Where’s Apple iWork’s spreadsheet?

20 years ago

“Let us speculate that Microsoft’s recent decision to formally promise to support Office for the Mac for at least the next five years is not an example of Bill Gates’ altruism,” Garry Barker reports for The Sydney Morning Herald. “Rather, some suppose, it was a device to slow further development of iWork, Apple’s new word processor and presentation suite. This may be totally unfair to Microsoft, and as a long-time user of Office:mac I have to say I find it an excellent suite, worth the money and I would like support for it to continue. On the other hand, some mild surprise was expressed in the more geek-strewn corners at Macworld Expo last month when iWork ’06 appeared without the third component some had expected, a spreadsheet. Rumours, and they are nothing more, suggest that Apple is working on an Excel competitor with a codename of either Cells or Numbers.”

“As we expect from Apple software, iWork ’06 is stylish and stronger than Office in its ability to manage graphics, type and layout… in its second incarnation, Pages can provide pretty much anything average users of a word processor might require, as well as a lot of layout stuff, some of which you might be able to do in Word, but the achieving of which would turn you into a mental pretzel. The package contains 40-odd handsome templates to produce professional-looking, modern or traditional newsletters, flyers and even, I would think, a small magazine,” Barker writes. “Keynote, now in its third version, is a full generation ahead of PowerPoint with many more effects such as the pretty water droplet transition you see in Dashboard and a heap of themes (I detect the influence of iDVD here). Like Pages 2, it can be closely integrated with the iLive ’06 suite so that photographs and video clips can be easily added to a presentation.”

Full article here.

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