iWork ’09 No Competition for Mac Office 2011
The new Mac Office 2011, currently in development, will easily best iWork ’09, and with every feature update demonstrates just how far behind iWork has fallen. The latest video preview only increases the value gap between the two office suites.
While the feature tease is minimal, the video shows off Sparklines, in-cell mini-graphs of visual data straight from Excel 2010 for Windows, as well as new PivotTable report designs and layouts. Office-wide, users will now have the ability to do “basic photo editing,” with options like color correction, as well as more advanced ones like background removal, but that’s the small stuff.
The big deal is Mac Office 2011 touts a level of compatibility with Office for Windows “that’s never been achieved before,” from the user-interface Ribbon of Office for Windows to the nuts and bolts of cross-platform document and data sharing. In Word, that means requiring pages printed in Word for the Mac and Windows be identical on paper. In Excel, arguably the biggest compatibility effort was the restoration of Visual Basic, version 6.5, same as the Windows version. Entourage has been replaced with Outlook and full support for Exchange. PowerPoint, well, with the exception of better cross-platform document compatibility, PowerPoint still looks to suck compared to the ease-of-use and pretty slides of Keynote.
Unfortunately, that hardly makes up for the rest of iWork for the Mac. Numbers, Pages, and Keynote are far less compatible when exporting in Microsoft Office formats, and none are as feature-replete. Worse, Pages, and especially Numbers, struggle with large documents. The problem with iWork is that it badly needs updating, but there is no guarantee of that happening this year, unlike Mac Office.
While it’s true iWork for the iPad was released this year, it, like OS X, is languishing in favor of iOS. iWork for the Mac is quickly approaching years between updates. While it’s fair to say that having the iWork team pivot to produce an iPad version is responsible for the dearth of updates, what’s the excuse for iWork.com?
Back in January 2009, when iWork ’09 debuted, a lot was made of the iWork.com beta, which let people view and share, but not edit documents. Eighteen months later, it’s still a beta, and you still can’t edit documents. Even worse, Apple has thus far failed to leverage iWork.com as the logical way to seamlessly synchronize documents between the iPad and Mac. Even the rumored iWork update is out of date, the most recent being “iWork ’10 for Dummies” placeholders being seen in at sites like Amazon France with three months left in the year.
Without an update to compete against Mac Office 2011, that leaves price as iWorks ’09′s best feature, $79 retail, $49 with the purchase of a new Mac. However, even on price Mac Office is competing better than ever before at $119 for the Student Edition, which includes Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and $199 for the Home and Office Edition that adds Outlook.
There’s a reason Mac Business Unit PR types can brag that Mac Office is on about 70 percent of Macs (a phenomenal adoption rate) and one that would only be beat by Office for the iPad. Please.
Related GigaOM Pro Research: Web Worker Survey 2010 (subscription req’d)
iWork has Arabic/Hebrew support, it’s not perfect but it’s there.
Something Microsoft has been ignoring for years:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/06/17/microsofts_mac_hebrew_snub_prompts/
I wonder if Office 2011 for Mac will actually work like other Mac applications? Every time I use Word, Excel or Powerpoint I just get frustrated because they don’t work the way all the other software does on MacOS.
With the adoption of the Ribbon, what is essentially a giant toolbar, and the return of Outlook, I’d say Mac Office is more like Windows Office than ever before. I actually think this is a good thing. Like it or not, it’s a Windows Office world, and it’s a lot cheaper to buy Mac Office than Windows 7, Office for Windows, and maybe Fusion or Parallels, too.
“It’s a windows office world?” Even if that ridiculous statement meant anything, that’s no excuse for disregarding OS interface standards? Even on Windows, the ribbon is not well-received. Shoving it down people’s throats doesn’t make it any more likable, the same way that never worked for Windows.
Honestly, I don’t know why I read anything with your by-line. It comes out of the gate as opinion, opinion, opinion, and everything you write goes to supporting it. It’s a big old waste of time and I’m about to delete this stupid blog from my Google start page so that I don’t get sucked into any more of your ridiculous rants. You, sir, are what’s wrong with blogging today.
Well I will wait to see. Because frankly, every other iteration of Office has “Blown Chunks”. While it may have a bag of features for power users, if it as awful to use as every other version has been then I will continue to use alternative (like iWork, which work just fine for 95% of the population) and does not make me want to pull my hair out in frustration every 15 minutes.
I’m a little disappointed with the performance of Numbers and Pages, and stunned by the lack of a synchronization solution for the iPad. I think Mac Office 2011 will prod Apple to build a better iWork, and if Microsoft launches Office for the iPad I know that will happen.
the major advantage in “mac office” is its compatibility with windows office
U cant call that an advantage cuz Microsoft have to deal with its own rubbish>>>>(applications) to make the compatible
and “iworks 09″ is able to export to “windows office”
it’s not perfect that i can say but it’s been there since forever
i have a fairly large spreadsheet that struggles in both excel and numbers… the diff is that numbers takes a fraction to load. i wouldn’t be surprised if apple are holding out to implement better compatibility after office.
having said that we’re due an ilife update too or have all the apple sw engineers been diverted to fixing antenna signal bar algorithms?
Er…this post makes no sense.
