While most of Steve Jobs’ presentation during last week’s press event in Cupertino was focused on the new iMac and iLife’08, I found iWork’08 to be the real gem. Just contrast iWork with iLife and you’ll quickly understand why iWork is where you should put your money first.
iLife is a true consumer application suite that I see many consumers growing out of quickly. It is very easy to get started with any of the iLife application and get some initial gratification in getting photos organized, a small song composed or a movie rendered. However, as you get hooked and want to go deeper, you’ll sooner or later switch to a prosumer application. I never even adopted iPhoto, Garageband did not prove to be sticky and iWeb locks me into .Mac and does not allow me to grow. The only application I still use occasionally is iMovie.
Contrary to iLife, iWork is not a suite of “starter apps”. There are easier ways to write some text, calculate some numbers or manage a list. Fortunately, iWork has enough functionality to not having to abandon it as my requirements become more sophisticated. Plus, Apple targeting iWork at the prosumer rather than the business person (like MS Office) provides for a welcome balance of ease-of-use with functionality. Indeed, I was most sceptical about its functionality, so I converted some of my advanced Excel (complex multi-sheet calculations with graphs) and Powerpoint (multi-build slides, heavy animations, images and clips) files to iWork. The result was much better than expected — basically, it converted all of them without barely a hitch, leaving me with 98+ percent of the files intact, working, functional and ready to expand. In Numbers, even the most complex formulas were preserved. Only macros would not run, since Visual Basic for Applications is not supported. My multi-build slides worked perfectly and my “foils” looked and behaved the way they were supposed to be.
Since some iWork users complained about its performance: All three iWork applications seemed zippy and performance was good overall on my MacBook Pro (2GB of memory).
There are three things that you should be aware of before adopting iWork — none are showstoppers, though:
- While iWork can import MS-Office files, including Office 2007, not surprisingly, it cannot write back to Office files. If your clients want to see Excel sheets and Powerpoint slides from you, you might have to stay on Office or find a 3rd party converter (not sure one exists, though).[Editor: One kind reader responded - iWork contains an Export function that can be used]
- Interestingly, iWork stores its output as a folder, rather than a file. E.g., a complex presentation shows up as a folder called XYZ.key, with all the individual elements comprising the presentation stored in the folder. This makes emailing a presentation harder. I don’t know whether you can email a folder in iMail, but for Thunderbird, I had to go into the Finder and zip the folder before being able to email it.
- When converting Excel spreadsheets, Numbers looses all conditional formatting information, since it does not support that feature. This might not be a big deal, but it is for me, since I’m a heavy user of conditional formatting.
Overall, at $79 for each iLife’08 and iWork’08, there’s no question to me what I’ll spend my money on. I’ll spend only $79 — on iWork’08.
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