As a recent (sort-of) switcher, I’ve been exploring iWork ’08 a fair bit, and with the launch of iWork ’09 I’ve really thrown myself into Pages, Numbers and Keynote. For someone who has used Microsoft Office almost exclusively for the last twenty-odd years, that’s a huge change! Along the way, I’ve started to notice subtle — but important — differences between them, but they’re not the nuts-and-bolts workaday differences you might expect.
Productivity apps are at the core of most desktop publishing. After all, everyone eventually gets around to writing a letter! Very many of us have the dubious pleasure of living in a spreadsheet every day of our working lives. Some of us even use presentation tools like PowerPoint. (Just don’t get me started on how horribly most people use it.)
I was five years old when Word was released. It’s a very dear friend. So, when I started using a Mac in mid 2008, I bought Office 2008 right away. My reasoning was: Office is the best Productivity Suite in the World. I know it inside and out. It’s all I’ll ever need.
Fast-forward six months (and one upgrade to iWork ’09 later) and that opinion has changed radically. Office is undoubtedly the best productivity suite in the world, if you measure “best” by the sheer number of features it packs beneath that shiny ribbon.
Yet, after pushing myself to use Pages I’m rapidly moving away from Word. Why? Well, it’s not because Pages has more features. It doesn’t. Pages, by comparison, is a bare-bones word processor, far less mature than Word.
No, the reason I have migrated to Pages is because it offers a far superior experience. I probably get just as much actual work done in Pages as I ever did in Word, but the process seems to be so…different. I enjoy work more when I use Pages because it makes me feel more creative, more empowered. More productive.
And while its themes or image formatting tools aren’t as feature-rich as those in Word, the results are definitely superior. It’s Apple’s indomitable style and attention to detail that permeates iWork and, I like to think, adds a little of its sparkle to my own documents.
In a classic example of quality over quantity, the (relatively) small selection of image effects in Pages produces far more beautiful results than the unimaginative million-billion effects crowbar-ed into Word 2007.
The same is true for Keynote. And Numbers. Especially Numbers. For 30 years business computing was mired in gun-metal grey spreadsheet-hell. Then Apple wanders up to the bar in all its turtleneck glory and, with a flourish, produces an application that makes spreadsheets a pleasure to produce. Spreadsheets become Art. Incredible!
I think that’s the secret of iWork — it encourages us to take something that was always fairly bland and run-of-the-mill (a spreadsheet, an essay, a presentation) and challenges us to press a few buttons and produce something utterly gorgeous. Microsoft Office gives us the same tools (and more) but it doesn’t care if we don’t use them. iWork, on the other hand, gently coaxes us to do something special…and richly rewards us for making that tiny bit of effort.
Upgrading to iWork ’09 is a no-brainer for me. And if you haven’t tried it yet, you should do yourself a favour and download the trial. I dare you not to produce something extraordinary!
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