iWork '06 - Nice improvements to Apple's 'suite'

Jan 16, '06 07:16:00AM

Contributed by: robg

iWork '06 imageThe macosxhints Rating:
9 of 10
[Score: 9 out of 10]

Last week was Expo, of course, and many new products were introduced. iWork '06, though, had an immediate impact on my work, and as a result, I spent quite a bit of time using it (well, half of it!) last week. Despite the minimal amount of attention iWork received during the keynote, there are some truly substantive improvements in the package.

Since I do a lot of presenting, I was most interested in the changes in Keynote, and whether they would address my number one gripe with the program. My gripe has to do with bulleted lists; namely, that when you have a bulleted list on a slide, you can (a) only have one such list per slide, and (b) you can't do anything else while those bullets were appearing on the screen. Assume the first bullet in a list is "Mail's new interface look," for instance, followed by "iTunes' new video features." In prior versions of Keynote, you couldn't insert a screenshot of the Mail interface after the first bullet, then have the screenshot vanish before the second bullet. This led to all sorts of stupid workarounds, most of which involved duplicating large numbers of slides.

In Apple's booth Tuesday after the keynote, a rep demonstrated that Apple had fixed my gripe in Keynote 3. You can have as many bulleted lists on a slide as you like, and you can now do things during the bullet builds. Since my presentation wasn't until Thursday, I went to the Apple retail store in San Francisco and bought a copy of iWork. I then spent much of my free time on Tuesday and Wednesday updating my presentations to take advantage of the new Keynote 3 bullet building feature (and inserting some of the nice new slide transitions). I found Keynote 3 to be a great improvement over the prior version, and hence, iWork earns this week's Pick of the Week on the merits of Keynote alone.

Pages has some nice upgrades, too, though I didn't spend nearly as much time on it. Of the changes in Pages, the addition of an auto-correct tool is quite welcome, as is the new integration with the Address Book (for doing mail merge documents). I covered what I found to be the major new features in each program (and the suite overall) in my iWork First Look writeup for Macworld. The writeup includes a demo movie of the bullet building feature in action, amongst other things.

I know some will complain that there's no upgrade price for iWork (or iLife, for that matter). But to me, even at $158 for two years, iWork has been well worth the money just for Keynote alone. There are still some things PowerPoint does better, of course, but Keynote is now a very worthy competitor, and at a substantially reduced price. Throw in Pages, and iWork is a bargain. (You'll probably feel differently if you don't do a lot of presenting, of course; Pages isn't a replacement for Word, and a program like The Print Shop may out-do Pages' layout skills).

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