Pages

Pages, which is both a word processor and a page layout application, could be compared to Microsoft Word in the word processor department, but Pages is so much more according to me. The grammar and spell checking works a bit differently and both the applications has their pros and cons here, Word however supports more languages than Pages does.

The true power of Pages is it’s simplicity. And with that I don’t mean that it lacks functionality, I mean that the software is simple to use, everything is located where you would imagine it to be (something that can’t be said about Word where most things are in weird places that you only know where they are because you’ve used the application for so long). It’s very simple to change a setting for either an individual paragraph or the entire document.

I said that Pages was also a page layout applications, something that Word is not, and this is where Pages shines the most. When I moved from Word to Pages I was shocked to find how easy it could be to place images and objects into the text. Images and objects used to be a nightmare to deal with, but now I can control them just as easily as the text — they behave just the way I want to without me having to dig though a lot of different settings.

A feature I like that I think most people overlook or simply don’t care about is the advanced typography tools. Pages has been criticized by some for the lack of faux italics and faux bold (i.e. having the application fake it when the font used doesn’t support italics or bold). I personally think this is a good thing, faked letter looks horrible. What Pages on the other hand does is to take full advantage of all typographical features the font is made for, which includes true small-caps, ligatures, ornaments and the like.

The last few months I’ve spent quite some time writing reports (IMRAD-style). Yesterday for example I put together a report of almost 10,000 words spanning more than 40 pages, written by me and three other classmates, containing several illustrations and a rather nice page layout if I may say so myself. I can simply say that I would not have been able to do the same job if I had been using Word, and what I would have produced with Word would not only have looked less appealing but would also had taken a much longer time to put together.

All in all, I love Pages.

Keynote

Before I got to the university it was very seldom I saw a PowerPoint-presentation, but in the last few month I’ve seen quite a few. The all have one thing in common, they look outdated. And I’m not just talking about the presentations from the teachers, no the students presentations are (sorry guys) just as boring and uninspiring. When it comes to presentations, the actual esthetics of something is important, so why is it that it feels like PowerPoint-presentations looks the same now as they did in the ‘90s?

Keynote is another great part of iWork. Even someone with no knowledge of design or typography can make stunning presentations. You can start out with a template, but it doesn’t take much to make the presentation unique and specialized for your needs. Personally I’m not a fan of transition animations between slides, and although Keynote has a few nice animations I think one would do best to stay away from them. That is animations between slides, the animations for text within a slide can still be pretty useful to highlight what your talking about etc.

Since I haven’t worked much with presentations before I haven’t used PowerPoint even close to the extent I’ve used Word, so I can’t talk so much about pros and cons. But what I have noticed is that once again every little setting in Keynote is precisely located where I thought it would be, even the first time I started the application.

Numbers

Numbers is the latest addition to the iWork family. It was first included in the ’08 version and is therefor still at version 1.0 (whereas Pages is 3.0 and Keynote is 4.0). You can notice that Numbers is not as “complete” as the other two applications in the bundle, but for my needs it can take over the tasks that Microsoft Excel handled before.

One big difference from Excel is the look and feel of the application, and just like the other iWork applications the settings are exactly where you would imagine them to be. With Numbers it’s easy to make a nice spreadsheet, both for printing and screen display.

I haven’t had that much need for this application yet, mostly used it to create graphs and draw up some conceptual database tables. I will probably go back here and write some more about it later after I’ve used it some more.

Update:
iWork ’09 has just been released, and I’ve downloaded the trial version and tried it out a bit. Don’t see that many new features I would use, if I had owned EndNote X2 it would be worth the price but right now I think I will just keep using ’08 until Snow Leopard is released.