You can use iWork to compose and design just about any kind of document. Although iWork’s programs fall outside the traditional definitions of these categories, you use Pages for word processing, Keynote for making presentations, and Numbers for spreadsheets. Here’s a brief tour of what awaits.
When words are your game, Pages has you covered. As a word processor, Pages’ most basic job is to make it easy to get words onto the screen and, once there, coax and refine them into irresistible prose for the printed page. Use Pages to write letters, pen the Great American Novel, draw up contracts, or write a term paper. The program gives you all the power-editing tools you’re likely to need: spell checking, styles, footnotes, mail merge, change tracking, outlining, tables, and lots of other goodies.
But Pages has a whole separate career beyond word processing—the program moonlights as a graphic designer. Pages makes it almost embarrassingly easy to create gorgeous page layouts for glossy newsletters, catalogs, brochures, flyers, posters, greeting cards, you name it. Deck out any document with photos or graphics with drag-and-drop simplicity.
If you’re blessed with a keen sense of style, you can use Pages’ tools to build your own graphic designs from scratch; otherwise, lean on Pages’ collection of more than 180 templates. Pick the design that you want to use and then drop in your own pictures and text, as easy as filling in the blanks. Just like that, you’re the artsy designer (and you didn’t even have to grow a goatee or buy a beret).
Keynote is a presentation program for making slideshows, usually to accompany a talk or other live presentation. The program helps you build screens of text and graphics to illustrate important points as you roam the stage earning the awe and admiration of your audience. As you flip from slide to slide, Keynote shimmies and shakes with cinematic transitions, clever animations, and all the supporting razzle-dazzle that your presentation deserves.
More than just a pretty face, though, Keynote is also an elegantly simple program to use. There’s an awful lot of complexity behind the scenes of the program’s eye-popping effects, but Keynote modestly keeps the hard stuff to itself. For you, the presenter, the design process is always simple and straightforward. And like all iWork programs, Keynote gets you started with a big collection of themes that make your slides look great even when you don’t use a single special effect. Whether subdued or noisy, your slideshow’s design is always polished and consistent.
Numbers is a spreadsheet program, tuned for organizing data and juggling numbers. The program has a special talent for math, of course—it eats balance sheets and financial models for breakfast. But like any spreadsheet program, Numbers can also put order to just about any kind of information. Use it for contact lists, team rosters, product inventories, invoices, or to-do lists. Once you’ve loaded up your data, Numbers can flip it every which way: sort it, filter it, categorize it, analyze it.
As usual with iWork programs, however, the thing that makes Numbers special is its remarkable talent for stylish design. Traditionally, formatting spreadsheets is an ugly, time-consuming process, and many people simply don’t bother. With Numbers, however, it’s easy—even addictive—to transform your data into a multimedia report by mixing your data tables with colorful charts, photos, and illustrations. The program’s chart tools are especially dazzling, turning your stodgy figures into impressive infographics.
From these descriptions, it might seem like the individual iWork programs do wildly different things, but it turns out that they’re more similar than different. The resemblance starts with the interface, which iWork keeps clean and spare, avoiding a clutter of toolbars by relying on the incredibly useful Format Bar. All three programs feature this chameleon-like strip of menus and buttons, which changes its contents when you change the focus of your work, giving you a greatest-hits selection of commands that are most likely to be useful to you at any given moment. iWork also keeps things tidy by sweeping commands and controls into the Inspector window, a floating control panel of advanced settings.
iWork’s integration goes much deeper than its toolbars. All three programs are on extremely friendly terms with the rest of the Apple software on your computer, a fact best illustrated by the super-handy Media Browser. This window, available in all three iWork programs, gives you an instant tunnel into your personal media ecosystem. Browse your iPhoto albums, iTunes playlists, or iMovie projects from Keynote, for example, to add pictures, music, or video to your slideshow with the click of a button. The programs similarly offer clever integration with Address Book, Mail, and iWeb.
While these niceties give similar form to Pages, Keynote, and Numbers, the programs have similar functions, too. Every iWork program works with the same raw materials—text, pictures, charts, shapes, tables, movies, sound—and offer the same icons and tools to manipulate them. Once you learn how to do it in one program, you know how to do it in all three: Page layout in Pages works like slide design in Keynote works like report layout in Numbers.
All iWork programs, in other words, have the same set of basic superpowers, but each program is more “super” at one particular aspect. Pages and Keynote both have the know-how to include spreadsheet tables, for example, but Numbers is designed for fast data entry and comfortable calculating. Likewise, both Keynote and Numbers can do page layout, but Pages makes it easier to create a design for the printed page. All of these similarities often make it feel more like you’re using one program than three; for the newcomer, this has the happy benefit of making it easy to quickly get up to speed with all the programs at once.
In fact, the hardest part of using iWork may have nothing to do with using the programs themselves, but deciding which program is right for the job at hand, since they’re all so versatile. And hey, speaking of which program to use…
Microsoft Office is, of course, the elephant in the room, the 800-pound gorilla, the lumbering wildebeest of the Serengeti. Word, PowerPoint, and Excel have dominated their respective fields for years as the business standards for word processing, presentation, and spreadsheet software. You’ll find those programs in cubicles around the world. In most offices, you can’t swing a senior VP without hitting a piece of Office software.
The question is whether that means you need it, too. Does iWork replace Microsoft Office? Your fearless author is bold enough to give you this clear and courageous answer: maybe, depending.
Of all the iWork programs, only Keynote surpasses its Microsoft counterpart in a feature-counting contest, beating PowerPoint in both tools and simplicity. Pages and Numbers simply can’t match Word and Excel for their laundry lists of features. For the most part, though, iWork’s “missing” capabilities are relatively esoteric power tools that most small businesses, educators, students, and home users won’t miss. In exchange, you get an elegant, refined workspace that lets you churn out designed documents that would be a headache (and sometimes impossible) to create with Microsoft Office. However, if you’re building a book index or need hyperlinked cross-references in a word processor, you’ll miss Word. And if your spreadsheets tend to stray into tens of thousands of rows or rely on pivot tables or unusually sophisticated formula functions, then Numbers will disappoint you.
iWork’s programs are still very young. Keynote was released in 2003, Pages in 2005, and Numbers in 2007—but even in that short span, all three have come a long way. The changes introduced by iWork ’09 focus mainly on polish and power features, an indicator that the collection has already reached a certain level of maturity (they’re a precocious set of programs). The feature gap between iWork and Microsoft Office continues to shrink.
But parity with Microsoft Office may not be Apple’s goal. At heart, this suite of programs has a very different feel and approach. While iWork isn’t the industrial-strength product that Microsoft Office is, it doesn’t have Office’s industrial flavor, either. Word and Excel offer a deep feature list, but that depth also contributes to a heavy interface and, often, a frustrating hunt for features that should be easy to find. By contrast, Pages and Numbers have a lighter, more flexible interface that’s a pleasure to use. Along with superior attention to document design, this creative workspace is an overall advantage that you might appreciate more than any absent features. The bottom line: If you don’t need those features, you won’t miss them.
Whether or not you use Microsoft Office, it’s crucial to be able to exchange files with people who do. The iWork programs can read and create Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, and overall they do a good job at it. The book in your hands was written in Pages but exchanged back and forth between author and editors in Microsoft Word without a hitch.
There are occasional hitches, though, and this book details where you’ll run into problems with your imports and exports (think macros, relatively esoteric Excel functions, and Office’s inability to digest all of iWork’s advanced visual stylings). In general, relatively simple files always make the transition from iWork to Office and back again no worse for wear. Go ahead and exchange files with your Microsoft-wielding colleagues with impunity.
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