Chapter 1. Starting Out with iWork '09

In This Chapter

  • Leaving the past behind

  • The iWork timesavers: Do it once, do it right, and reuse it

Word processing and spreadsheet applications are among the most widely used software products on personal computers; presentation software is a close runner-up. Having started from scratch on the hardware side and then the operating system side, people at Apple started dreaming about what they could do if they were to start from scratch to write modern versions of word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation programs. They knew they'd have to follow their recent advertising campaign theme: Think Different.

Freed from supporting older operating systems or from foregoing features that couldn't be implemented on Windows, they began to dream about how good those programs could be if they could start over.

So they did.

Welcome to iWork.

Tip

I assume you already have a Mac with iWork '09 installed. If you need more assistance with installations, go to www.apple.com/support/software.

Living the Suite Life

A suite of applications provides a collection of applications that can work together. For example:

  • Adobe Creative Suite combines graphics-oriented applications.

  • Apple iLife combines iPhoto, iTunes, iMovie, iWeb, iDVD, and GarageBand.

  • Microsoft Office is a suite of applications that comes in a variety of flavors: on Mac OS X, it normally includes Microsoft Office, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint. On Windows, there are further variations, some of which ...

Get iWork® '09 For Dummies® now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.