iWork 08 - The Full Review

You may have seen me rant on here doing an impression of Steve Balmer jumping up and down on stage like an overexcited chimp, however, I'm not fat bald or working for a company that has redefined the term 'shipping delay' in the dictionary.
I just got a little enthusiastic about how much easier my life just got.

This is in my opinion, is the greatest bundle of applications Apple has ever produced.
I know that's a bold statement, but this has the potential to be a game changing suite of apps.

As some of you know my MacBook suffered a hard drive failure a while back and while it was gutting that I lost some work and a lot of my portfolio due to my external HDD becoming corrupted, plus having to spend a lot of downtime reinstalling applications and getting my set-up back as it should be, one thing it enables me to do was separate the wheat from the chaff and clear my applications folder.

I didn't reinstall Microsoft Office.

The only reason I used it was for Excel documents
Entourage frankly sucks, I'd much rather struggle with the crippled Outlook Web access than use Entourage which has a habit of both crashing and eating messages.
If I did use Excel to view anything on my company network over VPN it would cause some kind of error that either corrupted the file or repeatedly crashed the application. I simply gave up on it in the end as it was a waste of my time.

I use Filemaker Pro for most things now days and all my company reports are sent as PDFs, it wasn't necessary for me to have Excel or Entourage, which left Word...

I'm typing this in TextEdit, the application that infuriated the hell out of me when I first got a Mac but it's pure simplicity makes it work.
I never format a document until it's complete, it's just best practice and one that I try to instil in EVERY member of staff in my company from admin assistants to design professionals. I also make it known that if I ever see a memo using Comic Sans I will burn both the memo and it's creator on a pyre in the car park.

Pages is far superior to Word, even better with version 08.
Sure, for the power user in some offices it's not going to cut the mustard, in terms of collaborative workflow but for what I do, and what most other people do it just works. It's now less oriented to the "newsletter crew" which is a good thing and also includes a multitude of templates for office use all of which are beautifully deigned and look professional, far more so than the templates included with Word, which while they looked great in 1995, now look like a kid let loose with an Acorn Archimedes and a dot matrix printer.

I don't believe in pumping out vast amounts of information for the sake of it, the endless duplicated Word and Excel documents on the networks at my workplace that could do easily be better managed with a central database is frankly scary.
I shudder at the wasted terabytes of data.

The point is, Excel isn't a database application, it get used as one far too often when filemaker and/or Access would do just as good if not a far better job.

Excel actually doesn't do anything I need it to anymore and I find it more and more constricting my the day, to the point here I now have my PA complete the weekly reports as I simply lose patience with having to pull information from 4 different databases and multiple spreadsheets on a weekly basis all to produce a 4 page report and make data fit in places it just doesn't want to defined by the archaic grid layout, it's a waste of 4 hours of my time.

Which brings be to Numbers....

Numbers is what Excel should have been five years ago, I'm not talking about eye-candy (admittedly it is nice not to have your company pie charts look like they were drawn in MS Paint by baboon with a brush between it's toes), but the whole concept and way of working is revolutionary. Yes, you heard, revolutionary.

I really can't explain how great this application is, If I ever meet the developers I'll kiss and hug them so hard I may be prosecuted for sexual harassment.
Check it out, play with it for an hour if you can and you begin to understand what a game changer this really is.
I'm actually struggling for words at this point to explain how great it is.
Go look, you'll understand. Download the 30 day trial from the Apple website: http://www.apple.com/iwork/trial/

I spent most of my time today in Keynote again today preparing for a presentation on the 6th of September which I can truly say is going to blow everyone elses Powerpoint dross out of the water.

The fact you can drag and drop EPS files straight in to the program and resize on the fly without an inkling of a problem is a MAJOR plus for me.
In addition the new spinning logo effects first seen in the iPhone intro is brilliant for my needs and has added the pizzaz I needed for the presentation without looking tacky like the Powerpoint effects.

I'm not one for text heavy slides, or even information for information's sake, I believe your presentation should be about you, your subject and the delivery of the information. I guess I learned from Mr Jobs on that one, you talk about things and use your presentation software for things such as graphs, charts, graphics and headlines only when absolutely necessary to avoid boring people.

Presentations aren't about Powerpoint.
Unless you can stand up there with no slides and hold peoples attention then you may as well just give up now.

The great thing about Keynote is that it has allowed me to concentrate on my content and not worry about trying to make animations work and slides look good.

I'm on my final draft of the notes now and have got 50% of the slides done in the past few hours, the rest of which I just need to get some input on from my colleagues when I do a test presentation on my department before I present it to the company.

I might post the results up here if I can get clearance to show you just what's possible with it in the coming weeks.

Go check it out.

Srslah, you guys!