You write, “The new Mac Office 2011, currently in development, will easily best iWork ’09, and with every feature update demonstrates just how far behind iWork has fallen”
Er…iWork ’09 was released in 2009, quite a bit before Office 2011 will be released. You can’t expect an older product to out compete a newer (nay, not yet released!) product!
In other words, instead of saying this “demonstrates just how far behind iWork has fallen” you should say this demonstrates how far ahead Office 2011 has progressed. You can’t expect a 2009 inanimate (non reproducing, non growing, because it is INANIMATE!) object to continue improving.
that’s deep haha. but it can easily be said that iWork will have some catching up to do. Plus as much as I love Macs over the inferior PC, iWork is less user friendly than even the previous edition of Microsoft Office.
I SO AGREE. Plus it stinks!
By the way, I do quibble with the way language is used because what I was pointing out in the previous post does make a difference.
By saying “demonstrates just how far behind iWork ’09 has fallen” you make the assumption or at least give the impression that iWork ’09 (or simply the iWork team) should have/ought to have continue improving on iWork. Yet, what you really are comparing Office 2011 to is an inanimate thing called iWork ’09 that stopped advancing the moment it was published and sold. So, of course, iWork ’09 has “fallen behind” because the moment it was published, it stopped advancing!
D’OH!
Well, admittedly, I do scribble with the way language is used, originally titling the article: Mac Office 2011 No Competition for iWork ’09. However, setting aside the numbers, which are just there because of obsessive desire for symmetry, what we are talking about is a comparison between, presumably, actively developed office suites.
So how long will we have to wait for iWork ’11? It’s a little surprising that the MacBu appears more nimble than the iWork team, especially when one considers how much more complex Mac Office is. Further, what is up with iWork.com? Is Apple trying to compete with Google on how long new products can remain betas?
I’d like to believe we’ll see something next month, or in October with an iMac refresh, but I’m increasingly skeptical in this Age of iOS.
Office 2008 has never been that great (it still loves to crash) and iWork ’09 is not typically an acceptable solution for scholars/academicians (of which I’m one). I think up until just recently, EndNote (a popular citation software for Macs and Windows did not work natively for iWork ’09 so I had to stick with Office 2008. Unfortunately, the Office documents formats are really still dominant in the academic world (at least in the humanities and social sciences; maybe less so in the sciences and engineering) so that’s what I stick with.
I still hate Office 2008 and will not upgrade to 2011 unless I really have to. For now, my EndNote X3 and Office 2008 work okay (albeit with crashes from time to time) and I’m sticking with that ecosystem.
More nimble? Office 2008 came out on January 15, 2008. “iWork for the Mac is quickly approaching years between updates,” you say, but it came out a year later than the last Mac version of MS Office.
How is the Microsoft MacBU more nimble than Apple when it takes them nearly 3 years to come out with an update, and it’s been less than 2 years since the last iWork update? Does time pass differently in Redmond than Cupertino?
“It’s a little surprising that the MacBu appears more nimble than the iWork team…”
How can you tell? Apple doesn’t release teaser videos of products. The last Mac Office was 2008, older than iWork ’09. How can they be more nimble if their last product release was older than Apple’s release and you have no details about Apple’s next release?
I’d assert that the code base is much larger for Mac Office than iWork, presumably making it more complex to develop for. As a relatively new office suite, iWork needs more frequent updates because it is playing catch up in terms of features and performance. And then there is the iWork.com beta. . . .
It’s these kind of unpleasant facts that lead me to believe iWork for the Mac is not a priority for Apple right now.
Way to miss the point. iWork isn’t about ticking checkboxes on the most ‘features’ that users will never use. That’s not how Apple rolls.
Office for Mac does have some neat stuff iWork doesn’t, but, after playing around with some of the betas, I found Office’s features to be still no match for iWork’s ease of use.
(As a side note, I do not have much experience with Office 2011 in particular, but I have used a few betas of it and also its predecessors. If I rant about stuff Microsoft has fixed by now, please be so kind and ignore it, or mention it in a reply. Thanks!)
OK, for instance, in PowerPoint, I can’t freaking type in how long do I want an animation to be! That’s a no-go for me. I like perfecting my presentations, I’m one of those people who keeps typing in different split second numbers until it looks just right. This, however, doesn’t work in PowerPoint. Really, Microsoft? Really?
Also, while it’s sure nice to have a font selection menu, how about NOT forcing me to use ugly, ugly Times New Roman? It’s not just a hard-to-change default, no, it’s a bug since Word 2008 or before that makes any new text I type in a document automatically turn into Times New Roman text. If you haven’t been struck by it – well, I have. It is horrible. Somebody I asked about the latest Office beta said that, while Microsoft hasn’t fixed every bug from the previous beta, it’s actually OK, even with the bugs it still has. Well, I’d better go with a bug-free office suite, but thanks anyway, Microsoft.
