With the Mac platform becoming more popular among all types of users, Apple is certainly well aware of the need to provide its own alternative to Microsoft Office, and specifically popular tools like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
The iWork ’09 suite is the latest version of Apple’s answer to MS Office, and it’s advertised as a powerful productivity suite with easy integration into Mac OS X. Even with the Apple backing, is iWork really a viable alternative to Microsoft Office?
The Basics
iWork requires a Mac with either an Intel processor, or a 500 MHz or faster PowerPC G4 or G5 processor. The suite runs on Mac OS X version 10.4.11 (Tiger), or 10.5.6 (Leopard) and up. It requires at least 512 MB of RAM, with 1 GB recommended, and 1.2 GB of hard disk space. It retails for $79.00 for a single license, or $99.00 for the 5-license Family Pack.
The three main components of iWork are the word processor Pages, the spreadsheet app Numbers, and the presentation creator Keynote. In other words, it offers alternatives to Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
So, how do Apple’s tools really stack up?
The Pros
As you’d expect from an Apple product, iWork is very easy to set up and use, and is at the end of the day an intuitive package that integrates with the operating system in ways that aren’t aggressive, but natural and genuinely helpful. This is a huge thing, as one thing that has been sorely missing in recent iterations of Office, with its infamous Ribbon, is the element of user friendliness. Even if you have the most powerful tools in the world on one side, you might find that you can get work done more easily with a set that’s easier to handle. This is a big point in favour of iWork.
In some respects, the individual components of iWork look very good next to their Microsoft counterparts. Pages is a bit more intuitive than Word in a general sense, and it’s also actually somewhat more powerful when it comes to adding graphics and fancy formatting to text documents. Again, this is probably exactly what most users would expect from an Apple product, and it delivers. Numbers is very similar to Excel for the most part, while Keynote is one of the most versatile presentation tools for any platform.
The Cons
There are a couple of important absences from iWork. It still doesn’t have a business-level email client that can truly compete with Outlook, and although Pages and Numbers are respectable, they aren’t quite at the level of their Microsoft counterparts in terms of total features. Some omissions are very problematic, such as the lack of footnote support in Pages (you’ll have to get additional software in order to make footnotes), while Numbers isn’t really adequate for accounts or other number-crunchers due to its lack of really high-powered tools.
The Verdict
For most users, iWork will do just fine. It’s perhaps best viewed as a somewhat more user-friendly and less pricey alternative to Office. For the most part, it can do the jobs of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and it gives you the added advantages you’d expect from an Apple product.
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