[X-Newbies] Re: Office Suite Conundrum

[Steven Rogers]

On Mar 24, 2005, at 10:52 AM, Vincent Cayenne wrote:

> At 2:33 AM +1100 3/25/05, Tony Johansen wrote:
>> I hear many good things about the new iWork and am looking forward to 
>> trying it out. From all reports it will more than satisfy Microsoft 
>> Office users
>
> iWork consists of two applications: Pages and Keynote. Pages is a 
> PageMaker-lite type of page layout and word processing app while 
> Keynote is a presentation app. The combination, in my opinion, is 
> useful and applicable to the needs of many users for whom an office 
> suite is overkill. But (again in my opinion) it is no substitute 
> whatsoever for an office suite. . . .

Agreed. It will import and export MS formats, but its not designed to 
lever Office users out of that environment. I'm not sure that's really 
possible. Pages and Keynote will do most everything an average user 
would need, but if you're working with other people in an Office 
environment, you'll want revision tracking and all that other crud. 
Being able to import and export probably won't cut it for people who 
"live" in that environment. My impression is that iWork is primarily 
built to integrate with the full spectrum of the *Apple* media 
environment, and import/exports Office formats as a secondary issue. I 
think this is probably the main reason that its so slick.

I haven't spent much time with Pages, but I have used Keynote a bit, 
and its very slick. In fact, it will export to Flash, and I justified 
the iWork purchase just to make some Flash doo-dads for a web demo I 
was putting together.

I've been using PowerPoint for years and years, and I found Keynote 
kind of hard to get used to. Its a scary realization, because the 
design of Keynote is very good - its just that if you've had your mind 
wrapped around PP for years, you're going to find it counter-intuitive. 
This is freaky to experience because I've seen the same thing many 
times in other people, but not in myself - i.e. being so stuck in a bad 
groove that something better looks harder. The GUI designer in me can 
see that Keynote is better - it will just take some time to get used to 
it. I would imagine that a real hard-core PPT user wouldn't find 
Keynote attractive. Its much more attractive to someone who lives in 
the media-rich Apple world and wants a presentation capability that 
integrates with it.

SR