Another deal-killer is the fact that Microsoft, faithful to their usual method, changes the most prominent part of the interface (Ribbon UI! Whee!), but keeps almost everything else of it unchanged for decades. Like, for example, the nasty right click boxes. In iWork, I can do just about all of this from a single, floating Inspector window. Everything’s compact, right at my fingertips and in a single floating window. Some things, like fonts, have their own, more advanced, floating windows, but there’s maybe three of such windows. This type of UI really throws me off! Here’s a pic of what I mean:
askdavetaylor.com/0-blog-pics/microsoft-word-mac-format-font.png
And here’s iWork’s solution (floating!):
macprovideo.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/step-43.png
… and advanced, but floating:
reviews.cnet.com/i/bto/20091012/font-window.png
Finally, basic image editing? iWork’s image adjuster (it’s the third floating window I can think of at the moment, counting the inspector) is great, and Instant Alpha kicks Office’s Select Transparent Color’s behind with ease. Instead of selecting just one color, Instant Alpha removes multiple ranges of colors easily. Office 2007 didn’t have this one. Office 2011 better have it! Cropping (masking) is also very well-executed in iWork.
Finally, I have to mention it’s a bit of an unfair comparison, seeing that iWork was released January 2009, as you pointed out in the article. Apple’s next iWork is highly likely to catch up with Office in terms of features; it has already done so in usability. Keep it up, Apple!
In Powerpoint you can type how long you want an animation, but you are limited to two decimal places (100ths of a second). Not sure how many people need more precision than that. The real difference here is that when you are forced to move your presentation to a Windows machine, the animation continues to work. If you had started with Keynote, your animation would be gone.
You do realize that Powerpoint has not used that particular floating palate since office 2004. In my world, the Apple inspector is the spawn of Satan. I suppose it would be fine if I sat and figured it out, but digging through it is generally pretty miserable, and I have no idea why Apple feels I want to dig through the Apple font inspector to go from 10 to 12 point font. It is just primitive.
Office 2011 has a new “remove background” feature that is more effective than the one in my current version of keynote (iWork 09). You press the button once and it calculates what it required to remove the background. It then leaves you to make final tweaks. In iWork 09 I push and pull the circle to tweak what colors are eliminated. When separating a glass container from a blue background, the Powerpoint approach is able to separate the bottle in one click, just leaving the shadow behind.
When developing complex presentation I often want to hide follow up slides and then link to them. This is easy in Powerpoint, but impossible in the current version of Keynote.
In Keynote I do not understand why I must pick the presentation size when it is supposed to dynamically adjust.
In Keynote I can create some very interesting and fluffy animations, and transitions, but not one of them remains when I open the presentation in the classroom because the iWork export to Powerpoint strips all of those.
If I work in iWork, I cannot collaborate with people in the University who use office because they are not bidirectionally compatible.
These are not measures of how good or bad Office and iWork are because they are for different things. iWork is not yet suited for large documents in technical environments, particularly Office environments.
“I have no idea why Apple feels I want to dig through the Apple font inspector to go from 10 to 12 point font. It is just primitive.”
Did you perhaps close your Format bar? When in a text field, you can change the text formatting right there, no need for the Inspector.
I know about the format bar. It was a welcome addition in iWork 9, but it is not a standard feature of Apples Applications. Most still rely on the inspector metaphor.
To each his own, I guess. For me, iWork is my absolute favorite. Bug-free and easy to use.
The fact that PowerPoint lacks some of Keynote’s effects means a flaw in PowerPoint, not Keynote. At least Keynote does have PowerPoint export – PowerPoint doesn’t have Keynote export.
The PowerPoint beta I used (the latest one, I’m pretty sure!) had five or six animation length presets. If this abomination is gone now, that’s good.
So long as MS continues to ‘best’ the competition, people will continue to believe that their products make a good information *delivery* system – and the world will continue to suffer. Screen captures in Word files and photos in Powerpoint files will continue to be a blight on society.
Such a shame PDF turns out to be as big an attack vector as MS itself. Time for a new layout standard?
iwork fans continue to be totally wrong on Powerpoint.
PP 09 (and 08) FAR beat our keypoint. I never thought a MS product would be easier to use than Apple, but PP is far better organized and more efficient to use than Keynote. Gave up on Keynote for good last year.
Word still beats pages hands down.
Numbers can be good for somethings…using numbers for grade books is really handy compared to excel…but its a dog with large amounts of data.
Let’s see….
I’ve never, as in NEVER, as in not ever seen an effective PowerPoint presentation. I have seen Keynote presentations obviously made by people unfamiliar with the software, but never one that actively works against its purpose to the degree that PowerPoint is rightly infamous for. Keynote may not have all the bells and whistles and complexity masquerading as capability of PowerPoint, but it was designed to be used, and to create a variety of reasonably effective presentations. This is largely accomplished by not encouraging the usee to load a hundred bullet points and arrows onto each slide.
The real winner for me is this: every Keynote presentation that I have ever made has been favorably received, usually involving an increase in my income. That effect is distinctly opposite to my experience for well over a decade in PowerPoint.
As soon as Powerpoint can handle inserting pdfs into documents like Keynote can it will finally be ON PAR with Keynote. As it is if I want to include math typeset in LaTeX into Powerpoint I have to use rasterized graphics that look absolutely terrible. What is the alternative solution? Using the terrible Office equation editor? The stuff that comes out of that doesn’t event look like real math. It’s ridiculous that in 2010 MS still doesn’t support inserting PDFs.
“iWork ’09 No Competition for Mac Office 2011″
The reviewer is clearly dyslectic.
iWork 09 is not competing against Office 11. It’s the other way around.
