iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Introduction

The words “productivity software” don’t exactly make your skin tingle. Most of us use a word processor or spreadsheet program because we have to. It’s how we get our day-to-day work done, pushing through the words and numbers that office, school, or household demands impose. What’s to get excited about? Until recently, not much. For decades, word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation software have presented blandly efficient tools that solemnly transferred your work to page and screen. Bland gets the job done, it’s true, but bland doesn’t inspire. You and your ideas deserve an environment that’s more stirring than that. Dreary work tools don’t cut it.

An inspiring spreadsheet program? A rousing word processor? The concepts seem improbable—but as usual, Apple beats the odds. When the company unveiled its iWork collection of programs, Apple proved that doing serious work doesn’t have to feel serious. The package includes Pages, Keynote, and Numbers: iWork’s word processor, presentation software, and spreadsheet program, respectively. While familiar, all three are remarkably different than what came before.

All iWork programs put an unprecedented emphasis on the design and polish of your final documents, making it easy to create results that look not only professional, but actually stunning. It’s like you’ve got an entire art department on the payroll—and in fact, that’s not far from the truth. Pages, Keynote, and Numbers all come stacked high with prebuilt templates that you can put to use right away, letting the skill of Apple’s talented designers shine through in your own work. Although the template concept isn’t anything new in this category of software, the quality of design sets the bar at a whole new level.

But iWork is more than just a collection of paint-by-numbers templates. Pages, Keynote, and Numbers sport stylishly elegant interfaces whose airy flexibility give you plenty of room to work, rarely getting in your way. Apple designed the programs from the ground up to deliver high-impact visual documents, and all of them let you work with freestyle layouts that juggle photos and movies as well as they do words and numbers. The result: Pages turns the mild-mannered word processor into a graphic design program; Keynote’s visual gymnastics make your Mac look like a Hollywood special effects studio (Al Gore even won an Oscar for his Keynote slideshow); and Numbers spreadsheets morph your gray columns and rows into dazzling multimedia reports.

When even your spreadsheets sparkle, it’s hard not to feel energized about your work. This, of course, is Apple’s strong suit. All the company’s software is designed to help regular folks painlessly turn out sophisticated creations to rival the pros—from making music to editing movies to creating photo books. Apple has a certain magic for making powerful software approachable, and with iWork the results are so productive and satisfying that it becomes—and please, don’t tell the boss—almost fun to get work done.