I've never been very open to change. Despite an oddly fairly widespread reputation as an easy-going, roguishly handsome international man of mystery (and I'll leave it to you guys to determine which of those hastily strung modifiers most applies to moi), I really enjoy a certain amount of order in my life. I might seem open to change, but whatever changes I decide to make are often the result of much deliberation.
Which is my roundabout way of saying that, after a decade of being subject to the whims of Microsoft Office, I've finally decided to switch to iWork. And you know what? It feels just like quitting smoking. What took me so long?
Monday, August 27, 2007
iWork '08? iLike!
8 comments:
Is Pages any better? I have iWork '07, and quite frankly saw no compelling reason to use Pages.
Also, a question on Keynote: if you create a slide with several builds and click to go back, can it go back by just one build or does it still revert back to the beginning of the slide? That's the only thing I need to know before deciding to invest in it.
That sw looks pretty cool. You'll have to let us know how you end up liking it versus MS Office.
Thanks for the comments guys. Tweet, it does look cool, but that's part of the problem for the serious professional.
Brian, you make a good point regarding Pages. Unless you're into publishing, or if you need to come out with spiffy layouts to catch the attention of your students (hint, hint: Jason!) then you really don't need it, though I did notice that it does have a shorter loading time than Word, but then Pages is more native to the Mac OS, so no surprises there.
I'll do some research on Keynote. Sad to say, I haven't had the need to click back, which in retrospect I should have done more often as my MA Humanities grad students might have had questions on my slides, but I was too enamored with my presentation to do so. Bad teacher! ;-)
john-d: you beat me to it. i have a half-written post (in Pages, not MS Word, natch), on my destop, comparing my experience with iWork 08 and MS Office 2004. ;-)
brian: i have both iwork 05 and 06 but never used pages because it sucked. it was too 'counterintuitive' (or maybe the ms way of doing thing is just so ingrained in all of us... shudder). pages in iwork 08 is much improved. they've made some concessions to the ms word look (you now have the formatting options displayed as they are in word).
as for keynote, sadly i still havent found a way to go "back" on a build-by-build basis. i'm not sure if that feature has been included in the new version.
with that said, however, i'm definitely getting iwork 08. with the family pack option (there are three, soon to be four, mac users at home), it'll turn out to be a sixth the cost of the student-teacher edition of ms office, and 1/20th the cost of the commercial version. i think it's a no-brainer.
I do love beating people to the punch. ;-) I've been playing around with both Pages and Keynote and while Pages is perfect for my purposes, Keynote could be greatly improved by allowing hapless presenters like myself to go back one build at a time.
Still, at the price I got it at, around US $115 for the family pack, it's a steal. :-)
I LOVE Pages. It is aesthetically better. Mac is proving that form does count. It just disappoints me that I have to open ugly ugly, ugly ugly word documents when I get marketing proposals from clients.
Jan, your comment is priceless! Most Word documents are rather unappealing, eh? ;-)
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