Also; Office “competing better than ever on price” is still a “fail” on price compared to iWork (fact is fact) spin it any way you want.
Anyway… yeah, sure. Apple probably won’t come out with a better iWork in the near future. That would be totally unlike them.
Well, if your main objective is to produce Microsoft Office documents, then iWork may always come up short. However, if your objective is to create documents where you can concentrate on the content and not spend time fighting the inconsistent behavior of a buggy program, then I would choose iWork every time. Numbers may not be as feature-rich as Excel, but its separation of formatting from spreadsheet functionality is a major advance that makes it far more productive for me at least.
I find your argument that Office:mac 2011 beats iWork ’09 quite precarious.
UI: +1 iWork
– easy to use
– minimal clutter
– has had basic photo editing for several versions, including the use of transparent PNGs, which MS has found so difficult to make possible across all versions of Office
– the ribbon interface is probably the shittiest thing MS ever did to Office (I still have trouble locating basic functions across the Windows suite)
Scripting: draw
– maybe some people have lots of VB code they need, fine
– some people use AppleScript, fine
– one certainly can find drawbacks to both depending on environment and user
Templates/Layout: +1 iWork
– How many PowerPoints presentations have you seen that use the same dreaded, ugly template??
Language support: +1 iWork
– supports Hebrew/Arabic
Price: +1 iWork
– maybe a price that is nearly double the mac price does constitute “more competitive than ever” but most people see the difference between $79 and $119 as not competitive at all price wise
Others:
– most people don’t use PivotTables, and if they did, they prob should be using Office
– having exact printing between MS and Mac versions isn’t exactly a feature, it should have been this way since the beginning.
– iWork will have an update soon, mark my words
– Keynote will ALWAYS kick PowerPoint’s ass in terms of looks, ease-of-use, and features available to presentors
Blaming the software for design decisions is like blaming the hammer for bending a nail.
I’d agree with this statement, but it’s also a matter of selecting a hammer that’s suited to the job at hand. I’d sure not use a hand-sledge for finish nails or furniture brads.
I’m probably getting too far into the metaphor, but I think the original posters point was that most folks don’t have a firm grasp on what makes a good presentation, and Keynote tends to nudge you in the direction of good content and format. Powerpoint tends to scream at me “Look at my animations! – your audience will love a thousand different bullet point and slide transition animations”
Granted this isn’t a direct critique on the software, but rather a critique on some of the packaged addons (themes, UI, etc.).
I’ve been using the Office 2011 beta since beta 4 and it really is a huge improvement over previous versions of Office. It might take people a day or two to get used to the ribbon, but once you do it makes perfect sense.
Despite the headline of this post, iWork was not meant to compete with Office, but instead to offer customers a lower cost, and easier to use alternative. While I use Office 2008 for business documents, I often do page layout in Pages, and I use Keynote for presentations. Since these are my own files, and I’m not sharing these documents, I just stick with iWork. Honestly, the writer sounds more like an Apple hater than someone who would be writing for a site called “The Apple Blog”.
@howie…yeah I have noticed that a lot lately with this blog…HATERS big time
if you don’t like Apple products then please quit blogging about Apple
Actually, I use iWork because it’s available for the iPad and Mac Office is not. However, most people use Mac Office over iWork, despite the heavily discounted price of iWork when purchasing a new Mac. Clearly, the great majority of Mac users see something in Mac Office that is not present in iWork, unless, of course, they are just a bunch of sheep. But then why aren’t they running Windows?
Office seems nice for people who require the feature set, but it is overkill for day to day use. I find Pages much easier to use for document creation. In business I’m finding that there is less and less need to send Word files. PDFs work for most cases. Also, much of what used to be distributed in .doc form has migrated to the web.
Keynote is still far better than Powerpoint. I present for a living and give some thirty or so presentations a year. I usually make two versions of my presentations. A feature rich one which I present from my MBP and a projector and a dumbed down, text only version exported to PPT for those people that demand copies of the presentation.
I do agree that Apple has been slow to update iWork. It’s great that Apple is making iWork because they have fantastic talent to do this. It is a drag that Apple is making iWork because it is subject to the ebb and flow of interest from management. Work has been going on. In the last presentation Steve gave regarding the antenna issue I noticed several unreleased features in Keynote.
Yeah, I wish I could make exploding 3d pie charts.
Also looking forward to the “Ribbon”. The iWork toolbars aren’t nearly cluttered enough. I like having half the screen taken up by toolbars.
EXACTLY. How is a Mac software UI copying a Windows software UI a good thing? I’ve used the ribbon and it’s anything but intuitive and in typical windows fashion, it is cluttered with icon and list shortcuts to a gazillion things you use once a year. Ridiculous and has no place on a Mac IMO.
iWork 09 is NOT a product to be compared with Office 11. They address two very different market segments. The feature set, pricing and ease-of-use are very different because of for whom the product is made. One is for the average user: student, small business owner, housewife, etc. The other tries for more breadth by a large feature set, while giving up ease-of-use to give the power-user more benefit.
Take your pick: power user would probably want Office 11; more modest use-then pick iWork 09.
If you want to compare Word to Pages, just take a look at the Edit menu, arguably the second most important function besides Format.
