iWork, worth it ?

[chevy]

Do you think iWork is a good and complete product ? Or does it still miss too many features ?

What is its first application ? Home ? Small business ? How does it integrate with Quicken ?

[andychrist]

I'm disappointed because I thought that it would completely replace AppleWorks, whose drafting program I have always found convenient but buggy. Still the demo looked awesome, wish it were included with all new Macs, like iLife. Unfortunately even iWork's meagre system requirements are too much for my old bondiMac. Another excuse to upgrade to the new iMac!

Maybe I'll take a walk over to the Apple Store and check it out...

[Randman]

I think it'll be a great compliment to Office.

[karavite]

Years ago I used ClarisWorks for everything. I went kicking and screaming to Office. I don't know much about iWork, but the thing that ClarisWorks did really well was integrating differerent doc types into one doc. Text, drawing and spreadsheet - were each treated as a sort of component of a document and depending on which you were working with it would give you the cooresponding UI (menus, tools...). Not the absurd mess in Office where you have completely different UI rules for tables in Word vs spreadsheets in excel... and don't even get me started about importing between Word, PowerPoint and Excel! If iWork follows this same philosophy, I might like to use it for personal use.

P.S. Didn't Apple explore something long ago that went against this whole monolithic app concept. Instead of giant apps that try to do everything you would have an almost generic doc type that you could then apply different tools to - text, image, tables... Was it OpenDoc - or is that something else? Whatever it was, it was a really neat idea. Alas, imagine our world had MS not been able to take it over...

[audi_luv]

I would be more willing to pay for a supported commercial version of OpenOffice/StarOffice for Mac.

[symphonix]

I think its pretty clear that this is a very, very different office suite to MS-Office, OpenOffice, NeoOffice, AppleWorks and StarOffice. Its design is something completely different, and as such I can quite easily see that people will happily use this alongside more traditional office packages and word processors.

As for value for money, I think iWorks price point is fantastic and I will definitely be buying it. As a regular Keynote user, I know just how powerful that application can be. I like the fact that iWork supports Flash, PDF, MS-Office, and Adobe formats such as PhotoShop and Illustrator. It does these extremely well, for instance you can drag in a multi-layer PhotoShop file and it brings in all the layers as separate objects, and then groups them, allowing you to do some pretty phenomenal graphical trickery in your documents.

And all this at the price of a consumer-end product. I should hopefully have a copy of this arriving not long after Jan 22nd, so I can give it a more thorough investigation.

[Pengu]

Im going to buy it.. I have Mellel (i still say it's the best Cocoa word processor around) but it doesn't do everything i want, and it doesn't have great Word compatibility.. I only need simple formatting.. and the added bonus of some layouting tools built in, is just brilliant!

[ApeintheShell]

I think almost all the announcements took me by suprise when I watched the keynote the day before yesterday. iWork looks like a briliant piece of software that is worth owning for the presentations and reports I have to turn in for school. Plus the formating in Pages surpasses formating found in Microsoft Word and others. I like the integration of iLife as well.