“Apple has a communication problem: it knew the latest iteration of iWork was only a starting point, but when it introduced the software was heavy on the hype, leaving users disappointed,” Jonny Evans writes for Computerworld.
“If you’re using the new iWork and you want those missing features just take a look inside your Applications folder (Go>Applications in the Finder menu) and you’ll find the old versions of your iWork applications are still installed,” Evans writes. “You can continue to use them. This is because the latest free iWork suite is not an upgrade to your existing software but a completely new edition built from the ground up to be 64-bit, so the installation does not take place on top of your original iWork apps. The snag is that when you open older documents in the new edition of an iWork application, the software “upgrades” the document to work in 64-bit. Once an upgraded document is saved you can no longer open it in your old iWork applications.”
“Eagle-eyed Apple-watchers will already know Apple has promised to introduce many of the most missed features within future software updates across the next six months,” Evans writes. “That’s fine, but the company could — and should — have been more open about this from the get-go.”
Read more in the full article here.
Related articles:
Apple: Forthcoming iWork releases will reintroduce features, add new ones – November 6, 2013
Apple’s iWork ’13: Dumbed down or smart move? – November 6, 2013
Some users angry over Apple’s free iWork suite – October 29, 2013
Apple’s Pages 5.0 an unmitigated disaster? – October 24, 2013
Apple releases next-gen 64-bit iWork and iLife apps for OS X and iOS; free with new Macs and iOS devices – October 22, 2013
Use the export option in the new version.
There’s a “Save to Pages ’09” option.
In the last several years it’s become a bad idea to upgrade anything apple. They have somehow gotten it into their heads that it is the height of, “we know better than you” , sophistication to take features away. Every OS release and ever new computer release in the past several years has taken something away. Always with the promise to give it back later.
On the software side, I suspect it is the apple way. An engineering team is brought together to build something. It ships and the team is disbanded. 2 years later a new team is brought together to upgrade the old product. They cant figure out how the old code base works, so they sell a technically challenged management on the need for a complete re-write.
The sad truth is that Apple is not very good at software. And the same disease seems to be slopping over into hardware.
I’ve probably bought my last Macbook because I’ve become one of those 10% of the market apple seems willing to sacrafice each year to the alter of their product quadrant. My sin is that I dont want a retina display and I want to keep an optical drive. No place for me in their marketing vision.
You’ll be disappointed as that becomes the standard in most PC laptops as well. Embedded batteries and no optical will be standard in only a few years.
I’m sure Apple is happy to trade your one purchase for the 10 people that decide that a Macbook Air is just what they need.
Indeed. I did buy an optical drive, but only so I could put all my dvd’s into iTunes and back them up on a large hard drive. Since I did that the drive has been unused.
Try…sacrifice each year at the altar. College anyone?
Turns out Apple still has an option for you: http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/macbook-pro?product=MD101LL/A&step=config
I still love my 1.2MB 5-1/4 floppy disk. I see no point for that DVD stuff and my 12″ CRT is irradiating my eyes just fine.
I will keep my old Gateway, thank you. (Running Wordstar)
Do you guys stay up all night to bleat your fud first. It is precisely Apples software that has made them the most desirable in computers, phones and tablets not to mention much supporting software even if there are a few stumbles, but then who else doesn’t have those. Microsoft is a software company yet barely makes any software of real quality and most that is anything but. Features and bloat don’t make for quality. Android is little better they have done a great job from a pig of a code base but its mostly a terrible user experience for anyone but geeks. As others say you will have to buy a cheap outmoded piece of crap by the end of next year if you want the features you desire to hang on to. I certainly look forward to learning what software and hardware is fundamentally better thats for sure.
Proof that apple can and will shovel any crap it wants and users may not even like it but have no choice. Apple will also brag about their numbers of users. But happy productive users? Apple has become what in 1984 they challenged.
Sorry, but I disagree TOTALLY. Apple is trying to create work applications that sync across devices and has laid out the beginnings of this with new applications. Having learned from past problems, Apple wisely left the old applications in place for anyone who wants to use them and further, included an export to the previous iWork 09 format as well. Apple was thinking of the customer in this instance. To imply otherwise is to disregard the obvious.
“…..but have no choice. ”
I’m sure I hear your new Windows (enter the latest POS version) computer calling. Hell, build your own. Then you can only blame yourself for anything that you don’t like. That’s the ticket.
“Apple will also brag about their numbers of users.”
Yeah, and dollars to donuts you aren’t one of them.
I am an often user of Keynote – I use it for presentations at least two times a week. I was a little lost with the new Keynote but I learned how to work with it in about an hour. So, I am satisfied at this point and look forward to the upcoming improvements. So much better than PowerPoint period.
I suppose you have to give them some credit because “Apple was thinking of the customer in this instance.” but business history is littered with the ” we have to get it out there before it’s ready just to make the marketing clowns happy” mindset. When the crippled version is fixed, customers still distrust the fixed version less for a longer period of time. Rightfully so.
But if you are going to obsess over syncing over all devices, then you have to bias your development toward the device with the least capability, which is iOS because of technology and the nature of the buyers. Hard to imagine a typical iOS user doing very much work in iWork honestly, and I doubt very much that this “collaborative document” fad will be satisfactory even if the technology works.
Instead, lets have more capability in the OSX version of iWork. Apple has the capability of picking the best features that are needed, as opposed the dogs breakfast that is Office, of which 90% of the “features” are never used. They have the capability of actually competing with Office, but are obsessed with making every thing compatible across the board with iOS.
I can’t imagine what they think they have to gain by dumbing down apps. They won’t make iOS users happy, and will not make OSX users happy. To try to be all things to all people is a bad idea.