Pages Edit is simple and easy to use, Word has confusing drop down menus, and the same Edit functionality works in most Apple programs including Mail. It’s a perfect example of Apple Design vs. Microsoft Design. Apple programs just work (easily).
Does the Office home & student license still prohibit professional use?
So is the new awesomeness worth the $50 or so extra cost for the home user? For the small business owner is it worth the $350 or whatever it costs?
For big-office work, office on Windows is a no brainer. But for the home user that would consider iWork in the first place, it still seems competitive.
Pages rocks! Period. I am constantly working with InDesign and MS DOC/DOCX files in laying out our Newsletter. Well I can’t tell how much graphics in Word SUCKS! Exporting graphics from Word one ends up with images that are impossible to resize and edit. InDesign doesn’t handle them any better. But bring the tiff images into Pages and voila! it fixes all! It re-sizes without loss of definition. Just export to pdf and paste into InDesign. Nice iWork Pages!
In fact we are thinking of using Pages as our production app for our newsletter.
P.S. Damn it … we are in 2010. Office has to grow up and stop using it’s proprietary sucky way of handling images/graphics.
Yes iWork does not have all the features that Office has. For me that is a selling point, for my needs Office is heavily bloated with unnecessary ‘features.’ iWork allows me to work far more effeciently than Office does, for a lower price. And that’s what matters most.
It’s clear that Charles doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The new Outlook will not work at my company, where Entourage 2008 works just fine, because some idiot at M$ made the decision to only support Exchange 2007 and above. Keynote is a brilliant application, blowing Powerpoint out of the water. As for the Ribbon interface, it’s crap.
I don’t think, that the MS Office will be better, in fact it never was and never will. Apple has done a lot of work on iWork and when your not looking for compability much, iWork wins at every thing (effects, interface, Mac compability, fast and easy, cheap), but if you want compability, then you can easily upload your iWork document to iWork.com, or export into PDF document (Pages, Numbers), or video, or site (Keynote). And a lot of speculations are talking about the new iWork ’10, or ’11. So I will never use expensive MS Office with interface like the Space Shuttle’s computer.
Sorry but this ringing endorsement of Office still will not get me to buy anything Microsoft produces. I’ll stick with iWork, it’s good enough for me.
I’ll add that I recently put both iWork(Pages) ’09 and Word 2008 through some serious academic writing. And I can say, with no remorse, they both have some real issues. For example, superscript/subscript in Pages is poorly implemented. Once you superscript (or subscript) its back up to the menu, format, font, baseline to get the next word back to baseline. There is no keystroke to get back to baseline? And yes, if you re-superscipt, then SOMETIMES you get back to baseline, but it is literally hit or miss. And don’t get me started about the integration with Endnote. It’s doable, but hardly elegant. Sometimes I wonder how a company lead by a man who is such an advocate for education can put out a tool that is so inadequate for academic use? So I guess I am in that 5% or so where Pages just isn’t good enough. And as for Word, well, all I’ll say is that it crashed 16 times within 4 hours. Seriously. The problem was 5 images and running EndnoteX2 was just too much. Everything was updated and I have no problems with smaller documents. Really, it is mind boggling how we can have such advanced hardware and an advanced OS, but things are really not much better than when I was using a G4 667 powerbook running OsX 10.3/4 with Office 2004 and EndnoteX. Although placing figures and formatting the document in Word is much better. Way to take advantage of the great new hardware/software guys. Bottom line? I just need to get work done. As long as one of these companies can get their act together, I’ll be happy.
jade, slay those fanboys!
Have you personally used Office for Mac or iWork? Based on your comment, I doubt it.
Thank you for your intelligent input to the discussion.
Not.
I’d love to see ODF import feature in iWork… probably the only thing that keeps me from buying it and completely abandoning that horrible OpenOffice/NeoOffice duo…
Also iWork.com should be updated to work seamlessly with iWork. I’d love to see “Save to iWork.com…” and “Open from iWork.com…” in Pages, Numbers and Keynote.
I have always felt that iWork lagged behind office, even office 2 version ago was better than iWork now … with the exception of Keynote vs Powerpoint that is. I would never write a presentation in Powerpoint but then I never write anything longer than a page in Pages and I never even launch numbers.
I hope microsoft do a good job with Office 2011 as the current version is a bit clunky on Snow leopard
Simon
Part of the reason I bought my first Mac was seeing my friend use Keynote and Pages. They are not really great tools for collaboration (since few other people have them) but the documents they produce look a hell of a lot better than their Powerpoint and Word equivalents, and can be produced with a lot less effort. Receive a presentation in PDF, for instance, and it is immediately obvious whether it was done in PowerPoint or Keynote… Watch a well-made one on the screen, and this is doubly obvious – Keynote knocks the socks off Powerpoint for making slides well-aligned and pretty.
Office 2010 (never have used Office on the Mac) is a very good piece of software, and the ribbon, especially now that it has been tweaked from Office 2007 is a great user interface paradigm for ‘power’ tasks. But have you ever tried dealing with 3rd party fonts or charts, tables, and diagrams in Word? The program still forces me to create charts in Excel and paste them in as bitmaps in Word, or risk the whole document being screwed, especially if it is a large document. I can understand problems with this in 1995 but in 2010? Apple’s omnipresent VoiceOver feature is pretty useful for proofreading your documents as well…
Or for free you can use Open Office. Not as pretty in the UI department, but it is truly cross platform compatible. OpenOffice loos and works the same on Windows, OS X and Linux. Andd up until now has been the best way of opening MS’s docx files on my Mac.
