Download Squad First Look and Gallery: Apple iWork '08 in the spotlight

Hot on the heels of today's new iLife suite, iWork '08 comes to the table too. Whilst new Keynote, and Pages, features are expected, the most hotly tipped question was "Would Apple bring out an Excel rival"? Behold Numbers and so much more.




Pages - The new version of Apple's Word Processing / Desktop Publishing application has truly brought about a more modal operation to the application. In prior version, a user was left in the lurch between whether the document was a 'Page Layout' piece, or a 'Word Processed' piece. Whilst it sort of worked, it also sort of didn't work, however that appears to finally have changed. With iLife '08, the distinction between the two is far wider, and the Word Processing portion of the application far more able.

One of the overriding and important features has always been the Microsoft Office compatibility, and Pages '08 continues this, not only with the older DOC formats as with older versions, but also full read/write compatibility with the Microsoft Office Open XML format (beating the Microsoft MacBU by nearly 6 months - whilst the Microsoft team has beta converters out, there's been no way to edit OOXML files straight out of the box until now). In addition to this (obvious, but pleasantly surprising) feature, there's the ability to, in Word-compatible formats, track your changes. As someone who's used Pages for a fair amount of product documentation, it's fantastic to see this arrive as, much to my own sadness, not everyone is running a Mac.

In a pass to the recently-delayed Microsoft Office for Mac 2008, there's even a ribbon-esque context sensitive Formatting bar that allows you to format text so very easily (in fact, this very post was written in Pages '08). To top off what appears to be a very well thought out, and mature, upgrade there's 140 templates to spur on whatever project you might want to start in Pages.

Keynote - In this release, Apple really seems to have tried to make the graphical abilities as powerful as possible, whilst keeping everything as simple as possible. Just one look at the alignment tools, the photo browser, the custom shape-drawing abilities, or my own favourite (for avoiding having to fire up Photoshop): Instant Alpha. The feature is limited, and certainly best used in photos with a highly contrasting set of colours, however it's a neat idea, and I have to give kudos to Apple for realising that those of us needing to give presentations desire transparent images to wrap around the text. There's tonnes of other consumer orientated features too, like the ability to drag in a set of photos, and Keynote then going and creating an auto-slideshow of them. For seasoned professionals, there's animation paths (which I'm convinced we saw in the January Apple keynote) and the ability to combine them for maximum impact.

Numbers - The newest addition to the iWork package, this Excel-rivaling application offers, arguably, the features most average Mac users want in a spreadsheet program, whilst putting it into an attractive, and relatively straightforward user interface (more on that in a minute). As with Keynote, Pages (and other tools such as Interface Builder), there's a series of guidelines to help you align free-form shapes, text boxes, images (from the Media Browser which is now common place) and anything else you drag into the spreadsheet. Of course, like Pages and Keynote it's compatible with the Office Open XML file formats, so going to Office 2007 should be a breeze. Apple designed templates, charting abilities (as the icon might suggest) and the nice touches with the UI (such as the Formula Editor shown below), make it surprisingly and, dare I say it, fun to create a spreadsheet.


So what else is there that's new? The user interface throughout the three applications. The look and feel of the trio has been dramatically improved, honed and seemingly re-thought about. The splash screens are stunning, and the Formula inspector in Numbers was certainly a pleasant surprise. The integration with iLife is, whilst expected, refreshing. Looking at iWork '08, even just this evening, it would appear that Apple has created a product that may well render Office for Mac semi-irrelevant. An expensive option that business users will require, but one that is overkill for the average Mac user. Whilst creating a consumer-friendly office, is arguably what iWork has always been about, that's not to say Office and iWork aren't competitors.

iWork beats Office when you look at costs. It beats Office on user interface, not simply because the shipping version of Office for Mac is now four years old, and it also beats it for sheer simplicity and ease of use. Whilst hard-core Excel users may not find it meets their most technical needs (as a casual user of Excel, that's something I rarely encounter), that's not to say you can't try and find out, for Apple is even offering a 30-day trial of the software which you'll want to see. Are the gloves off in the Mac OS X office-software arena? Yessir. It seems it's game on, and that can only be good for us all wanting to share Word, Powerpoint and Excel documents, whatever our platform of choice. We've put together a gallery of shots of the new version of iWork, which we'd recommend you check out!

Tags: apple, commercial, excel, keynote, microsoft, numbers, office, pages, powerpoint, word