Apple's iWork Package Is Elegant but Wimpy Compared With Office
When you hear that Apple has released a new product, you think of a sleek Macintosh laptop, or perhaps a beautiful program for editing videos. But a spreadsheet? Not a spreadsheet. After all, expertise with spreadsheets is the sort of computing skill about which the "Mac guy" in Apple's TV ads mocks the "PC guy."</br></br>And yet, last week, Apple brought out a new spreadsheet program called Numbers, thus completing one of its least-known products: a productivity suite called iWork. The iWork '08 suite, which competes with the Macintosh version of Microsoft Office, also includes a word- processing program called Pages and a presentation program called Keynote. The two were upgraded last week. IWork costs $79, about half the price of the lowest-cost version of Microsoft Office, which sells for $149.</br></br>In the past 10 years, Apple has out-designed Microsoft and its hardware partners in a number of key areas. But can Apple really take on Microsoft in the category of productivity software, where Office rules on both Windows and the Mac? To find out, I've been testing the new iWork, which runs only on the Mac, against the Mac version of Office.</br></br>My verdict: iWork '08 is a nice product, capable of turning out sophisticated and attractive word-processing, presentation and spreadsheet documents. It can even read Microsoft Office documents, whether created on the Mac or on Windows computers, and can save documents in Microsoft Office formats so they can be opened in Office on the Mac or on Windows.</br></br>But iWork simply isn't as powerful or versatile as Microsoft Office, especially when it comes to word processing and spreadsheets. And it suffers from a design that places far more emphasis on making documents look beautiful than on the nuts and bolts of the actual process of writing and number-crunching.