Its design is something completely different, and as such I can quite easily see that people will happily use this alongside more traditional office packages and word processors.Īs for value for money, I think iWorks price point is fantastic and I will definitely be buying it.
I think its pretty clear that this is a very, very different office suite to MS-Office, OpenOffice, NeoOffice, AppleWorks and StarOffice. Alas, imagine our world had MS not been able to take it over. Was it OpenDoc - or is that something else? Whatever it was, it was a really neat idea. Instead of giant apps that try to do everything you would have an almost generic doc type that you could then apply different tools to - text, image, tables. Didn't Apple explore something long ago that went against this whole monolithic app concept. and don't even get me started about importing between Word, PowerPoint and Excel! If iWork follows this same philosophy, I might like to use it for personal use. Not the absurd mess in Office where you have completely different UI rules for tables in Word vs spreadsheets in excel. Text, drawing and spreadsheet - were each treated as a sort of component of a document and depending on which you were working with it would give you the cooresponding UI (menus, tools.). I don't know much about iWork, but the thing that ClarisWorks did really well was integrating differerent doc types into one doc. Years ago I used ClarisWorks for everything.
