“The silly things I read about Apple or an Apple product boggle the mind,” Gene Steinberg writes for The Tech Night Owl. “The other day, I ran across a perfectly absurd piece suggesting there was something harmful or nasty about Apple’s iWork software.”
“Now in the real world, Apple has been producing consumer-level productivity suites for years. It dates back to the launch of AppleWorks for the Apple II platform. Mac and PC versions existed ClarisWorks before becoming AppleWorks,” Steinberg writes. “All told, the three iWork apps are actually quite decent overall.”
“Speaking as someone who has used Microsoft’s productivity suite for years — and written a couple of books about it — I can tell you that I do not need all the features available in Office. Most people don’t, and even some businesses can survive on something simpler,” Steinberg writes. “By adding real-time collaboration, Apple has entered Google Docs territory without the privacy concerns.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We haven’t touched Office in well over a decade. Apple’s iWork easily does everything we need (of course, we’re all-Apple here, so iWork offers seamless continuity across all of our devices).
SEE ALSO:
Apple updates iWork’s Pages, Numbers, and Keynote for macOS and iOS – April 25, 2017
Apple makes iMovie, GarageBand, and iWork apps for Mac and iOS devices free for all users – April 18, 2017
Apple iWork vs. Microsoft Office vs. Google G Suite: Your iPad can largely function like a laptop – February 23, 2017
You need the features of Office for compatibility. In the legal profession for instance, countless complex legal documents are created in Word. Pages just chokes on them and spits out unformatted garbage. If Pages worked, they would happily dump the less secure far more expensive Word. So basically the problem is Pages and neither read or write complex Word documents.
Same thing happens with Numbers and Excel. Formatting is a joke. The Mac version of Excel cannot handle the massive spreadsheets that the Windows version handles with no problems and Number cannot handle large spreadsheets from Excel. The more complex the formulas, the more likely Numbers will barf.
Apple’s office suite is great for students and consumers and anyone who doesn’t have a pressing need for 100% Microsoft Office Compatibility.
different strokes (pun), for years I have created massive workbooks filled with conditional and cross links easily with no problem, usually much quicker and elegant than my excel colleagues. iwork targets non geek apple users for which it is perfect.
ps I have little to no problem converting files so long as I prep excel/word users how to use their own software beforehand.
Haha… For years (2008-2013) I taught dozens and dozens of lawyers and paralegals how to convert their WordPerfect document to Word and Pages because it was the MS Office of the legal profession. I would teach them how to fix the formatting that Word destroyed. Six out of ten attorneys I’ve met still run WordPerfect until the last couple years.
Unfortunately, most people don’t work in an all-Apple environment. iWork is great when you are working in an all-Apple environment. But most folks are working in an environment which is mostly Windows, or they have colleagues or friends or relatives who are using Windows. With the exception of Mac users, most people are using Microsoft Office. If someone isn’t using iWork or Microsoft Office, they’re probably using LibreOffice or Google Drive. For those who don’t know, LibreOffice is an open-source office suite, which is able to work with Microsoft Office documents natively – without conversion. For those who don’t know, open-source means that the program’s source code is publicly available so anyone can inspect it for malicious functionality – something you don’t get with proprietary software like Microsoft Office.
And LibreOffice will even open older Office docs that the current version of Microsoft Office can’t.
Pivot Tables – lots of data analysis…. Numbers cannot match Excel in that area… I wish Numbers could, but it’s a toy compared to Excel….
Yes, this is true, but as the article says, most people and even buisinesses don’t use/need that.
Until they do. Some people just don’t know what they are missing by using amateur freebie software.
True enough about complext spreadsheet functions. But Pages is also a toy and still missing basic functionality present in 4.3.
Pages 9 was excellent.
Now I use Word.
Numbers is ok for some things but most people who use a spreadsheet for work will need Excel.
Apple have let things slide. They’re losing users for lots of reasons. They are gaining users too but it’s a different set of users. The geeks are leaving.
And the geeks were Apple’s free sales force.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who has stopped recommending Apple products.
The gold Watch really turned me off. It signified what Apple had become: arrogant and cynical.
Personally, I get the feeling that Apple these day is leaning more towards ‘good enough’ or pushing proprietary tech rather than cajole the user by phasing in disruptive tech while still supporting ‘older’ proven tech like their competitors.
Moved from Word to Pages 5 years ago and love the difference. Pages is FAR easier and with much less overhead. (And I come from a page layout background). Use Pages exclusively now. Love it.
Sorry, the comment of “far less overhead” had me chuckling. By that reasoning, Wordpad using RTF files has far easier and with less overhead and is probably just as useful for most users’ text formatting needs.
Wordpad? Not on a Mac. Perhaps you meant to say TextEdit instead?
Right. Just any simple text editor that can handle RichText format. 😀
Medium level word processing features are still missing. That were once in write on the original macs. What gives
Examples?
Linked Text Boxes!
Without them Pages really isn’t a page layout program and has no business claiming to be one.
When Apple made an entirely new application called Pages, in part incompatible with the previous version, I turned to Nisus Writer Pro and have never regretted. Style control is one of the nicest things about it, but there is much more. Search, for example. And the fact that it uses rtf, so the text will be retrievable even if everyone else stopped supporting it.
Commenting to correct myself: “When Apple made an entirely new application called Pages”. I meant to say: “When they made an entirely new application with the same name as the old one, Pages”.
I actually liked the old Pages a lot. Still, looking back, I like Nisus better.