For me the killer feature in Office2011 is Communicator Client, so I can now fully participate in the Office Comms environment (until now I had another Windows PC that was basically just a $500 telephone) or I had to run Windows in a VM on my Mac.
Outlook is a HUGE improvement over Entourage, as it works just liek the Windows one, but that also means, it has all the same crappy features as Outlook on Windows – poor suport for iCAL, but Contacts does pick up synch with Address Book – pretty much in real time.
If it was my money though, it really is hard to justify the cost for personal use. Student Edition – again, nothing there most students couldn’t do with OpenOffice or iWork.
I don’t think you can even compare iWork to MS Office. iWork is a fast, lightweight, user-friendly way to quickly create simple documents like invoices or short letters. I use Pages all the time because it’s so fast and has a smooth, simple interface – especially compared to the overweight, bulky and ridiculously overcrowded button-hell of MS Office.
Serious office work consisting of complex scientific excel sheets or the writing of an entire book, I wouldn’t trust to iWork. You’ll need a real office suite. Even Open Office is still an option – although progress on that seems to have halted just as iWork.
Office 2011 has thousands of features. Most of the people will only need a few of them. I dumped Office in favor of iWork at home and in the office. iWork is sufficient for writing specifications, creating business letters, faxes, handling 3 years of web-site kpis and creating stunning presentations (and using those kpis from numbers easily). The only thing I am really missing in numbers (iWork) are pivot tables. I have been living very well with iWork and without Office.
that guy is a pc fanboy or what?
iwork is way better than office
office is so complicated and incoherent!
I don’t care about features and I’m sure that most people don’t
iwork has all I need plus extras like reflexions, themes, 3d graphs that look way better than the office ones, instant alpha, magic move transitions. but most of all… its easy and coherent.
by the way I don’t use either.. I use google docs and export as html =)
open standards ftw =D
that guy is a pc fanboy or what?
iwork is way better than office
office is so complicated and incoherent!
I don’t care about features and I’m sure that most people don’t
iwork has all I need plus extras like reflexions, themes, 3d graphs that look way better than the office ones, instant alpha, magic move transitions. but most of all… its easy and coherent.
by the way, I don’t use either.. I use google docs and export as html =)
open standards ftw =D
Bigger isn’t necessarily better. I just want a word processor which does word processing and not photo editing, graphic design or anything else. The more “features” they add the more complicated, bloated and in some ways less useful the product becomes. For that matter why do they feel the need to keep adding to the product as if it wasn’t complete? What’s next? Will it be making my morning coffee, reading my blogs and telling my FaceBook friends what I’m doing? Who cares! Just give me a plain old easy to use word processor.
feature bloat.
just get Office 2008 to work as intended and I’d buy it. office needs a snow leopard-style code overhaul. the last thing it needs is new “features” like image editing. what a joke.
I agree with other commenters – It not a good comparison to compare them. Perhaps if the rumors are true with iworks 11, THEN iworks 11 and office 2011 can be properly compared. Of course when comparing newer to older 99.9% of the time new products will win out.
I believe each product has a proper place to use. for example, coming from (windows) excel 2003, I found that it was a lot easier to complete my daily tasks in numbers with their functions and graphs.
That being said, its good to see Microsoft updating their product to run properly on Macs (I heard it is even running in Cocoa).
I haven’t purchased Ms Office since Office 2004, and I only bought that because work required that I have Virtual PC. iWork has been my preferred Office suite since 2005 or 2006, and Ms Office has never given me a single reason to switch—especially when I can get five iWork installs for about 40% of the price of one Ms Office install.
I was stunned by reading that the reviewer prefers Word to Pages, “especially for large documents”. He must come from a different galaxy. Pages is dramatically superior to Word in every respect (except learning curve, make the investment).
Excel is dramatically better than Numbers as far as features and power — Numbers is better for the smaller, prettier spreadsheets that comprise 90% of spreadsheets.
KeyNote is far prettier than PowerPoint, and it’s easier to develop a logical storyline due to indexing/outlining, and it’s better graphically once you’ve learned to integrate Preview for images and, say OmniGraffle, for complex diagrams. But PowerPoint still has a competitive feature set and far more available templates and clipart.
Overall, I switched from a power Office user to an iWork user and feel the move was justified. (Except for the occaisional advanced Excel application.)
A lot of folks here are missing the point in comparing office and iWork. MS office is a very extensive product and is designed for the corporate user in mind and has extensive functionality. It can be complicated for many users and a blessing for others.
iWork is more designed for the casual and home user, simple and easy to use, just enough to do what you need. Comparing iWork to MS office is like comparing a two seater plane to an Airbus, sure they are both planes but with a different design goal in mind
In 2009, I bought a 17″ MBP, after loving the use of my iPhone and airport extreme base station. I have tried to use iWork, but it doesn’t come close to what our business needs even with the ability to save as ppt, etc. The reason? When our instuctors who are all using PPT open the files, text is in the wrong place, etc. Same problem with crappy Office 2008. And I was shocked to have just learned Office 2007, which I really loved the ribbon, only to learn that the idiots running the MS Mac business unit thought it was more important to create yet another interface!
