TidBITS:
Apple has released updates to its trio of iWork apps for the Mac — Pages 6.2, Numbers 4.2, and Keynote 7.2 — with all three receiving the capability to reply to comments (with each person in the thread receiving a unique color and author identification) and the addition of a library with over 500 professionally drawn shapes (in categories such as objects, animals, nature, transportation, arts, and more). The three iWork apps also receive a new Auto-Correction pane that enables you to set up text replacements and more.
Of the three, I only use Keynote on a regular basis. Do any of you use all three as an “Office” suite of apps?
Definitely Pages/Numbers/Keynote is my office suite – seemless with iOS, gorgeous
Yes: Pages often, Numbers sometimes. Keynote few times a year.
But like them.
I use Pages and Numbers daily for home and work. I never use Keynote because I don’t give presentations.
Yes, and they’re generally very good. But I do wish they would greatly increase the number of functions in Numbers.
No. The world (or at least the part of the world I deal with) has standardized on Office.
I don’t use Word that often, but I truly loath it – attempts to do everything, good at nothing. Pages might be a modest improvement, but I just don’t have that much use a WYSIWIG word processor. OmniOutliner and a regular text editor are better for me.
I actually like Excel, and it is much better than Numbers for what I do.
Not much of an opinion on the presentation software – I almost never create slide decks, and almost exclusively use PowerPoint as a doc viewer.
I do my business invoicing with Numbers, and I wrote a book about Pages. And, on those rare occasions I need to do a presentation, Keynote is what I use.
Yes, I do and loving it. And it works in a world based around office. Only sometimes I have to fire up Word (mostly for some fucked up forms from my company).
iWork is generally faster, better integrated into macOS, better in the usability. Killer feature: I never lost a thing in all of them, even when the OS crashes or something. The apps always holds the latest state, even if I never saved the document.
Honestly, I use Pages more as a Pagemaker replacement than a Word substitute. (although to be honest, I used Pagemaker as a Word substitute as well 🙂 I don’t do presentations, and 99% of what I need a spreadsheet requires me to use Excel.
That said, if I’m just putting words on paper I use BBEdit 🙂
Numbers, for almost all of our personal and business spreadsheets. Pages, only for very few specific documents. Keynote, almost never.
Many of our clients give us Word, Excel, and Powerpoint documents. I run Office 2016 to handle specific details within them, as needed.
iWork has been my suite for years – only time i ever need to go back to most is for massive number crunching – which happens less and less – partly because numbers has got better over the years and partly since i don’t like using excel for that – so avoid those kinds of tasks as much as possible.
keynote is my go to … pages is used nearly as much … numbers more for planning
to me keynote is not just for presentations – it is a blank canvas for ideation – works great
i use iWork and export out to most if needed – works fine
truth in that
Professor here. Use Keynote for simple presentations accompanying lecture. Do not use numbers bc my university uses Office so all work stuff I have to do I am forced to edit/modify Excel. Still use Word bc of what I feel is a more robust grammar checker and better support for footnotes and annotations.
Too much hassle for what I do. In my experience, import and export are rarely flawless and many clients depend on Box and/or Sharepoint integration.
I’ve written whole novels in Pages, and I love it! I’m so glad that Apple seems to be moving a little bit now in terms of updating iWork. I think they went through a period where they were so developer-focused that they made a conscious decision to let their own software slip (instead of racking up more stories of ‘sherlocking’). But for a decent number of people, it was Apple’s proprietary software that attracted us to the ecosystem, not the shiny hardware (or at least not ONLY the shiny hardware). I wanted to get into Apple to use Logic and Final Cut, not play freemium games and use knockoff photoshop clones.
I enjoy using iWorks. I don’t use them on a daily basis (simply don’t use WP/spreadsheet/presentation on a daily basis) but I prefer them over MS Office much of the time. The exception is if I am working in a large spreadsheet, in those cases I prefer Excel.
I use Pages and Keynote regularly on iOS. I use Google Sheets for light spreadsheet stuff, and Google Docs for docs I have to share easily.
I only really use Numbers. Once in a while I’ll use pages. If I ever did presentations I would use keynote over powerpoint, but I don’t do presentations.
BTW, I would kill for these shapes & images to be VISIO compliant or work with visio stencils.
Mostly use Numbers for laying out notes and text in tables, its great for that. Used to use Pages a bit but back at uni this year and got a free copy of Office 365 so trying Word for probably the first time in 15 years. Not too bad but I wish I could use Pages at times.
Yes, on a daily basis. I depend on all of them to run my business. And with these new releases, Apple made them incredibly fast.
I use Pages to create ePub talks.
The previous update killed all my formatting. No ePub looked like it should’ve. It was so depressing I found an alternative called Jutoh. That is one serious ePub creation tool.
However the latest Pages update has fixed everything. All my formatting is carried over from Pages to an ePub that I read from in iBooks.
So now I have TWO great ePub creation tools.
I use pages and numbers often, keynote hardly ever. office might be the “standard” but iwork does everything I need and more in a nice, simple package.
I find it kind of impolite, when people send out documents with formating that only works right in proprietary software like ms-office – although they probably don’t know better.
it’s like getting those emails from outlook with the “J”
most of the times, if it doesn’t work in iwork, google docs does the trick – anything else is going back, with a polite “I don’t have office, please reformat”
I have used Keynote as my primary presentation software since its release in 2003. I also regularly use Pages as my primary page layout software and have since its initial release. Pages is near-perfect for documents that will primarily live as PDFs. It can act as a true page layout solution, especially if you select the Blank document template, click the Document tab and UN-check Document Body; this creates a completely blank page that is easy to set up in a custom layout. With this update, Apple FINALLY re-added text flowing capabilities so longer text boxes are far more easily edited in multiple columns across a document. Check this out…it’s a great feature!