iWork ‘08: Not ready for the Office yet

Just a little while ago I mentioned Numbers and what Pages needs to compete in the Office space (both to run head-to-head with Microsoft Office and to be useful in a business setting). Now Apple has rolled out iWork ‘08—a huge upgrade to the iWork suite.

So, how does iWork ‘08 stack up—and should you think about deploying it as your business solution? Unfortunately, the short list of must-have features that would make Pages a word processor worthy of a business setting have been shorted again. Here’s my review based on our first few months working with Pages, Numbers and Keynote.

Not having a spreadsheet application has been the biggest obstacle to adopting iWork in the business. With iWork ‘08 that problem goes away—Numbers is Apple’s answer, and it’s an excellent application. Compatibility with Microsoft Excel, an essential feature, is excellent. I’ve been able to open complicated workbooks spanning many pages, using extensive formulas and intense table cross references. As far as I can tell, iWork ’08’s promise of superb Office compatibility has been delivered.

Where Numbers “does something different,” the Excel importer gives you a handy little review panel that tells you exactly what changed during the import. You’ll see messages such as “print area isn’t supported and was removed” and “unsupported border styles were mapped to solid borders.” (This same review panel is now present in all iWork applications). All in all, I haven’t seen any functionally significant problems—almost every conversion is stylistic and those few that aren’t are called out and easily dealt with.

Numbers itself is a very nice spreadsheet application. It is, in typical Apple style, easy to use, just about as intuitive as a spreadsheet application could be, and it affords a lot of power in layout and page design. It’s support for functions is far more extensive that anything that we would need in our budget analysis, project planning and P&L sheets and is, as far as I can tell, at least as comprehensive as Microsoft Excel.

One intriguing innovation—and something I’m really looking forward to exploiting—is the idea that a Numbers document is first and foremost a document, not a big matrix-style table. You can have multiple tables on a single page, all of which can be completely independent of each other. You can also lay out charts, images, even text right on the page in a very creative manner. Unfortunately, Excel doesn’t know how to handle this complicated layout, so any exported “Numbers documents” will automatically create a separate Excel worksheet for each spreadsheet. Even so, it does this remarkably well so my Excel-using friends have no trouble reading entire workbooks that I’ve created in Numbers.

Table support in Pages and Keynote borrow a lot of their power from Numbers, so you’ll be able to build full fledged, formula driven tables in any iWork application. Hands down, Numbers is a hit.

Unfortunately, Pages does not come through with such a glowing review. While compatibility with Microsoft Word has been vastly improved (and yes, that includes support for Word 2007) there are at least two critical business features that still “just don’t work.” Ironically, these features are not horribly difficult to implement and, in fact, Pages comes close in a few ways—but misses the mark, leaving us with a couple of gaping problems:

1. Support for cross-references. That is, the ability to automatically generate references to other parts of a document by target bookmark, such as “see section XYZ on page 123.” In Microsoft Word this is done by inserting a Bookmark Reference. Word lets you choose how to reference the bookmark: By its page number, section number, reference text or bookmark name.
2. Automatic numbering of symbols, for instance figures. If you want to number your figures today, such as “Figure 1,” “Figure 2″ and so on, it’s a manual process. Heaven forbid you want to insert a figure at the beginning of the document! Pages still requires you to edit your entire document, changing each figure’s caption one at a time.

On the upside, it would appear that many other deficiencies have been addressed (such as the “section number bug” that caused problems with numbered lists and numbered sections throughout a document).

I was delighted to see that Pages finally supports change tracking—another mandatory feature for the workplace. Tracking changes in Pages does the job very nicely, recording what has been deleted, changed or added, along with the author of the change and an optional comment displayed in the off-page margin. Other handy features that some users will appreciate include advanced image adjustments, “instant alpha” (a tool that creates a transparent background in an imported image), and better text box handling. Proofreading and some related word processing aids have been added as well.

For the serious touch-typist, Pages may be a little bit frustrating because of its reliance on the mouse. For example, there is no way to navigate and change a paragraph’s style without resorting to either the styles drawer or pulldown. Fortunately, most operations do have keyboard alternatives so this is at worst an annoyance, at least in my book.

Overall, I think that this new version of Pages is close to the mark, but still won’t make it in the business environment. Long documents, business contracts, project proposals—you name it, they all have tables, figures, attachments, lengthly section numbering and cross references. The potential problems of having incorrectly numbered figures or mistakenly entered page references (not to mention the manual time and effort to review and edit those references) is just to costly for a business user. Pages is an excellent basic word processor, but it won’t cut it in the business environment until these deficiencies are addressed.

Keynote is probably the gem of the application suite. As a presentation tool, Keynote has been the best of breed for years and now leaps ahead of the pack once again. Personally, I suspect this is because Steve Jobs uses Keynote on what must be a nearly daily basis—if only he would put so much attention on Pages and Numbers, iWork ‘08 would be a solid business tool.

A few things that stand out immediately in Keynote ‘08: New animation effects, including panning, A-B pathway motion and rotation controls at the slide level—now you can build great, animated presentations without resorting to tricky slide building techniques. And speaking of builds, a new Smart Build feature lets you incrementally build a slide. For example, you can set up a build that brings the first text bullet onto the slide, then the first wedge of a pie chart, and then the second bullet.

Keynote is, of course, wonderfully easy to use and intuitive. What takes hours of tinkering in Powerpoint can be done in minutes with Keynote, and usually with much more consistent and good looking results. File export has been improved as well, so creating a Powerpoint, PDF or Flash movie (among others) is a breeze. Unfortunately, many slide transitions, effects and subtle nuances are lost on their way to Powerpoint (which doesn’t support many of these Keynote features). Still, Keynote does a reasonable job getting the data out—but, if you have to give your presentation in Powerpoint, you probably don’t want to use Keynote to author it.

The entire iWork suite has a new look and feel that gives you more power, but without being intrusive. The new toolbar, across the top of the document, provides quick access to such things as styles, fonts and justification. Image masking has been improved substantially (you can, for instance, edit a mask now rather than having to delete it and recreate the mask). And every application has an impressive suite of templates—Pages and Keynote both having a new batch that adds to the already stunning templates providing in the previous version.

Bottom line, iWork ‘08 turns the suite into an excellent and well rounded set of applications for home use, but it’s still not ready for business adoption. Fortunately, there are only a few obstacles left—and even with these, some small businesses may find Pages’ flaws acceptable. Unfortunately, Apple isn’t known for listening to the market (I originally provided Apple with detailed descriptions of these flaws back when iWork ‘06 came out—and I know I wasn’t alone giving this commentary). So, for those of us still in need of a serious, business-grade office suite, I’m afraid we’re still stuck with Microsoft Office:X.