I’m delighted to learn Office 2011 brings the ribbon back. I find it far superior to any of the iWork interface, primarily because it’s what I’m used to, which I believe will be the case for most it’s target market: people who switched to a Mac, but still need to use Office products.
I’m a huge Apple fan, and I just bought a 27″ Quad Core i5 iMac with 16gb ram and a 27″ external HP monitor for our new Office. While I love these products, I don’t find iWork anything close to serving our business needs, primarily since most of our clients are either from the US Government or are government contractors.
What’s the point of this post?
I bet most of 2011 soon to be released softwares won’t get any competition from a released since 2009 softwares… It’s not because it’s the case with old OS X version and newest version of Windows, that it should also be the case for Office suite.
I thought I had to use Office for Mac 2008, but it’s really painful. It’s heavy, it’s buggy and constantly crashing. I was using iWork for my personal work, but I naturally switch to iWork for my professional work too.
Some exports or sharing with windows machines are perhaps not 100% accurate… so what? In my environment, it doesn’t really matter. I need to get the job done… that’s it. I’m even tended to send my iWork files also since most of my contacts do use Macs now.
I don’t use PivotTable and can adjust my photos with iPhoto and Aperture3. I’m perfectly happy with Mail, iCal, Address Book and Today (from Second Gear)… so what would be the reason for me to change? Actually none!
Expect in some very specific work environment, we can live without Office, mainly when we know it won’t be no Upgrade Path.
Even if $119/199 could look an attractive price for Office, it’s still way more than the $49 I paid for iWork who’s covering 90% of people needs.
Nonetheless, Microsoft is always announcing software 12+ months before the real release, teasing everyone with some “amazing” features that reveal, in moment of the release, to never work properly, as expected… or also available in competition product. They can’t fix the current version, so they tease everyone with a hypothetical better future version… it’s kind of lame.
In the other hand, Apple is known to keep everything secret. So no one knows if a new iWork update/version will not be released even before Office Mac 2011.
It could, and I’m sure it will, happen anytime soon (mainly in regard of the lack of update on iWork.com). So, I won’t spend a penny on Microsoft anymore. I’m just gonna pass this time.
Bye bye Microsoft, it was the last piece of software I was using.
Phil
I liked your article and analysis. Thanks. I look forward to the release of Office Mac 11.
Allright, its got the same features as iWork plus some thingies most people won’t use. But even if you accept that “The new Mac Office 2011, currently in development, will easily best iWork ’09, and with every feature update demonstrates just how far behind iWork has fallen. The latest video preview only increases the value gap between the two office suites” crap, you should note that office mac 2011 is going to be released 2 years after iWork 2009, and that’s a big deal… let’s see how the next version of iWork turns out.
iWork was never about having more features than MS Office. In fact, having fewer features is a feature. If you want more features, buy MS Office, by all means.
The iPad apps *are* an update, not a reason for no update.
In the past we could rely on a new iWork every year, until this year. We have never been able to rely on a new MS Office every year.
Office for Mac to me always has been clunky, feature-overladen, slow, and the UI far from intuitive. The only reason I keep using it, is in order to be as compatible as possible, when exchanging files with PC users of Office.
I realize this is a bit old, but I wanted to make a few comments here..
1) The *biggest* problem I have with Office for Mac is that it ignores published Apple UI guidelines. This is one of the hallmarks of the platform, and one of the primary reasons I switched to Mac from Linux. I assume that the point is for PC users to feel “at home” in MS Office for Mac, but please, don’t ignore the Mac users that actually use things like keyboard shortcuts (which, believe it or not, are plentiful on Mac)
2) Problem 2 – People grew up in a broken home of document creation, and while Pages tries to be a solution to this, Word perpetuates the problem (but has gotten better). For some unholy reason, people designing “word processing” software in the ages of dinosaurs got the sensation that users need to be able to individually boldface, italicize, and adjust font sizes by the point, and people could just adjust position by using tab, space, CR’s, and the like. This is a terrible way to write any document. Templates and styles are the way of the future, and once you embrace them, you will be amazed at how much your writing will improve. Word has finally taken steps to go there, but it seems that the lack of individual knobs for the settings are a constant complaint in Pages. This will fade as time marches forward, because it appears Word is going the way of styles as well.
Lastly, to those of you writing academic papers in Word, are you crazy? – I can’t even imagine putting that kind of effort into something as flaky as Word. A few page business draft, sure – but a 75 page Thesis? Have you seriously never used TeX? Yeah, the interface sucks, and it’s a pain to set up initially, but I haven’t worked on a single paper that wasn’t written out in either Tex or LaTeX. It is the ultimate in separating out the information from the formatting, and your paper is in plain old text, which you can view, edit, and open on *any* platform, and produces FAR better output than either of these other options. The learning curve is steep, but if your life is producing documents for academia, it’s well worth looking into.
My .02
The trouble with MS Office for Mac is that it crashes and seems to have difficulties handling complex multipage documents with graphics and linked text blocks (delay in opening, delay in saving). Until I see a real stable version of Office for Mac, I won’t believe Office has any other advantage to offer than being the standard.
