“Last week, Apple brought out a new spreadsheet program called Numbers, thus completing one of its least-known products: a productivity suite called iWork. The iWork ‘08 suite, which competes with the Macintosh version of Microsoft Office, also includes a word-processing program called Pages and a presentation program called Keynote. The two were upgraded last week. IWork costs $79, about half the price of the lowest-cost version of Microsoft Office, which sells for $149,” Walt Mossberg reports for The Wall Street Journal.
“iWork ‘08 is a nice product, capable of turning out sophisticated and attractive word-processing, presentation and spreadsheet documents. It can even read Microsoft Office documents, whether created on the Mac or on Windows computers, and can save documents in Microsoft Office formats so they can be opened in Office on the Mac or on Windows,” Mossberg reports.
“But iWork simply isn’t as powerful or versatile as Microsoft Office, especially when it comes to word processing and spreadsheets. And it suffers from a design that places far more emphasis on making documents look beautiful than on the nuts and bolts of the actual process of writing and number-crunching,” Mossberg reports.
“If you’re a Mac user with basic word-processing and spreadsheet needs, and a strong emphasis on design, iWork is good choice, especially if perfect compatibility with Microsoft Office isn’t a high priority. But for office-suite users more concerned with function than form, I’d recommend sticking with Office,” Mossberg reports.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: What Uncle Walt fails to realize – or perhaps just forgets to mention – is that the vast majority of Mac users (and all computer users, for that matter) would do far better with iWork ’08 than Microsoft Office.
This is a point we are not willing to cede to Mossberg or anybody else because it goes just the same for the Mac vs. Windows PC: the vast majority of people would do far better with a Mac than with Microsoft Windows.
If people used iWork instead of MS Office, they would be faster, more productive, less frustrated, and create far better output. If you need MS Office’s esoteric, obscure features you are in the minority. If you need “perfect compatibility” with MS Office, then you are a victim of lock-in or you’re dealing with someone who either doesn’t know what they are doing, are victims of Microsoft lock-in themselves, or who are, again, in the minority using obscure features.
You should not need Word to read/write a word processing file. You should not need Excel to read/write a spreadsheet file. And, if you have a Mac, you should not even be using PowerPoint.
All of our Excel spreadsheets, including functions (admittedly, they are relatively normal expense, billing, etc. spreadsheets) have been flawlessly converted to Numbers. We do not use Excel. All of our Word documents (admittedly, they are relatively normal business letters, invoices, etc. documents) have been flawlessly converted to Pages (long ago). We do not use Word. And, Keynote wipes the floor with PowerPoint.
We email .pdf first and only bother exporting .xls, .doc, or .ppt files when requested (such requests have all but dried up over the last few years).
Again, while we do respect Mossberg’s opinion, you have to weigh a product’s value based upon the typical user’s needs, not the needs of a relatively atypical few.
Does Apple have more work to do on iWork? Yes, of course. That’s unending. But, Mossberg’s review comes off limiting iWork to too small an audience. Too many people will take Mossberg’s “perfect compatibility with Microsoft Office” comment and “wimpy” hyperbole and mistakenly conclude that iWork won’t work for them. In more cases than not, iWork will work “perfectly” with Office files and perform better for Mac users than Microsoft Office.
iWork is more capable and will work for more users than Mossberg’s review implies.
Hey, don’t take our word for it, iWork can speak for itself. Give Apple’s free 30-day iWork ’08 trial a try and see for yourself.
MDN didn’t criticize Uncle Walt, but Uncle Walt also didn’t criticize iWork. He said that it wasn’t as powerful or versatile as Office. It isn’t. That isn’t a criticism, it’s just a statement of fact.
Apple included the features 90% of users will utilize. If you’re one of the 10% who needs, say, pivot tables or a sophisticated mail merge or an equation editor or footnoting tools, you DO need Office.
10% is a lot of us. I haven’t had enough time with Numbers yet, but I’ve been trying to use Pages for a long time and I keep finding myself going back to Word because Pages just doesn’t cut it for so many things.
