iWork Review

By Thomas Marshall · July 26, 2005 ·

A ‘Trail Version’ of iWork ships with Tiger. You will find out why I used inverted commas later. iWork is Apple’s productivity suite. That is probably what they call it anyway. As far as I am concerned it is a complete waste of time. It contains only two apps. A word processor, called pages, and a presentation app, called Keynote. I really don’t know what the point of Pages is. All macs ship with Appleworks as far as I know, and that is just fine for pretty much all word processing needs. The rest of the Appleworks components are awful, and virtually impossible to use. But since I never make presentations, and if I need to do a spreadsheet I have a copy of office for mac OS 9, and can make it with that. If you were mad enough to go out and buy iWork it would set you back £49. That is £49 to much in my opinion.
Pages is really crap, along the top there is one row of buttons. An index of your Pages, a columns button, a Style button, (list, header, sub header and so on), an object button, (shapes, tables and charts), an inspector button, (that is the sort of thing you would normally find on windows; to check for illegal operations) a media buttons, (wow lets put a song on our sheet of paper that will make it better; I think it is for putting photos in actually, although there is an audio option!), a button to set the color, of text and tables and shapes I suppose, and a fonts button. If you click fonts you don’t get a list like in everything else. You get a little window, which incidentally does not give you a sample of the font, just the spelling. The interface is rather blank really, there is no page border, text just sits in the middle a white expanse. The feature of iWork that Apple are making a big thing out of, is ‘Pages sense of style’. They probably mean the masses of stupid themes or templates that have been included to put on ones documents. No one would ever need them. These days people are perfectly capable of making their own invitations, and writing their own letter without Apple telling them how to do it. Really £24.50 on a load of useless themes and 10 buttons on a menu bar, is a waste of money.
Keynote, I suppose has its uses. Although if you make presentation then you are probably a lecturer or Steve Jobs, and then you can get Office for free from your college or university. There are also loads of stupid templates with keynote. I suppose templates for presentations are OK, but just plain slides is usually best for a presentation, without to many colors.
So to sum it all up. There is no need to get iWork. Use the demo that comes with Tiger if you want. If you need a presentation tool, get Office. If you can use Appleworks presentation then congratulations to you. So get Office is the final message.
Just one more thing more thing. At the beginning i said, ‘you’ll find out why I used inverted commas around trial version. Well here’s why. The trial version is the full version with a 30 day usage limit on it. And then, if you want to continue using it, you just have to buy a serial number. Well on the internet these days there are loads of cracks for things like this. So just hunt one of these down and you have endless usage of Apples most lame product ever. Why ever don’t Apple do and iLife ‘05 ‘trial version’.