Years of development by the richest company for such an unstable result is a shame.
The IPAD knocked out 50% of the laptops at Stores. Looks like IWORK is taking over??? Sorry Microsofties. Pages is much easier to use then Word. Numbers is way more advanced graphically then Excel. Is it time again for Microsoft to copy Apple like it did the Mac. The author even admits Keynote is much better then Powerpoint.
I have recently switched from windows to mac. And I love office. However, I have found so many problems with mac office. Word constantly kicks me out. I keep reporting all problems to apple but I am not sure really what to do.
I think most commentors here using iWork corporately must be in small business or design. I (in the UK, maybe it’s a regional thing) have never received a document in pages format at work. MS Office is what the world works with. Having the ability to use that software with my platform of choice is what makes the new Mac Office suite golden for me. I like the simplicity of iWork, but until I can use even simple spreadsheets (hyperlink to a file, anyone?) in Numbers, Excel will always be a winner.
Pierre – You are right! iWork is great and I find that pages works better and faster than word. You are right about Excel being number 1!
I just wish I could created a bulleted list… not a check-box list, in Word 2011 or 2008.
I have to say that since I’ve been working with iWork my life changed. It’s so easy to use, so many attractive things, even numbers tells you for example that: Interest = (Principal*Rate*Time) but in Excel you have: A3 = A5*A6*A7 what’s that? In Keynote Graphics never were so easy to use, for me it’s a nightmare to start again and again if I want to make changes to the graphics in Excel, but in Numbers you just move it, enlarge it, change color almost instantly = EASY.
I have been reading reviews about Office 2011 and they say to wait, it’s not finished, and it has some software errors (as everything Microsoft does, check it’s new Windows phone), you can read the the New York Times, and CNBC and lots more about this.
Compatibility: Well I made my Masters Degree with iWork, at the office I work everyday with iWork and everybody around me sends me Word documents, PowerP and Excel to check the State’s Income and Outcome for example. I’ve never had any problem. This is in my own experience, I don’t know other people having problems.
What Microsoft should really do is remake the messenger for Mac users, it’s really terrible.
Office – any version – will be a genuine competitor with iWork when the former STOPS CRASHING!!!
When I add up the time I’ve spent tracking down problems with Office for Mac after it has crashed for the umpteenth time in any given week, plus the fact that Microsoft seem incapable of designing a product that is really and truly compatible with the PC version, or rendering proper assistance, the premise of this article starts to look pretty laughable.
Sure, iWork has problems, but wasting days of my life that I will never get back is not one of them.
Listen office does not even compare to iwork, it is in a totally different league. I will never use office. People that think office is better than iWork need to re evaluate their life
How can you compare iWork with MS Office???
iWork never was intended to compete with Office in a business enviroment.
Howerver for (SO)HO enviroment iWork is the best! Most certainly if you also consider the difference in price!
This article almost sounds like the MS website “why you should buy a Windows PC”.
“Worse, Pages, and especially Numbers, struggle with large documents.”
Good lord. I work with both Pages and Word, and I can tell you from frequent experience that only one of those applications pukes on larger documents. And it’s not Pages. Word creates more unnecessary work for me than any other “productivity” app out there. Gah.
And one more thing: the grotesque feature bloat in Word is a massive liability, not something to be praised. It’s fat and stupid.
What a shame the article doesn’t make mention of the fact that, as with most Microsoft applications, not everything “works” as it should; for instance the “Save As” function in Outlook is greyed out & is unable to be accessed
I am so furious with iWorks!!! Don’t know where to begin, nd shouting at a wall anyway!! OMG! had NO idea. When I asked–over and over–about how my 100′s+100′s of old Office files would work and look on this iWorks, I was assured all would be “fine”. That’ where I’m speechless. It’s SO NOT ‘fine’!! EVERYTHING about it sucks right at this moment–even the finder. I just wish I had my old Word back. But am told it will not work with 10.6. And don’t want to waste anymore time here–as it angers me that MAC has made these stupid assumptions. Just as the mouse pad no longer has the dual function. Now you have to use the “enter” key or go up and move the cursor to the address bar…… I can not spell the expressions of my angst!! I’m otta here!
Mac pwns Windows at everything except iWork. iWork VS Mac Office 2011: Mac Office wins. I love Apple, don’t get me wrong. But I tried Word for Mac, and I was amazed at all the features it had compared to Pages. It is now my primary word processing program.
I’m not quite sure why all the commotion about these two sets of programs; Pages imports and exports .doc and .docx without blinking; same respectively with Numbers/Excel and Keynote/PowerPoint extensions. I have both Office:Mac ’11 and iWork ’11, and I use them for different things. If I want more polished, more powerful, more intuitive, I go with iWork. If I want simple word processing without the polish, I hit Word. I don’t even bother with PP or EXC because they’re not as powerful, versatile, or polished as their Apple counterparts. I may occasionally need them to open someone’s clunkier older Windows file, but other than that, no need.
My gripe with Apple actually has to do with the fact that they used to ship all their ‘puters with a word processing suite (remember AppleWorks?), but now they’re almost as stingy as “pc” world and only provide Text Edit.