Apple iWork '08 [OLD VERSION]

Apple's iWork 08 is a great product and the perfect substitute of MicroSoft's Office suite.

I've been a Mac user and Microsoft Word user since 1984.

I made the switch to Pages a year or so ago, and while I periodically still need Word, for the most part, I've converted to Pages. If I do use Word today, it's more out of habit than anything else, because Pages has performed to my expectations and has done whatever I've asked it to do, including being able to read Word documents and "save as" Word docs for my Windoze friends.

As an author, I put Word through paces; as a Publisher, even more so. Pages is ahead of Word in that it is *ridiculously* easy to create a PDF file in Pages: Simply "save as" PDF. Word, however, involved needing to convert it which would "need distiller properly installed", and you'd have to "print" it as a PDF file as opposed to saving it as one. It's an additional and apparently unnecessary step, but typical of Microsoft.

Pages hasn't frozen on me yet. Always a plus. However, one area that could use improvement is its standard templates. Word comes with far more templates of various types than Pages. There are other areas as well, but it could stem more from my being so used to Word, more than a deficiency on Pages' part. One thing I wouldn't want is for Pages to become excessively bloated and inappropriately priced like Word (and Office).

I haven't needed to use the other software included in iWork yet, so no comments there.

For the price, Pages does the job, and it's worth it to be free of the Microsoft monopoly.

My mother keeps sending me .pps files, which on a Mac I can not read or even open. However, I found out that Keynote, which is part of iWork, opens and plays them with no problem. There are a few files that should have sound, but I don't seem to get the sound. However, despite that one flaw I can a least get the images and the slideshow effect that you usually get when on a PC. I'd say it's worth the money to purchase this because the three programs that come in iWorks are similar programs found on PC so you can now do much more on a Mac than you could before!

I purchased iWork as a gift for two granddaughters, ages 11 and 13. I've enjoyed using it and I hope they will too.

Keynote is so much more intuitive and polished than Powerpoint that I would gladly pay twice the price for Keynote alone. I also like Pages very much for its elegant and simple approach, though it doesn't beat Word by nearly as much as Keynote beats Powerpoint. Numbers still needs some work, but is already very promising (I still use Excel for more complex tasks.

My one big gripe is the lack of an auto-save function. These applications do crash (though Keynote never crashed on me during a presentation) and I have lost many hours of work because I didn't save often enough. So: Make sure to save often!