Thomas, spot on. Their review of iLife was subjective, treacle covered Apple spooning. It made no mention of any of iLife’s flaws – such as the infuriating way you can’t stop skimming in iMovie, so every time you move your mouse, the play head moves.
Walt’s tried too hard to be objective with this piece and lost sight of who iWork and especially Numbers is really for. Sorry Walt, Numbers is not for bean counters to replace the their megalithic multi-sheet spreadsheets.
iWork is not trying to compete head-on, feature for feature with Office.
iWork is trying to fill the needs of so many folks who’ve for years lamented Office’s feature bloat that were never the features really wanted anyway.
Arguments about whether most users could get by with iWork miss the point for many those of us in WIndoze workplaces. iWork would probably be adequate for my individual needs, but I work in a research environment in close collaboration with others.
Central to this collaboration, as we assemble reports and research papers, is the “track changes” facility in Word. Pages won’t cut it in this respect. And we all have different skills in Excel, and need to sit down at one another’s computers and work through various scenarios. The last thing my colleagues need is to have to learn Numbers in order to work with me.
I’ll say it again. MS Office, for all it’s faults (and it’s not as bad as MDN claims) allows me to keep my precious Mac in my workplace.
I sent Walt a nice letter noting that the one major “business feature” he noted as missing was used by about 42% of business users. Not even half of them used Pivot Tables, and not all of those who used them did so “frequently”. So … maybe 40%-60% of business users – and maybe 90%+ of the non-business users – can get by with Numbers.
15 visitors from MDN to G.L.Horton’s Stage Page in the past seven days.
Thank you all.
“Does misspelling ‘grammar’ make somebody an illiterate idiot in your opinion?”
Yes.
Walt has done his share of Apple-bootlicking/MS-bashing. This article seems to have been written on one of his clearer-thinking days.
A couple of respect points to him for pointing out what the more level-headed of the Mac community already knows.
… and shame on MDN. Don’t you fellas ever get bored of rehashing the same “MDN take” on every article?
Apple:Good//MS:Bad gets boring once you hit the millionth time.
Elegant but Wimpy
That could be Apple’s buyline for a lot of products
The only problem I have with iWork is the same problem I have with Office. They both use proprietary file formats which may or may not work 10 years down the road.
I’m very disappointed that Apple has not adopted Open Document Format. I want to know that the documents I create today can be opened and edited 10 years from now if I need to.
“There’s still no database, still no Outlook or Entourage counterpart.”
I don’t think we’ll ever see this in iWork. Any of these features will be added to OS X in the Address Book and iCal apps. One of the most beautiful aspects of OS X is that one contact database feeds to all the other apps, so you only have to enter contact information in one place. There would be no reason to duplicate it in an iWork app.
I have to agree on the Database app, though.
@Macaday
“Am I alone in being tired and bored of reading what Zune Tang has to say…?”
Yeah, I’m with you. His schtick is growing as old as Camel Milk Drinker
Petra —
What do you use as a Visio replacement? Does it work on a small screen? There are many Cocoa drawing applications, but it seems they all need to open 20 little windows. I would like something with an Apple-type inspector window that does everything from one place. Especially when you can open 2 or more copies of the inspector.
I dumped Office 2 years ago.
It’s not polished and bloated with issues.
I have since used NeoOffice.
Though not perfect, it is FREE, and has more then FILLED the missing MSOffice app.
I MORE then welcome iWORKS… not yet purchased… cos there is many FREE alternatives.
AbWord, Bean, even TextEdit are all capable of doing MS Word stuff for me…
AND NOTONE client has even thought that I my not be using MSOffice.
die MSOffice die
Suggested change to Numbers: Numbers assumes that you might have several spreadsheets on a single canvas. So when it’s converted to Excel, it adds a front page as an index to all the other pages. My suggestion is that if you only have one spreadsheet on the canvas, then drop the index page. It’s useless. I end up exporting my Numbers doc to Excel, and then opening it in Excel do delete the useless index page, then sending it to my customer.
