iWork '08

23 Aug 2007 12:01

Although Microsoft Office 2007 offers deeper features, particularly for number-crunchers, Apple's iWork '08 is a strong Mac productivity package and a pleasure to use.

Setup and interface
The system requirements of iWork '08, thankfully, are not too demanding for users of older Macs. You'll need an Intel, PowerPC G5 or G4 machine with a 500MHz or better processor, in addition to a minimum of 512MB of RAM, running OS X10.4.10. Installation took about 10 minutes in our tests.

We like the sparse interfaces throughout the iWork package. Its features aren't as rich as those in Microsoft Office 2007, but iWork also hasn't changed radically from its last incarnation, unlike Office. iWork also covers much more than just the basic productivity tasks offered by online tools such as Google Docs & Spreadsheets or the Zoho suite, so it should be adequate for the vast majority of small-business users.

Pages
Apple seemingly tore a page out of Microsoft Office's book by creating a Contextual Format Bar that displays different features according to your current task. Select a block of text and the bar shows font options. Click on a picture and the bar displays image-editing features. Unlike the contextual formatting Ribbon interface within Microsoft's Word 2007, however, Pages '08 offers no live previews of font and image changes as you hover over them.

Pages '08 also adds Change Tracking, similar to the Track Changes feature adopted many years ago by Microsoft Word. We're glad that Pages gets this treatment rather than the often confusing revision and commenting history offered by the online Google Docs. Plus, Pages integrates tracked changes with those in Microsoft Word files.

Pages includes the usual must-have features for writers such as footnotes, bookmarks, dictionary and thesaurus, as well as tables of content, in addition to integration with charts and functions from Numbers. Pages now detects when you're typing a list and formats bulleted points automatically. We just hope that this won't drive us mad, as it does sometimes in Microsoft Word. Plus, you can integrate Pages documents with an iWeb blog.

There are plenty of page templates for letters, resumes, reports and the like to get started if a blank slate poses too much pressure. Page Layout mode lets you create relatively complex designs without software such as Adobe's InDesign, which is great if you're putting together reports for work. It also lets you layer images on top of images. The Instant Alpha feature, also found in Keynote and Numbers, lets you cut out backgrounds in images without dealing with alpha channels, as in Photoshop. And we prefer Pages' colour wheel, crayons and spectrum to Word's colour options.

Keynote
Microsoft's PowerPoint 2007 may be richer, but Apple's Keynote '08 adds some smart features that PowerPoint lacks. It's also simple to get to grips with. Keynote offers 140 templates for putting together a quick presentation.

New Action Builds let you create basic point-A-to-B motion animation, without needing to deal with motion tweens as in complex apps such as Adobe's Flash. Smart Builds enable animation, such as rotating photographs, using images you can grab from the iLife media browser. There are new between-slide transitions and slide show themes too.

New voiceover recordings enable you to, say, narrate podcasts with pictures — but with few controls. If you mess up a narration, you'll have to rerecord it. At least if that error comes on slide 5 of 10, you can start the rerecording from slide 5 and on rather than from the start.

Numbers
Our early look at the new Numbers spreadsheet reveals ease-of-use novelties that competitive tools don't provide. Microsoft's Excel 2007 is more robust, particularly for number crunchers such as scientists, accountants or engineers. Yet the majority of users who rely upon spreadsheets as one-size-fits-all tools for light office work should be pleased to have a new option for Macs. Apple has succeeded in getting Numbers to help you think outside the grid. With Numbers, you can pop little table grids and pictures onto a blank canvas instead of trying to fashion a canvas from a grid background.

Numbers comes with plenty of templates, including travel planners, business expense sheets and school science lab reports. Of course, it can also save and export Excel-readable files. This application pleases the eye and can make attractive spreadsheets. We dragged around text boxes, images and tables using alignment guides without a hitch. You can add 3D bar, pie and other charts and even integrate maps into a spreadsheet.

The controls for working with tables were extremely user-friendly in our early tests. Slider bars allow you to adjust the numeric values within cells, which is handy if you're looking to add a range of values or make quick calculation estimates. Resizing columns and rows appears to be less of a hassle than with Excel. You can drag data from a file of contacts or into a Numbers table that will automatically partition information into the appropriate columns. And sorting a table smartly leaves the headers alone. Some 150 formulas appear to be the same as those in Excel, but Numbers also has easy-to-find natural language shortcuts for common calculations, such as sums and averages.

The Interactive Print View offers more controls than in Excel, which easily leads to unwieldy spreadsheet printouts. Numbers shows where a stray column might take up an unnecessary extra page. You can eliminate the overlap with a slider bar that instantly scales the tables, charts and images on a page.

On the downside, Numbers doesn't support pivot tables from Excel spreadsheets. If you open these tables in Numbers, the data will remain intact, but they won't continue to pivot. You cannot use Visual Basic macros, either.

Service and support
We found the searchable help menus within iWork '08 to be thorough and to the point, and the video tutorials are good. Forums to interact with other users may be the best source of support. Don't bother trying to talk to someone at Apple for help, as live assistance is unavailable. The lack of personal assistance is common with free web-based applications, but with paid software it makes us feel as if we were left hanging.

Conclusion
Despite the lack of a dedicated email application, the inclusion of Numbers in iWork '08 makes this software bundle a stronger alternative to Microsoft Office for the Mac, which hasn't been updated since 2004. Unlike the iLife '08 multimedia suite, iWork does not eliminate features found in its earlier iteration. Instead, Apple has focused on making text files, spreadsheets and presentations easy on the eyes and hands, both to create and to edit. The fledgling Numbers offers more than enough formulas for the majority of users. That said, workers who lean on heavy-duty spreadsheets for, say, engineering calculations should probably stick with Microsoft Excel.

Story URL: http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/software/productivity/0,1000001108,39288737,00.htm