Especially when they try to “simplify” iOS apps, I prefer 3rd party apps for the most part for iOS, because third party developers are closer to their user base. They are not obsessed with hiding controls in order to achieve that full screen/blank white screen motif that Apple shoots for, as if seeing one too many app controls are going to make someones head explode. Too many Apple apps for iOS leave you wondering where to I go next unless you use each one every day and remember the location and work sequence of the app. Minimalism taken just one step too far makes your satisfaction factor…………minimal.
Apple user since 1984, so I guess that makes me an old fogey. Ask me if I care.
Every so often Apple does something that just makes you tilt your head, furrow your brow, and say huh?
But they usually follow the huh with a wow.
Although I applaud all the extra effort Apple is putting into the foundation of iWork, Jonny Evans makes a good point about communicating with the public.
There was a lot to hype, but a few simple words could have prevented the backlash Apple received from a minority of users.
Is there a way to install the previous version? I bought mine from the Mac App store and want to install the old version on a new computer. The Mac App store only lists the current version and the old version is not installed on the new computer.
Amazon $30
Migration assistant. Import the apps from one computer and be done with it.
Sometimes I am just amazed at some of the comments here. For example, suggesting that “export to iWork ’09” is any kind of fix. When you open an ’09 file in ’13, it strips out all of the features of the old file that are not supported in the new version. Those features do not come back when you export back to the old format; the only impact is to strip out all the new features that are not supported by the old program. The exported file then has only those features that are common to both versions… which frankly isn’t very much beyond what you could produce in TextEdit.
The advice to just keep on using iWork ’09 is flatly dangerous. The program is now four years out of date. Sooner or later, an update to hardware or system software will knock it out of service, leaving all the files generated under the old version unreadable (except, presumably, by iWork ’13 or its successor, which will strip out and discard all the unsupported features).
As a practical matter, iWork ’09 users who need the dropped features are no better off–despite the existence of ’13–than if the program had been discontinued entirely. They can continue using the obsolete and unsupported program, but it is on borrowed time, just like PageMaker after inDesign came out. iWork ’09 will not be available for a new computer once the existing stocks at places like Amazon run out.
While Apple has promised to restore some of the dropped user interface features, that will not help those of us who were using Pages to produce newsletters and similar documents. Our key problem is with features that were dropped from the file format, not just the user interface. Things like linked text boxes were absolutely not “power user” features. They have been basic to Mac page layout software since 1985, which is how long I have been using them. There is no indication that they are ever coming back to iWork, which has dropped its previous focus as small office/home office professional software and been repositioned as collaborative software for mobile users.
Clearly, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote no longer see print output as a priority; they expect that people will be viewing iWork documents on an iPad. Users who relied on iWork to produce quality printed documents (or PDFs) are no longer the target audience. I can’t fault Apple for making a business decision that it saw to be in its own best interest. However, I am astonished that so many people on this forum assume that what’s good for Apple is necessarily good for all its customers. In fact, a very large segment of iWork users have suffered a major loss and it is silly to expect us to be happy about it. Having your business torpedoed is bad enough without being called a “whiner” for failing to embrace that as a good thing.
“The advice to just keep on using iWork ’09 is flatly dangerous. The program is now four years out of date. Sooner or later, an update to hardware or system software will knock it out of service, leaving all the files generated under the old version unreadable (except, presumably, by iWork ’13 or its successor, which will strip out and discard all the unsupported features).”
What the hell are you going on about? It works in 10.9 and on all Apple hardware. In the next 6 months they are going to have some new hardware or OS that nobody has ever seen before? Yea I don’t think so. You know how long freakin AppleWorks stayed working?! Somehow I doubt the old iWork will suddenly stop working in the foreseeable future.
Apple stopped selling AppleWorks in August, 2007. It stopped working with the release of Lion in July 2011. It lasted for four years, but only because it ran within Rosetta, a software layer that was specifically designed to allow old PowerPC programs to run on Intel Macs during the transition. No such layer exists today to insure backward compatibility, since Apple has no business reason to provide it.
iWork ’09 was based on iWork ’05, which was written as first-party software taking advantage of every feature of the then-current operating system. Many of those features are now deprecated because new application interfaces have replaced them. With new versions of OS X coming out annually, it isn’t exactly a stretch to predict that iWork ’09 is going to stop working reliably within a very few years. That future is entirely foreseeable. iWeb ’11 has already started going wonky.
I don’t know about your business, but most professionals I know make plans more than six months in advance. They get really nervous when they realize that they will be forced to choose at some point—some completely undefined point—between running software that drives their business and running the latest and greatest system software and hardware. They get particularly nervous when it is clear that new software licenses will cease to be available as soon as the boxed software has sold out, within months at most. Yes, they can transfer iWork ’09 from an old computer to a new one, but they cannot legally add additional users and cannot risk getting caught with unauthorized copies if they are subjected to a software audit. It may surprise you to learn that some businesses plan on adding additional employees over time and would like to do so legally.
That is what the hell I am talking about.
I can’t believe someone actually wrote this article:
“Look in your Applications Folder and you’ll see Apple did not delete your old apps. You can still use your old Apps.”
So um, thanks, Apple?
Apple has been fucking up software for a long time. Most of the bozos here don’t even know that Apple that was making product for he rest of us.
Now they just produce shit! Like iOS 7 the update from HELL!
Maybe I’m lucky to have an ‘outdated’ iPod touch 4G.. .I’m stuck on iOS6 ?
I really like Pages 5, it’s finally a good alternative to Google docs. And with the new Finder tags uodate, it can be made to work even better for document organisation that Google Drive ever did. I was a bit shocked at the loss of beloved features like Outline view, but the program overall feels lighter and easier to use.