@ Jeremy
Lastly, I would like to agree with those that are saying that the MDN folks are going a little overboard with the “fan-boy/girl” stuff. I like the site, I come here every day, many times a day and read all the stories and comments and then read the actual linked stories, so you can’t say I am not familiar with things.
That being said, the kind of “OMG! Everyone that doesn’t like Apple products is an idiot!” stuff like we see above just makes for an unprofessional and silly experience.”
Unfortunately, that is the reason I quit coming here everyday. MDN is no longer about “news” at all, it’s just a bunch of fanatical fanboy rants. I can not however point he finger at just MDM, all the so called “rumor” site have similar posts…..
I suspect 95% of the posters here are 15 year old snot nosed kids who have no idea what a spreadsheet even is. When I read about the so called “80/20” rule, I crack up… Trust me, EVERY PERSON in my floor know what a pivot table is for Christ sakes…
Steve Jobs could sell a piece of shit for $600 and the posters here who not only buy it, but post 3 pages of praise about how the shit was higher quality than comes out of Bill Gates Ass…
Unlike most read-only documents, spreadsheets are OFTEN needing to be edited by the reciever. I send a budget to a customer. He can edit the % of multipliers to see what the final number would be with small changes. He does not want a 4 page pdf spreadsheet that he cannont edit without typing it all in.
My goal is 100% Microsoft free. And MSOffice 2004 is not Intell native, so it is slower and sucks up RAM. (My experience has been that non-native programs are more likely to be memory hogs– like my old Filemaker.
I will use Numbers when I can. But when I am exchanging data with my customer, I need it to be editable by both of us.
>DLMeyer wrote: Not even half of them used Pivot Tables, and not all of those who used them did so “frequently”.
Many seem to miss this about having the proper tool available exactly at the moment you need it.
Since it’s there, you can get your work done and move on to something else. When it’s missing, you waste time trying to find it and then waste even more time trying to work around it.
—–
>So … maybe 40%-60% of business users – and maybe 90%+ of the non-business users – can get by with Numbers.
That’s a lofty goal… to get by rather than to excel. Pardon the pun.
Buy iWork. Get by.
—
Poor Walt. I’m sure the deluge of complaints about one of his more centered articles was enormous.
“Anyone that needs Word for grammer checking is an illiterate idiot in my
opinion.”
Macaday are, you; shure about – that?
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I abandoned Word when so many of its esoteric features got too smart for their own good and got in the way. In Windows, I switched to Wordpad / RTF mode, and use Textedit + Pages on the Mac. Output is PDF almost exclusively.
I continue to use Excel on both platforms for its pivot tables and lookup functions, but willl definitely evaluate Numbers on the Mac soon.
What’s missing is an Appleworks database replacement for iWorks. Just like Pages now straddles word processing and DTP, a future Numbers update could toggle between number crunching and personal database modes, which IMHO covers what most people use spreadsheets for.
Sky
Harvey,
Zune Tang is writing satire. Surely you don’t believe that any actual Microsoft fanboy would pick a handle like that?
-jcr
Harvey,
Zune Tang is writing satire. Surely you don’t believe that any actual Microsoft fanboy would pick a handle like that?
-jcr
Harvey,
Zune Tang is writing satire. Surely you don’t believe that any actual Microsoft fanboy would pick a handle like that?
-jcr
Harvey,
Zune Tang is writing satire. Surely you don’t believe that any actual Microsoft fanboy would pick a handle like that?
-jcr
Now that Rupert “The Reptile” Murdoch has taken over the
WSJ, it will be interesting to see what sort of things Mr.
Mossberg writes. The reptilian one has a history of taking over
a paper, saying he’s not going to touch its style and editorial
content, wait a year or two, and Voila!–instant right-wing, tabloid
Scheiße. I give Walt two years max before he’s shown the
door…or made to write only MS-friendly propaganda.
Apple comes to the table looking great but is just too weak with iWork. Also, AppleTV sucks. But love my Mac.
Yez I is shore that the Mak iz the best Komputa Eva. I dont kneed know grammer or speling chek.