http://news.com.com/Apples+iWork+emerges+as+rival+to+Microsoft+Office/2100-1012_3-6030011.html

…

Pages, IMO, is close to FrameMaker in conception and ever since Adobe dropped the ball on a native OS X FrameMaker port I’ve been using Pages for everything, big and small. It works if you make the minimal investment to learn it well and construct your own templates.

iWork is dirt cheap compared to Office. This alone makes the suite compelling. The bottom line is that Pages has replaced Word in the things I do and it has worked out exceptionally well.

While there are problems (most of them are newbie issues) the simple fact is that Pages can compete with Word and if you don’t think so, either you’re using a lot of Office integration (I do not) or you don’t understand things. So take a step back and learn it.

Keynote — so much better than PP, and we can do really polished work that looks clean and feels tight.
NeoOffice — daily use for text and spreadsheets we can share w/ clients & contractors. A bit clunky, and not pretty for graphs.
MS Office — last resort, but still stuck with Excel for complex modeling because our monte-carlo tools only run there. Excel graphs are also prettier.
Pages — anything on letterhead goes out pages -> PDF. The para numbering doesn’t get screwed up, and images behave properly.

Many of the “needed” feastures above are needed before Pages will replace NeoOffice. Pages is a bit slower (!), doesn’t allow us to create complex templates, and is generally bizarre about some things. Plus side is that paragraph formats and rules can be enforced, and since Adobe (may they rot in hell) dropped Framemaker we’ve been bereft.

although this is a long shot, if apple integrated this software into leopard, it would truly provide an all-inclusive out-of-the-box feeling!!! You wouldn’t really need anything!!!

Media apps like iTunes, iPhoto and iMovie were of course utterly brilliant because they got right in front of a massive wave of consumer interest in rich media.

Internet apps like iWeb attempt to get in on the ground floor of the “next Office” — Internet content creation and publishing. (Unfortunately for Apple, Web apps will almost certainly dominate this space and Google is way out front with Blogger and Google Docs+Spreadsheets.)

But a document-oriented app? To control how things look when printed out on paper? How old school is that? Plus they just antagonize MSFT for no particular reason.

Unless they know something about the future of Office for Mac the rest of us do not.

Some say Apple needs to come out with a spreadsheet app to compete with Microsoft Excel and Corel’s WordPerfect Office Quattro Pro. I disagree. Spreadsheets are too tied to certain data structures and functions. What Apple should do is come out with a database app, like a FileMaker Lite. Apple could call this new app Data, or DB. This database app could still serve as a number-cruncher for spreadsheet users, but also work well with mailing lists and other data structures. Then iWork would be more complete. If iWork had a “Data” app that could also work well with Apple’s Address Book technology and its iCal and Mail.app, (or perhaps acts as the next step up from them, much as Aperture is professional software versus the consumer-oriented iPhoto) then you’re getting somewhere!

BTW: If you want to see how cool the spread sheet program will be, just add some formulas to a table in pages to see how nice the UI of a spread sheet can be. iWork will have it’s day, just like iPhoto now does (do you remember how many people trashed iPhoto 1.0?).