eWEEK Labs has published their list of “The Most Important Products of 2007” which includes Apple’s iWork ’08.
“Earlier this year, Apple unveiled iWork ’08—a full-fledged office productivity suite—and reinvigorated the market with distinctive new features that demonstrated that following Office is not the only way forward. The suite’s first-ever spreadsheet application got our vote with its intelligent tables feature, which allows for multiple formats on a single spreadsheet. And its Charts [sic] spreadsheet app and Keynote presentation app score high for providing robust yet easy-to-use features. Finally, the Pages app is now a full-fledged word processing application with a separate mode for layout,” Tiffany Maleshefski writes for eWeek.
Full article here.
While it’s nice to see Apple’s iWork ’08 on eWeek’s list, it is patently ridiculous to not include Apple’s iPhone on any list billing itself as “The Most Important Products of 2007.”
That said, do you really need Microsoft Office? Give Apple’s free 30-day iWork ’08 trial a try and find out for yourself.
I think I will try iWork.
iWork for Vista any time soon???
“And its Charts spreadsheet app and Keynote presentation app score high for providing robust yet easy-to-use features.”
Kind of makes me wonder whether they even used iWork, the spreadsheet application is Numbers. That’s not even something that needs to be researched…
“Kind of makes me wonder whether they even used iWork, the spreadsheet application is Numbers.”
Dave, I am guessing that eWeek is an Equal Opportunity Employer and must hire blonds also.
Articles like this help us Mac users Chart the intelligence of the writers.
They use the same guy that researches for Forrester.
“Apple does not sell replacement batteries for the iPhone. So when the battery dies, so does worker productivity.”
– Forrester “We’re Too Stupid To Look Up Anything” Research
People that think that iWork is going to displace Office are kidding themselves. iWork is fine software, and it is very useful to have. but it does not provide the seamless back-and-forth file format that would allow a user on a mac to easily operate in the windows world (and this is still a windows world). MS office for mac does allow the mac user to peacefully coexist.
iWork is excellent for graphical work – Pages does layout much better than Word; Numbers does graphs much better than Excel; Keynote makes presentations that are more beautiful than Powerpoint. Each of these iWork programs do things differently than the Office programs, which undercuts what is really needed. They are different programs, not replacements.
Once you go Keynote you never go back.
MDN needs to change its tag line from “where Mac news comes first,” to “where Mac news creeps in eventually after the ads.”
I don’t think ads are the problem. I think it is the page design and the excessive use of JavaScript.
Bubbler,
Love the handle (got one myself).
Half-way agree with the comments.
Like iWork. Like Numbers. Pages is not easily shareable as someone found when trying to get out a newsletter recently. PDF had no links. Other export modes could not hold template formatting. Web based didn’t work for others. And it’s still too slow opening.
Good otherwise.
Bubbler, what you say is both totally correct and amazingly misguided. The question isn’t “can iWork replace Office”, it is “where can iWork replace Office”. Maybe 2/3rds of all enterprise desktops can get by with iWork, the question is “which ones”. Much safer to spend the extra cash and be certain. Maybe 10% to 20% can certainly get by with iWork instead of Office. A safe exchange, if those desktops happen to be Macs.
Now. How about the smaller consumer market. Again, maybe 2/3rds can get by with iWork. BUT! Most of those 2/3rds have no problem making the switch. They are not likely to discover a business-critical email attachment that their software can’t properly read. They most likely don’t need any of the many enterprise-specific features left off Pages or “Charts”. If they need to convert to Word format, as my wife regularly does, or Excel format, as I sometimes do, it’s not a problem. I do have to limit the fanciness of my Numbers sheets … a little. Or I can send a .PDF of the page, with a dumbed-down copy of the data.
My point is, most Mac users – most of whom are in the consumer space – can use iWork to replace Office. It matches their uses, their needs, nicely. Mac users in the enterprise space may need Office available even if iWork fills 99% of their daily needs.
Dave
I have iWorks 08 and Numbers has some great features, but I find it is less intuitive than Resolve was or AppleWorks’ spreadsheet application. Simple things like defining the area of a spreadsheet add considerable time to the learning process and it’s likely that Excel users will not take the time to learn how to do basic things and actually switch to Numbers. The Pages and Keynote apps are much more advanced and very usable without a steep learning curve. Still and all, users who don’t already have Office and don’t really need it will be content with iWorks, particularly if they are not heavy spreadsheet users. No doubt Numbers will come in for improvements, which should be added in as updates to the existing package. It would also help if the tutorials could be improved and/or expanded even if the Numbers application is not updated. For most people who just want to turn out a fast spreadsheet and get things done fast, fancy appearances are utterly irrelevant. Speed of learning is what will detrat from Numbers’ usefulness.
Attn: MDN
The thing is a phone. Not the coming of the electric light blub, the internal compustion engine, the wheel, or fire.
Those things actually did change the world. Steve’s phone, while really really cute, did not.
So, unless the list is one ranking the cutest gadgets, the iPhone doesn’t make it.
iWork ’08 is honestly one of the best suite of programs I have ever used. I loved iWork ’06, and sure, Open Office and even MS Office are decent…but nothing comes close to the iWork experience.
Who’d have thought I could be passionate about an office suite?
If only it were available on PC and Linux, all of my computers would be running it
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Cubert wrote: “Once you go Keynote you never go back.”
Ehh, if I need to do a presentation I’ll lay it out in InDesign and show it on screen in Acrobat. Both Keynote and PowerPoint are featureless in comparison.
If I have to sit through someone else’s presentation I’ll just leave the room.
iWork is great, but for long-time Office users, it takes some getting used to. The problem is that iWork is very intuitive, whereas Office, like all MS products, is not intuitive.
I forced myself to stick with Pages and Numbers for a couple months rather than reverting to Office. Once you get used to the way Pages and Numbers do things, your work becomes so much easier to get done in iWork than Office.
Because the upcoming version of Office for the Mac makes Office even less intutive, more people will be pushed by MS into using iWork. In fact, I don’t even know why Apple advertises. They should just give their ad budget to MS to develop more crappy products that will push more people toward Apple products.
It’s a list of products. Not world changing inventions. And nobody has an internal *compustion* engine that I know of.
@Wow Just Wow:
eWeek was rounding up the most important products of 2007, not of all time. For impact, you didn’t have anything much bigger than the iPhone this year.
@Tommy Boy:
“If I have to sit through someone else’s presentation I’ll just leave the room.”
It doesn’t sound like you HAVE to sit through other’s presentations. Must be nice.
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Naturally there’s no way for readers to comment on eWeek’s sorry-ass picks. The egalitarian nature of the internet is definitely a two-edged sword. Anyone can write whatever they want about any subject without any qualifications whatsoever. Reader beware.
@ Wow Just Wow,
The first cell phone did change the world as we knew it.
The hand held, combo computer, entertainment center, phone, gaming device, camera, video phone, gps unit and PDA that actually is easy to use might just be as earth shattering.
The iPhone is the first of that breed.
It is good that someone writes articles which really matters something. Thank you for this article, it is full of knowledge which is hard to find in tons of rubbish in our famous world wide web. Regards and good luck!
Yeah, keynote is lovely..