is a pain in Word and anything complex can get tedious. Word is still better for technical and long documents but, heck if I'm going to get THAT involved, I'll be using Adobe or Quark (still) over Word. Anything to get away from that Ribbon interface which makes the 2008 version and upgrade (I have to use the newer versions at work but wouldn't download them for free if I had to).
Keynote quickly became the standard with convention presentations. Looping a video and laying text over it becomes a very fast "lower third". I'd layer things all the time with basic QuickTime PNG looped videos with transparency. You can instantly tell the text quality and image crispness is sub-pixel and superior to PowerPoint, which kind of looks onscreen like "MS Paint" versus PhotoShop. And that's fairly tragic. Having years of experience in MS apps, after a week of using Keynote I found I could work faster in it. The one little tabbed inspector to do everything just makes getting to tasks easier. There is NO CUSTOMIZING IT -- which is what makes it more useful, not less. Everything is logically placed where you'd expect it once you get used to the way Keynote works.
Numbers still isn't a serious contender in the office to Excel, but for people doing little budgets, invoices and more "creative show-and-tell" spreadsheets, it's more clean-cut. I'm a relative power user on Excel so I can tell there isn't a lot of depth to Numbers, but what is there is so much more useable than Excel. It's hard to explain exactly what it is -- it's the attention to detail I suppose and not over-complicating things. Microsoft also has a bad habit of re-inventing terms using generic words -- so it's impossible to actually search for help items on some Microsoft page layout and function words. Other than mail merge, I can't remember having Help help me in an MS app.
The author would pick Google Docs and the Google Drive app based solely on Docs's ubiquity among internet users.
Wow! Now there is some quality reasoning. Office runs circles around anything offered by Google and is the predominantly used application suite amongst those that need a serious productivity solution. I willing to bet Office is more ubiquitous than Google Docs/Drive.
Really? Office runs circles around Google Docs and iWork? On the iPhone?
Google Docs/Apps efforts have been seeing some significant success lately on the enterprise front. A couple weeks ago the City of Boston announced that all employees would be transitioning to Google Apps joining the States of Colorado and Utah in dumping Microsoft. Today Maryland became the third US state to choose Google Apps for all state agencies. http://googleenterprise.blogspot.ca/2014/01/the-state-of-maryland-goes-google.html
Comments
Don't know. I tried it as an alternative because I've been battling with Word bag of bugs for 48 hours because it freezed before realizing it was just the bloody infamous Grammar Checker of Mister Fat Ass Ballmer that freezed Word. Finally deactivated the damn thing and Word is fine again. Problem is that bug exists since Word 1998 and Fat Ass Ballmer and his goons never corrected it.
Other flaw in Pages : when you create a note, you cannot navigate back from the note to the note entry by clicking on its number, as you can in Word.
I'd have to say as an advanced user of PowerPoint and Word that I prefer Keynote and Pages. They are just way more comfortable and faster to use. Now if I had to do a few complex macros -- sure, I might break out Word -- but it's absolutely horrendous for anything remotely like page layout. Image positioning is a pain in Word and anything complex can get tedious. Word is still better for technical and long documents but, heck if I'm going to get THAT involved, I'll be using Adobe or Quark (still) over Word. Anything to get away from that Ribbon interface which makes the 2008 version and upgrade (I have to use the newer versions at work but wouldn't download them for free if I had to).
Keynote quickly became the standard with convention presentations. Looping a video and laying text over it becomes a very fast "lower third". I'd layer things all the time with basic QuickTime PNG looped videos with transparency. You can instantly tell the text quality and image crispness is sub-pixel and superior to PowerPoint, which kind of looks onscreen like "MS Paint" versus PhotoShop. And that's fairly tragic. Having years of experience in MS apps, after a week of using Keynote I found I could work faster in it. The one little tabbed inspector to do everything just makes getting to tasks easier. There is NO CUSTOMIZING IT -- which is what makes it more useful, not less. Everything is logically placed where you'd expect it once you get used to the way Keynote works.
Numbers still isn't a serious contender in the office to Excel, but for people doing little budgets, invoices and more "creative show-and-tell" spreadsheets, it's more clean-cut. I'm a relative power user on Excel so I can tell there isn't a lot of depth to Numbers, but what is there is so much more useable than Excel. It's hard to explain exactly what it is -- it's the attention to detail I suppose and not over-complicating things. Microsoft also has a bad habit of re-inventing terms using generic words -- so it's impossible to actually search for help items on some Microsoft page layout and function words. Other than mail merge, I can't remember having Help help me in an MS app.
The author would pick Google Docs and the Google Drive app based solely on Docs's ubiquity among internet users.
Wow! Now there is some quality reasoning. Office runs circles around anything offered by Google and is the predominantly used application suite amongst those that need a serious productivity solution. I willing to bet Office is more ubiquitous than Google Docs/Drive.
Really? Office runs circles around Google Docs and iWork? On the iPhone?
Did you read the article?
http://googleenterprise.blogspot.ca/2014/01/the-state-of-maryland-goes-google.html
Interesting. I will look into Numbers. Thanks.