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83 Comments
- iamgnat, on 10/11/2007, -2/+21I've been using iWork 08 for a bit now and i'm still not sure about it as a competitor with Office for the power/constant users, but for the price I would take it over MSO for the little bit that I would use it.
My usage of Office has always been limited to creating simple presentations (mainly just text, nothing fancy), reading other peoples docs/writing my resume, and examining CSV data and maybe a few simple graphs.
iWork 08 "feels" nicer than Office as it feels more like a Mac app than a ported Windows app. And I like the price too.
What I don't like:
1) "Files" are actually bundles. This makes it annoying to attach to an email/ftp/scp/etc..
2) "Files" take up more space than their MSO counterparts. My resume is ~120k in Pages, but if I save to Word format it is ~30k. No images, no weird formating, just apparently lots of overhead.
3) Numbers does not like large CSV files. On my Mac Pro opening a ~25k row/10 col CSV file, Excel (via Rosetta mind you) takes ~30 seconds to display the data including starting the application. Numbers takes almost 2 minutes to do the same thing. Once it displays it, Excel will do anything I ask it instantaneously. Numbers, on the other hand, likes to hang up with the beach ball for something as simple as scrolling through the data.
-dave - eleven, on 10/11/2007, -2/+18wow, a cheery bunch of people in here.
- TheFinaleofSeem, on 10/11/2007, -3/+12One big advantage of iWork '08: It's a helluva lot easier to use than MS Office. Yes, it lacks some of the features of MSO, but if you don't need them, iWork is just fine. I took several classes on MS Word and I still find it to be a pain. Pages, however, is far simpler and more intuitive as far as interface design goes.
- yikiad, on 10/11/2007, -0/+8calm down. jesus f'n christ. a guy asks a simple question and gets called a fanboy?. wtf is wrong with people? and you bag on religious zealots?
*****, man. get a life. - Nerfdude, on 10/11/2007, -10/+17conclusion: it's no Microsoft Office. surprise!
- GodJustice, on 10/11/2007, -8/+15Yeah, like playing video games... oh wait...
- Karmavs, on 10/11/2007, -0/+7A lot of the overhead is caused by the Apps storing a PDF version of the document inside the bundle for previews. YOu can disable this in the preferences for each app
- knightboat, on 10/11/2007, -2/+9I don't think he was being a fanboy or misunderstanding your meaning. He was just questioning your really unfunny pun.
- ersnyder, on 10/11/2007, -1/+7I certainly got it to do formulas...don't know what you were doing wrong, but it sure works for me. Even opens my native excel spreadsheets and formulas minus a few font problems.
- Tippis, on 10/11/2007, -0/+6Because it sucks compared to any and all alternatives? Its only selling points are price and philosophy -- the rest is behind the times.
- grouchyman, on 10/11/2007, -0/+6What the? A constructive post??? Dugg down!
Seriously, thanks for contributing rationally. I have been on the fence about getting iWork and I think I'm the same as you in that I'm part of the 80/20 crowd. - Tippis, on 10/11/2007, -0/+5...and that's an important point here. Unlike many of MS' products, Excel has actually faced some pretty fierce competition throughout its product life, and come out on top each and every time. It has constantly been the driving force of the entire Office suite: any new functionality always shows up in Excel first, and the Excel teams have always been at the forefront of dreaming up new stuff.
Heck, back in the days, Excel drove the *windows* development forward...
The thing is, if (and, admittedly, that's a big "if") Apple wants to actually *compete* with Excel, rather than provide a "cute" home-use-only little app, then they need to do better, even at v1.0. It's not like they can't look at what's out there already and try to improve on it.
Oh, and Excel never had a version 1 ;) - knightboat, on 10/11/2007, -0/+5It's neat then that Digg offers you the ability to remove any section of the site from your front page so you don't have to see content in that section. For example: Technology/Apple.
Though I commend you for so poorly attempting to justify the unwarranted vitriol and inaccurate FUD that often clutters up the comment sections of Apple articles. You know, for that 7% of the world that actually does care about Apple news, going by your statistics. - TheUngod, on 10/11/2007, -1/+6You took classes on MS Word and find it hard to use? I'm sorry...are you functionally retarded?
- nixfu, on 10/11/2007, -1/+5>Cant do formulas?
WHAT?!
I work in finance, and was able to load and start using right away many complex spreadsheets doing amortization calculations etc. - iamgnat, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4As I said, it's an irritation rather than an outright problem.
Just because we have massive amounts of disk space and insane amounts (historically speaking) of RAM doesn't mean that applications should run around eating it up when there is no need.
Now i've gotten curious... Oh good god!
1) Even though I have the preview (mentioned above) turned off, there is still a preview.pdf for QuickLook as well as a thumbnail jpg (this host doesn't even support QL yet!!!!).
2) The data is stored in index.xml.gz (only ~30ishK, but 280K uncompressed!!!!)
3) The XML file is two lines. The first the standard first XML line and the next the remainder of the 280K of characters!
4) My actual content of the file doesn't start until ~95+% through the file?!?!
