bit-tech Shopping: Apple iWork '08

• Presentation
• Publishing/Marketing
• Spreadsheet
• Word Processor

• Intel Core Duo
• PowerPC G4
• PowerPC G5

Rating: 8

Time with product: 20 Days

Strengths: Cocoa app, with full Mac OSX functionality, looks good

Weaknesses: Can't buy components separately, view options limited

Summary: I only use Pages, the word processing component of iWork, and wish I could have bought it alone. Mostly I wanted to jettison the last Microsoft app I still used, Word. I can compose docs in Pages, and save in Word format to send to coworkers with no difficulties. This now also includes the "track changes" feature from Word, which is preserved in Pages. This is a full Cocoa app, with all the bells and whistles of Leopard, like being able to look up words in dictionary or Wikipedia with one click. My sole beef is that you have no option but to display page breaks as a visual simulation of actual pages. Since I rarely print documents out, this is annoying and unnecessary, but I can't seem to turn it off.

Rating: 8

Time with product: 3

Strengths: Ease of use and variety of program packages

Weaknesses: not enough graphics. Can not read the database information from Appleworks.

Summary: So far, I love this program. I only wish I could easily convert my Appleworks word processing program documents with out having to open and save each document individually. The price of this program combined with its effectiveness, easily makes this a more preferable program to purchase than Microsoft Office.

Rating: 10

Time with product: 14

Strengths: keynote is brilliant.

Weaknesses: lack of interoperability between iwork and office.

Summary: if you have to use a mac, iwork is much better than ms office (especially the pathetic office 2008 for mac). for presentations, keynote blows powerpoint out of the water. pages and numbers are nice too. surprisingly, for an apple product, the price really isn't bad. one issue might be compatibility, since the iwork applications have their own file types.

Rating: 8

Time with product: 30 Days

Strengths: Better control and more intuitive than Word.

Weaknesses: Pages will not open some large Word docs I have, don't know why.

Summary: Haven't used the other iWork programs yet, but definitely rate Pages as much better than Word, and love the price! The interface is much clearer than Word's. I got very tired of trying to set indents and paragraph styes in Word and not have them work. Pages' style settings are available right there at the top of the interface making it ultra easy to set font, size, paragraph style, etc.Love it!

Rating: 10

Time with product: 2 Days

Strengths: iworks has many templates to use. there are many choices for fonts. editing is easy

Weaknesses: no clip art

Summary: I find iworks much easier to navigate and it can be easily explained. it is easy for my husband who is not computer savvy to use and for my six year old child to use. There are always tutorials available if you get stuck or lost.