“On Tuesday, Apple announced iWork ’09, an update to the company’s innovative suite of office applications,” Jamie Lendino reports for PC Magazine. “As with the prior version, iWork ’09 includes Pages (a word processor), Keynote (a presentation app), and Numbers (the graphics-centric spreadsheet program Apple introduced in 2007 as a part of iWork ’08. iWork ’09 is available now for $79, or $49 with any new Mac, and requires Leopard (OS X 10.5) in order to run.”
“Pages now features an uncluttered, full-screen view reminiscent of WordPerfect in the 1980s. It goes far beyond that old program, though, since Pages’ version is fully WSYIWIG and (unlike Microsoft Word’s standard Preview) fully editable,” Lendino reports.
“As before, Numbers’ slick interface is very different than Excel’s, with a heavy emphasis on charts and graphs. That’s mostly a good thing. In addition to Numbers’ expanded Formula list… Apple also added some pretty hefty 2D and 3D graphical charting capabilities. You can now link charts between Numbers and Pages or Keynote,” Lendino reports.
“Keynote ’09 includes some spiffy new transition effects and animated charts. It also includes Magic Move, a new feature that lets you animate an object from one slide to the next with a click. I saw several of the new effects in person; most looked great,” Lendino reports.
“Perhaps the biggest news with the entire suite is the iWork.com beta, Apple’s new way to share documents, presentations, and spreadsheets among colleagues… [which] is clearly a hedge between local computing (where one person creates the document, or another edits a separate local version) and cloud-based computing (where everyone edits the same version, which is stored online),” Lendino reports.
“That’s still an improvement over the old way of mailing attachments back and forth. But given the cost of individual iWork ’09 licenses on top of whatever Apple decides to charge for iWork.com, I don’t see a lot of customer take-up, especially given the multitude of free, collaborative online tools out there,” Lendino reports. “That said, iWork ’09 as a whole certainly looks impressive at first blush.”
Full article here.
You still cannot protect cells in Numbers 09. Was it really too hard for Apple to make it work in a year’s time? 🙁
Paid service? Apple, heard of Googledocs? Plus there are many other ways to share docs online. I don’t see iWork.com taking off. Anyone excited about it?
I was initially excited about iWork.com, but when I discovered that it only allowed other people to view, but not edit my documents, it lost it’s appeal for me.
I’ve become used to using things like Adobe’s Buzzword and Google Docs and the ability for multiple people to equally share just one instance of a collaborative document has proved to be invaluable.
I’ll still get iWork and will doubtless try out iWork.com, but it doesn’t look particularly useful to me.
It would be great if you could post your file on your own me.com public folder and make the file editable on a browser. No need for iWork.com there or any other extra paid service (other than me.com). That would be a game changer.
WSYIWIG? Is it not WYSIWYG, “What You See Is What You Get”? Might need to change that MDN, or add “[sic].
Having used the trial edition for the past couple of days, I’m very pleased with a number of changes in the new iWork software. One of the ones that’s a huge improvement to me in my line of work is the ability to now create custom number formats. It works fantastic and adds many other improvements.
My wife is quite interested in iWork.com as it will make some of her activities as a playwright much simpler – at least, for the three snowy months of the New England winter. Other occasions, too, but it will make collaborating ever so much easier. It took me some work to convince her to make Pages her default word processor, it took no effort at all to convince her to look at this cloud extension. She can post it and her techno-dopey collaborator can surf over to it and make notes. Placing the notes right there with the text works for her.
Will it be possible to transfer directly without any format loss a doc from Word to Pages of iWork?
Or shall we need to download/buy some transfer program to do so?
Please someone tell me.
I have been writing all my texts on Word (for OSX) and I am so used to it that crossing over will be a trauma. But I will do it if Pages renders my Word docs faithfully.
@AlanAudio, if Apple had somehow delivered an iWork.com Beta that could edit Pages, Keynote and Numbers documents with the same level of elegance and richness as the very slick desktop versions, they would have just delivered the holy grail of web apps. Sure it would be fantastic, but is that in any way realistic?
Come to think of it, the day Apple can offer that. They might as well offer a web based OSX. Generic PC makers could load linux and a browser, and let people “subscribe” to a web-based virtual Mac.
How the hell can anybody criticize something they haven’t tried yet? Cripes it is obvious by some of the comments here, that some of you haven’t even bothered to check out iWork 09 site or actually tried it, and don’t know what the hell you are talking about.
What is more obvious, is that anybody, and I include myself, that has tried it is pretty impressed. Best some of you guys listen to them before you open your mouths and make fools of yourselves.
I really like the iWork suite, but it is a real hassle to use it as your primary productivity app in a Winblows/Office environment. Apple should make iWork handle Office and ODF files natively. It’s just not practical to translate between formats for every revision of a document, especially when you have to keep some of those revisions and the translator is far from perfect. I have the same issue with CAD apps. It doesn’t matter how slick the interface or capabilities are if you have to constantly import/export just to get work done. The workflow becomes too convoluted and dramatically impacts productivity.
I still use iWork whenever I can. I’ll never use PowerPoint again if I can avoid it! Keynote is just so far superior to it that there’s no comparison. Besides, I don’t usually have to share my presentations with anyone except my audience, so I don’t need to translate them!
As far as iWork vs Office >>>
Keynote is way ahead of Powerpoint.
Pages is pretty much with Word.
but Numbers… well- it’s heading in the right direction;
no pivot tables, can’t freeze cells, no direct way to name cells- yes I know about the row/column header naming scheme- it’ll do and it might even be the better way- but I want to just right click on a cell- select nameCell and name the cell.
With that said- for $79 > it’s a gem; not to mention the family pack option for another $20
Collaboration should be free to mobileme subscribers.
Though I have no use for it myself, if I did I would not want yet another subscription charge.
@buliguo
Will it be possible to transfer directly without any format loss a doc from Word to Pages of iWork?
Probably.
It depends on your documents. If you’ve something crazy in there like Word input fields, the answer’s, No.
In that case, even OpenOffice.org might’ve trouble reading them, and those people have put years into reverse engineering MS formats.
BUT If the documents use fairly ordinary layout and features, there’s likely to be no problem. Last year’s version of Pages added Word-changes tracking and someone over at Macworld – Rob Griffiths perhaps? – tested out that out by sending a document back and forth with a colleague using Word and there was no glitch at all.
The real answer is: if you want to use Pages, try opening your Word documents in it and see.
Pages 08 is a nice interface to work in. I haven’t seen Pages 09 yet. Full-screen as such doesn’t interest me, and I don’t know what else it offers save the collaboration features, which I probably wouldn’t use.
From the point of view of document longevity I’d be reluctant to save documents in either .pages format or .doc format (which even MS themselves have abandoned). It’s a shame Pages 08 hasn’t got support for ODF even though TextEdit in Leopard has (some) support. But I suppose one can’t have everything – or not all at once – and Pages will export to PDF.
@iLuvMuMacs
Freeze cells is on the new version and anyone that knows how to use pivot tables should be at the level to know how to UAE some very basic equations to get the same job done.
Naming of cells I agree with. It should be a simple thing for apple to do.
Visit the apple discussions for some threads that have dozens of features people have found that were not documented.
@Jax
Jax- Thanks for the comments & suggestions. I actually meant- ProtectCells- not freeze- and I’d be very interested in learning techniques that emulate pivot table behavior. A long time ago- I was a big fan of Lotus Improv- it didn’t last long but they had the right idea.