Some how I don't think blobs of text (which I didn't enter) like the following are adding anything useful...
"Koop a cupy uf cak vux noaw yerw phuno. Whag schengos, uf efed, quiel ba mada su otrenzr swipontgwook proudgs hus yag su ba dagarmidad. Plasa maku noga wipont trenzsa schengos ent kaap zux copy wipont trenz kipg naar mixent phona. Cak pwico siructiun ruos nust apoply tyu cak UCU sisulutiun munityuw uw cak UCU-TGU jot scannow. Trens roxas eis ti Plokeing quert loppe eis yop prexs. Piy opher hawers, eit yaggles orn ti sumbloat alohe plok. Su havo loasor cakso tgu pwuructs tyu InfuBwain, ghu gill nug bo suloly sispunsiblo fuw cakiw salo anr ristwibutiun. Hei muk neme eis loppe. Treas em wankeing ont sime ploked peish rof phen sumbloat syug si phat phey gavet peish ta paat ein pheeir sumbloats. Aslu unaffoctor gef cak siructiun gill bo cak spiarshoot anet cak GurGanglo gur pwucossing pwutwam. Ghat dodtos, ig pany, gill bo maro tyu ucakw suftgasi pwuructs hod yot tyubo rotowminor. Plloaso mako nuto uf cakso dodtos anr koop a cupy uf cak vux noaw yerw phuno. Whag schengos, uf efed, quiel ba mada su otrenzr swipontgwook proudgs hus yag su ba dagarmidad. Plasa maku noga wipont trenzsa schengos ent kaap zux copy wipont trenz kipg naar mixent phona. Cak pwico siructiun ruos nust apoply tyu cak UCU sisulutiun munityuw uw cak UCU-TGU jot scannow. Trens roxas eis ti Plokeing quert loppe eis yop prexs. Piy opher hawers, eit yaggles orn ti sumbloat alohe plok. Su havo loasor cakso tgu pwuructs tyu."
Ugh. Thank you Apple for using a format that should be easy to reverse engineer, but good god that's painful....
-dave - yikiad, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4dude you are so busy bagging on apple and calling people fanboys that you sound completely ridiculous. why don't you stop trolling and put bill gates ***** back in your mouth?
- yikiad, on 10/11/2007, -1/+5ok, here goes, *****. i'll keep it simple.
Go to digg.com and do a search for microsoft. 4229 stories
Go to digg.com and do a search for apple. 3830 stories
out of your last 11 comments, you have slammed on apple 7 times.
now whos' the fanoy?
who the ***** cares what os anyone uses. use what you want. it's a free country. both os's have advantages and disadvantages.
oh yeah, one last thing. that little button on the top of your mouse? yeah, that one. don't push on it if is says apple if you don't want to read it, k? - betterth, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4You want a free Office program, I want a good looking, robust Office suite running with a low memory footprint. Hence why I don't use Open Office.
- MacParrot, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3iWork isn't bad. I prefer Keynote over PowerPoint, but Excel is still the winner over Numbers. If I'm just doing a regular document, I use Word. Any graphics in it, I use Pages and if I need to share it with people that don't have Pages, I use the export feature. I've bought every version of MS Office (or its individual pieces) for the Mac since 1987, and will buy the new version next year. Until iWork is better integrated with its Windows counterpart, there's not much choice.
- signal15, on 10/10/2007, -1/+4Numbers is working fine for me, but I'm just using it to manage IP ranges and sort data. The real thing that's missing for the Mac is a diagramming program that will handle Visio VSD files. Visio XML format doesn't cut it when clients send me VSD files.
- Nerfdude, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4not very, because it came out over 20 years ago.
- malhussaini, on 10/11/2007, -2/+5What are you talking about? Excel loads in 2-3 seconds on my 3 year old low-end laptop (Running Vista no less). In fact, it starts up faster than firefox.
- PaulDrake, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Only tweenies think Apple products are trendy.
News to the 12 year olds: Apple has been making products longer than you've been alive. - betterth, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3I definitely agree Malhussaini -- I use excel almost every day and it loads nearly instantly, and I keep six or seven spreadsheets open over two or three Excel openings (separate excel.exe in the background) and all together it uses less than a single Firefox window and one tab. Excel is definitely one of the leanest and quickest programs on my computer...
- yabos, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2The large size is due to the Leopard compatibility which has the QuickLook preview and pre-rendered icon.
- TheUngod, on 10/10/2007, -2/+4Ah irony. Your comment was far from useful commentary.
- iamgnat, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2Thanks for the tip, it isn't enabled for me though so there is something else (I haven't bothered to look since it's just irritating rather than a major problem) that is eating up the space.
- evensong, on 10/11/2007, -8/+10My review of the Numbers application:
1. Cannot do trendlines or formulas, or anything remotely close to it. This goes for most data analysis that is standard in Excel.
2. Two variable graphs are clumsy at best, impossible to use two sets of two variable data (e.g. comparison of data sets).
3. Graph creation is silly and counter-intuitive. Numbers does not like when you plot against time (X). So it royally ***** your data so that you need to fix the axis yourself.
