Why Apple iWork Really Matters 01.28.05 By Michael J. Miller MacWorld was dominated by Apple's new iPod shuffle and the Mac mini, but the new Apple product that may turn out to be most influential is iWork '05. Here's why: Microsoft Office is as dominant in the office market as Microsoft Windows is on the operating-system side. But in recent years, Microsoft has focused more on adding enterprise features than on changing the core word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation features. Office has some decent competitors?Corel WordPerfect and StarOffice/OpenOffice?but they have focused primarily on being compatible with Microsoft software. Apple's iWork is the most creative office-productivity package we've seen in years. It combines the second version of Keynote, a presentation package, with Pages, a new word processor. (No spreadsheet yet.) Both programs are visually stunning, with graphics, shading, and lots of incredibly professional-looking templates. The first version of Keynote, back in 2003, looked great, but was slow and didn't have a lot of the features that presenters need. Keynote 2 seems faster (though still a bit sluggish on a G4), has more snazzy templates, and offers new features for presenters. Pages is a simple desktop-publishing program with super templates. You start with a design, then replace the dummy text and graphics with your own. Both programs give you an amazing amount of control over fonts and graphics. And both are well integrated with Apple's iLife suite, letting you use photos and music from iPhoto and iTunes through a new Media Browser. Unfortunately, neither program is fully ready for the broader business audience. Keynote is sluggish at times, its importation of PowerPoint is far from perfect, and it doesn't offer a slick way of publishing your presentation on a CD or DVD. Pages lacks a grammar checker, revision marks, and the collaboration, tracking, and security features that Microsoft Word offers. And Microsoft's multiple-toolbar approach lets you work faster. So why is iWork so important? Because the software truly rethinks the way these features are presented. iWork offers a visual way of looking at your documents, so it brings out many features that are buried in Microsoft products. I look forward to seeing where Apple takes these applications in the future. This more competitive software from Apple might finally get Microsoft to overhaul PowerPoint, and might also get Microsoft and the developers of other Windows-based productivity packages to rethink their software design. And that could lead to more innovation than we've seen in office suites for a long, long time.
Jeff Slyn, Owner SLYN Systems & Peripherals (502) 426-5469 serving Kentuckiana clients 7 days a week since 1985! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.math.louisville.edu/pipermail/macgroup/attachments/20050201/0e8cdc61/attachment.html
