“In the workplace, Microsoft Office is as inevitable as drawn-out meetings and bad coffee. But Microsoft’s combination of Word, Excel and PowerPoint is not the only way to write, crunch numbers or prepare slideshows. And for home users, it isn’t even the best way anymore,” Rob Pegoraro reports for The Washington Post.
“Two of these Office alternatives are free Web sites that you can use in any new browser: Google Documents and Zoho Office,” Pegoraro reports. “The other, Apple’s $79, Mac-only iWork ’08, is a traditional program that incorporates some refreshing changes to the standard productivity bundle.”
“Apple’s iWork ’08 outdoes Microsoft Office most notably by helping you make more use of the information already on your computer,” Pegoraro reports. “Apple has also made these features easier to discover than the tools in Microsoft Office…”
“iWork’s Numbers program is the most fascinating part of this bundle. There hasn’t been a new spreadsheet program in years, much less one that could be described as ‘fascinating.’ Numbers ditches the traditional, intimidating graph-paper look and instead invites you to mix multiple tables, slick 3-D charts and graphics on a single page,” Pegoraro reports.
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Whit” for the heads up.]
I ditched MS Office/Entourage yesterday in my law office for iCal, Mail, Address Book, Pages, Keynote, and Numbers.
Except for a legal forms program that only runs under Windows/Parallels, I’m MS free….
re:rsbell
I feel your pain. I have gotten rid of all MS ties in my office except for havig to use Autocad under Windows/Parallels. I would pay double for Autocad to run it native on my Apple to get rid of MS all together. They had once talked about doing in in 2003 but nothing.
Dorks. For me the best thing about Microsoft Office is that the cubicle experience is conveniently brought home because I have Office installed on my Dell at my house. The zillions of helpful square buttons and that bouncing paper clip thingy never leave me and I couldn’t be happier.
What I don’t get is how you MAC lemmings go home to a Microsoft-free computer. What the hell do you do? Can MACs get on the internet? Do you have to get a cup of coffee while you wait for your namby pamby toy spreadsheet software to make a 3D chart?
Your potential. Our passion.™
I know you’re joking, ZT, but what ‘cubicle’ would that be then? (And I don’t even want to hear about the ‘experience’.)
I don’t plan to buy office 2008 once I get the new OS and iWork on all of my Macs.
Other than that, don’t feed the trolls.
Has anyone used Excel 2007. I head horrid things about it and great things about numbers.
I’ve had the misfortune to see the whole Office 2007 debacle first hand. We are sticking with 2003 at work.
Once again (opinion), what the hell where they thinking?
OMG, everyone taking Zune Tang at face value: LEARN IRONY. And you call yourselves Mac users. For shame!
A Zune Tang classic, “the cubicle experience” .
lol
Nice, Originalrecipes. No argument here. BTW, I might take the rest of the day off if you’re monitoring the MAC psychobabble today. Good stuff.
Your potential. Our passion.™
Error in the article:
“[iWork] can also save [documents] as read-only PDF files…”
Actually, the PDFs created by iWork are fully modifiable by any software designed to modify PDFs. No security is implemented on documents created by iWork.
If you want to make them read-only you can do that with Acrobat, for example, but it’s not the default state.
“easier to discover than the tools in Microsoft Office” didn’t he mean “easier to discover than the tools at Microsoft.”
Office 2007 is sweet. Ribbons rule (as well as the keyboard shortcuts now available for every single function). Anyone knocking Office on the basis of older versions should really try it.
I am looking forward to trying iWork08 on my MacBook Pro though, for a blow by blow comparison.
@Brit and twodales,
I can clear this up. Zune Tang is referring to my testicles. I don’t know what experience he is talking about unless he talked to his sister Pune about this past weekend.
(emoticons not working on my POS HP I use at work)
OK. My keyboard smiley got turned into that thing. Oh well.
um…where did the post from originalrecipes and I go?
And, yes, they are square.
Although I haven’t used it in years, Ragtime was/is the most integrated set of applications I have ever seen. As good as iWork is, Ragtime is much better. Too bad the marketing has been spotty ever since it was introduced in the US in the mid 1980s. Performance on Mac of that vintage was beyond outstanding. I’ve often wished that Apple would acquire the rights to Ragtime and improve on its interface, because frankly the learning curve for such a full-featured suite as Ragtime is a bit steep.
Ironically, it the first spreadsheet for the Mac 128 was by Microsoft. “MultiPlan” was pretty sweet, with the ability to link charts, generate some useful graphics, etc. I actually have fond memories of that program and haven’t seen anything that comes close since “Numbers.”
feelyour pain…
AutoCAD? eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeewwwwwwwwwww
Why on earth would you WANT to run that counter-intuitive, bloated, over-priced POS?
Poor sap!
Check out VectorWorks! It’s actually fun to use! They just released a new version today!
http://www.vectorworks.net
I would dump Office tomorrow, but reality’s a bitch. iWork still can’t seemlessly open all the Office files I receive from work. Doubt it ever will.
Numbers needs to be optimized. I keep trying to use it, but a lot of my work involves importing large text or csv tables into a spreadsheet, and Numbers is dog slow at this, especially if the number of values is large. Excel running under Rosetta on my MacBook Pro beats Numbers hands down for speed. What gives Apple?
Numbers looks great, but so far for me its not usable. I don’t understand why a new program should be so slow?
Why do MS trolls insist on monitoring and posting on a site that is so obviously NOT related to what they like??
Are they mad? Are they paid? Do they have nothing better to do?
Answers from idiots like OriginalRecipe or Zune Tang (..forget irony btw ZT is plain stupid) would be welcomed….
Anything to offer guys??!?
Oh yeah all that hype and no equation editor.
Equation editors have been around since WordPerfect for DOS (yeah remember that M$ OS). So, they are not specialized or boutique items. iWork should have an equation editor. No I am not going to learn TeX or put up with the short coming of the iPhone or iPod touch. As always Apple has to release a complete product before I put down my cash. I am still aching over the 1 grand+ I put into my Newton. And my wallet has long term memory. But I am buying iLife ’08. That rocks.
Apple wants me to buy iWork..great I downloaded the 30 day trial it is a well written and robust software suite…where is my equation editor? Apple wants me to buy an iPhone or iPod fondle…excellent products both, show me the hard drive. If not I spend $169 and get a PSP and have movies, music and better games, with expandable memory and a consumer replaceable battery.
Just my $0.02
Excel 2007 has nice improvements in pivot tables and especially pivot table formatting. Hopefully Excel 2008 for the Mac has similar improvements in pivot tables so I can again keep the majority of my work on the Mac side.
I like Numbers, but I need pivot tables which Numbers does not yet have. Numbers also needs other features to catch up to the current version of Excel such as the ability to do conditional formatting based on a formula. It now does conditional formatting based on static values. Or, should I say, conditional coloring? The “formatting” options are only cell fill color and font color.