iWork '05: The Missing Manual

Introduction

It seems the software wizards at Apple aren't about to rest until every aspect of your computer life is as stylish, elegant, and well-designed as the Mac itself. With the introduction of Pages, Apple has ushered in a new era of word processing style and ease; and with Keynote 2, it improved on the elegant presentation software it released two years earlier.

Together, these two programs constitute iWork '05, a brand-new software suite that'll eventually replace the venerable but aged AppleWorks—that do-it-all bundle of word processor, spreadsheet, database, presentation, painting, and drawing programs. For now, iWork has just two components. But when Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the new software at Macworld Expo in San Francisco, he said, "With iWork we're building the successor to AppleWorks." Which building blocks are next or when they'll be put into place is another Apple mystery.

Pages flips the concept of word processing on its ear. Instead of starting with a blank sheet of paper and working your way toward a finished document, Pages lets you choose the kind of finished document you'd like to end up with, and then go about incorporating your own words, pictures, tables, and so on. And yet Pages also contains all the modern, powerful word processing features that most people need: columns, sections, headers, styles, tables, spell checker, and so on.

Not that you can't start with that blank page if you want to—but with 40 professionally designed document templates ...