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PC Magazine hands-on with Apple iWork ‘09: ‘Innovative suite certainly looks impressive’

Thursday, January 08, 2009 - 05:38 PM EST

"On Tuesday, Apple announced iWork '09, an update to the company's innovative suite of office applications," Jamie Lendino reports for PC Magazine. "As with the prior version, iWork '09 includes Pages (a word processor), Keynote (a presentation app), and Numbers (the graphics-centric spreadsheet program Apple introduced in 2007 as a part of iWork '08. iWork '09 is available now for $79, or $49 with any new Mac, and requires Leopard (OS X 10.5) in order to run."

"Pages now features an uncluttered, full-screen view reminiscent of WordPerfect in the 1980s. It goes far beyond that old program, though, since Pages' version is fully WSYIWIG and (unlike Microsoft Word's standard Preview) fully editable," Lendino reports.

"As before, Numbers' slick interface is very different than Excel's, with a heavy emphasis on charts and graphs. That's mostly a good thing. In addition to Numbers' expanded Formula list... Apple also added some pretty hefty 2D and 3D graphical charting capabilities. You can now link charts between Numbers and Pages or Keynote," Lendino reports.

"Keynote '09 includes some spiffy new transition effects and animated charts. It also includes Magic Move, a new feature that lets you animate an object from one slide to the next with a click. I saw several of the new effects in person; most looked great," Lendino reports.

"Perhaps the biggest news with the entire suite is the iWork.com beta, Apple's new way to share documents, presentations, and spreadsheets among colleagues... [which] is clearly a hedge between local computing (where one person creates the document, or another edits a separate local version) and cloud-based computing (where everyone edits the same version, which is stored online)," Lendino reports.

"That's still an improvement over the old way of mailing attachments back and forth. But given the cost of individual iWork '09 licenses on top of whatever Apple decides to charge for iWork.com, I don't see a lot of customer take-up, especially given the multitude of free, collaborative online tools out there," Lendino reports. "That said, iWork '09 as a whole certainly looks impressive at first blush."

Full article here.