JulianSchrader.de

What Everybody Ought to Know About iWork ’08

When the postman rang the doorbell last Friday and brought the new iLife suite, there was another box in the package: iWork ’08, introduced at Steve Job’s keynote on the Apple campus one week ago as well as iLife ’08.

I wrote about iLife ’08 — but for a productivity suite such as iWork ’08 getting a general idea requires a little more time than it takes to check out the new tools a set of creativity applications has to offer. So I’ve been taking notes over the past few days with Keynote, Pages and the new Numbers and today I’m presenting to you What Everybody Ought to Know About iWork ’08.

Keynote

Let’s begin with the most important application for my needs — Keynote, the application which I use to create presentations because it is far superior in comparison to the market leader. Did anyone say PowerPoint? We all know there’s neither power, nor any point in ugly, endlessly stuffed lists and cram-full slides of text.

Keynote ’08 brings along some nice new features, some of them could already be spotted at Macworld Expo in January — Steve didn’t only use transitions that are available for our own presentations with Keynote ’08, but also Smart Builds which enables you to create for example instant picture slideshows. Remember the spinning cube used to illustrate the combination of iPod, phone and internet device in the iPhone introduction?

Another nice addition is point to point animation as known as A → B Animation. Previously known as the feature Keynote lacked in comparison to PowerPoint, this makes it possible to move objects along freely definable lines or curves from one point to another or even across multiple points.

Do you sometimes need to apply transparency to pictures or other graphical elements? Up to now I always fired up Photoshop to remove the parts that could distract my audience without supporting my presentation. A great new feature in Keynote ’08 is called Instant Alpha — with a few clicks you can cut out the objects you’d like to present and eliminate the background or other disturbing elements.

Sometimes we need to send a presentation to somebody who isn’t able to work with Keynote files — now there are two options of how to cope with this kind of problem: If your contact knows how to work with PowerPoint, convert your presentation into an appropriate format — Keynote ’08 handles PowerPoint 2007 (Office Open XML) as well as earlier versions. Though it does import and export your content, be aware of the fact that PowerPoint and Keynote are different applications and therefore are differently equipped in terms of effects and transitions — don’t blame me if your PowerPoint presentation doesn’t feel the same in Keynote or if all the nice effects you applied with Keynote do not work using PowerPoint.

The other — and regarding compatibility much better — option is to export a video from Keynote. This preserves not only every single transition and renders playback possible even on mobile devices, but also gives you the possibility to turn the presentation into a training video with the new voice-over recording feature.

Did you know you can add text effects to images as well? Burn down trees when you talk about how fast the rain forests are cutover or blow up problems into tiny pieces next time you are introducing solutions to your boss.

Pages

Before Pages ’08 was released it felt like Adobe InDesign’s little brother. Pages enabled me to quickly put text into predefined layout templates which could be modified according to one’s will. Pages ’08 introduces a new layout mode — it is possible to choose between it and a word processing mode, depending on the complexity of the template chosen for the project.

Another very similar feature ist the new Contextual Format Bar. Remember the cluttered interface of Microsoft Word? When you need the toolbar for text, you need to turn it on. When you need to work with images, you need to turn on the suitable toolbar. And because you don’t like to turn them on and off all the time, they stay there and distract you from your actual tasks. Depending on what you’re actually working with the Contextual Format Bar allows faster access to the tools you need by displaying only those which make sense when you’re editing either text, images or tables. Anyone who likes to work with a uncluttered, clean UI will love this feature.

Speaking of images, Pages ’08 of course has image editing capabilities right built in — such as the previously mentioned transparency feature called Instant Alpha.

Native support for tables and charts of course is a must have — hence Numbers, the new spreadsheet application. And the change tracking feature (compatible to Microsoft Word) makes collaborating a lot easier.

Numbers

iMovie ’08 is rebuilt from ground up for the new version of iLife — iWork ’08 has a completely new application called Numbers. This has been rumoured extensively before and as you might guess right, it is Apple’s take on spreadsheets.

This may be a bold statement, but for my needs Numbers is a great application that fully replaces Excel on my Mac. The only feature it lacks is the possibility to run pre-recorded macros — but the spreadsheet work I do does not require any macros, so I’m fine with it (and I’m sure most people would be as well).

Numbers allows to arrange multiple tables and other objects such as graphs, texts and images on a flexible canvas which provides more space as you need it but doesn’t overwhelm my screen with a gigantic grid that I use only partially.

Graphs and charts are generated on-the-fly by Numbers and update live as soon as you change their values in corresponding tables. They look great and an be copied over easily to any application that supports graphics. I won’t be fiddling around for 20 minutes in Illustrator anymore to create a nice pie chart for a presentation or for the web — equipped with Numbers I can complete this task within seconds and despite all the shiny 3D-ness my chart will remain editable.

To share your spreadsheets, Numbers brings a number of possibilities. When you need to cooperate with someone who uses Excel, don’t worry — Numbers exports and imports Microsoft Office files as well as Pages or Keynote do. But keep in mind, just like Keynote’s PowerPoint export spreadsheets exported to Excel won’t look as great as they did in Numbers. Unfortunately a less capable format is not able to provide the full range of superbness…

Say you want to print what you created — for example a poster for the next congress you’ll attend. Again, what happened to big and complex tables before whenever you printed them? Most of the time Excel screwed up and sliced cells into pieces because it couldn’t fit them on a single page. Numbers solves this problem with a feature called Interactive Print View: It allows to rearrange and scale items for print to fit nicely on one or more pages — this tool makes it really easy to avoid messed up prints and partially printed tables are history by now

I also discovered one problem while working with Numbers — this is kind of a feature request: I’d like to import HTML tables into Numbers — copy & paste out of Safari doesn’t work for me. Open Office is able to read HTML tables, but it takes some time to import HTML into OpenOffice, to export it into CSV and to finally import CSV into Numbers. Any suggestions on how to improve this workflow? Do you know some kind of online converter that can be used via a bookmarklet?

Conclusion

iWork ’08 is a great productivity suite that revoked Microsoft Office for Mac’s right to exist on my Mac. With this new version compatability issues between Apple’s and Microsoft’s spreadsheet and word processing software are nearly history and the integration between PowerPoint and Keynote took a big step forward — though the latter surely is a great deal better

Since Microsoft Office for Mac is from 2004 and runs emulated in Rosetta on my MacBook Pro, it wasn’t exactly a pleasure working with it — besides the cluttered interface it is darn slow. I’m very happy Apple didn’t only build a great productivity suite, but also one that provides a true alternative to Microsoft Office and simply works great.

What is your opinion regarding iWork ’08? Did you use it before and will you upgrade? Tell me what you think!

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