So if you were expecting a real office suite that competes with MS Office, look elsewhere. Keynote is still the suite's strong point, followed by Pages. Numbers is pretty much that... numbers. Don't expect much out of it. - moisie, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2I was sent a 1 page word document the other day which was an order form. It had 2 small images and the rest was text - it was 4.7MB! Every word had a different style applied to it which all ended up looking the same but it was clear that the people who made it had no clue what they were doing.
The above illustrates to me that, especially in the case of word, most people - even in a business environment - are not power users, they use word because that's what there is. Most people press enter/return multiple times to get a space inbetween paragraphs rather than once and specifying word to add the appropriate space for them. I'm by no means a word expert but I took some time to get those basics down so that when I do a letter I can just type and it will set up all the formatting automatically. I
f you strip out all the stuff people don't need or don't have a clue how to use from word you find that pages (for example) is more than suitable for most people. The same can be said for Excel. Obviously certain occupations need complicated formulas but most people don't. At best they're adding figures or doing simple calculations. The number of excel files I get sent that have a Macro which does nothing is ridiculous. A lot of people have no idea how to do simple things with excel, I get sent files where people have written stuff in multiple columns to make it fit rather than just making the column bigger! - damm, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3It's sad... they removed Export to HTML Feature..
You can export to iWeb... but that's pointless.... Additionally why would they even expect it to support ODF? It should support final versions of a document format. Who is to say for ODF to get accepted it won't be revised 3 or 10x and then break support.
I felt like a Windows user reviewed iWork, and hadn't really given it a solid chance. It was like this is cool, but it doesn't do all these features that it should! I call that Creeping Featuritis. It should be avoided at all costs. Give users the features they _NEED_ not what they Want.
Pointless waste of time reading it. - spectre_25gt, on 10/11/2007, -1/+3Trying to get Word to format things the way you want them formatted instead of the way Word thinks you want them formatted is a complete pain in the ass. It tries to do too much automatically, which makes it complete crap in my eyes. Even something as simple as selecting text gives me trouble. Select a couple words in a sentance and Word will select the whole damn thing.
- SniperGX1, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2OmniGraffle?
- Karmavs, on 10/11/2007, -5/+6Putting 'i' before all words =/= Humour
I think (note: not iThink) this is the first time I've dugg down every single comment on a post (except for eleven's comment) - DagMX, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Guys, I'm assuming he's running office 2004 under rosetta or something similiar.
- etandrib, on 10/11/2007, -5/+6I don't think that numbers works well in an office scenario like what is mentioned above - however I use it at home for random spreadsheet stuff and I haven't come across anything that I want to do that it can't. So I'm glad I have it.
I'm also glad I don't have to wait 1 minute while Excel loads and then crashes or complains when I try to open an Excel document. - chris9902, on 10/10/2007, -2/+3Sharepoint is a Microsoft Office product. http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/default.mspx
- HerrEisenheim, on 10/11/2007, -4/+5If you are trying to do regression analysis in Excel you're an idiot anyway. Learn to do it the right way, in SAS.
- antitab, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Don't know why you're getting dugg down; one of the most commonly thrown insults to Mac users is that we are "trendwhores". Because purchasing something because it gives you a vastly more enjoyable user experience than anything else you've used before is just a trend, apparently.
- tracydanger, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1What about SPSS?
- klaupacius, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Luckily I don't need to use Office at all. Unfortunately I still need to use Pages and Numbers a couple times a month. 8 is pushing it, I'd rate iWork a 7.49
- nixfu, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1>Visio VSD files
No known program in existence other than Visio can read them, there are some that can generate simple visio files, but no other programs can read them... - nixfu, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2>SharePoint?
NO.. thats called 'using A real WIKI', not a lame Microsoft knock-off locked-in product that does the same things and less. - antitab, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2Nope. Not even in the same league. If you want to get something done and have it look incredible and professional, use iWork. There's simply no comparison.
- tobsterius, on 10/11/2007, -3/+4Pretty tired of hearing similar statements. How capable was excel when it was only at version 1?
- MicrosoftBob, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Yes, the "i" prefix has been tired for a while now. If they insist on a prefix I would simply use "Mac". MacWork, MacTunes, MacPhoto, etc.
- MicrosoftBob, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Nice hat-trick, ulmus.
- macgolfer53, on 10/10/2007, -2/+3Since I use iWeb for my restaurant web sites - what I like is the productivity I get from using the common tools( inspector, alignment aids, media browser,etc) across iLife and IWork. Numbers is very interesting. The use of multiple tables in one spreadsheet is very cool. I have been able to create some graphic spreadsheets for uses that I normally use Adobe Illustrator (with manual calculations) for - the tables are almost like objects.
I was a Windows user for 25 years. I still use Office but I am migrating to iWork to improve my productivity. It is helping. - TheFinaleofSeem, on 10/10/2007, -1/+2I find it to be a pain in the ass and I find another program to be much simpler. I can use Word, but it's a real bitch. And as Spectre said, the autoformatting has got to be one of the biggest pains about it.
- MacParrot, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1So, how long have you been gay and had cancer then?
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