Apple Apple IWork ’06 Family Pack By Apple’s Developers

Apple’s iWork software presents two applications: Pages and Keynote which is Apple’s answer to Microsoft’s Publisher and Power Point. As someone who has used both, I can honestly say that iWork blows Publisher and Power Point clean out of the water. Keynote has some added features such as 3D graphs and the capaibility to add numbers in charts (like a very limited spread sheet) added in this version. You can make truly professional looking mind blowing presentations with Keynote that will make any presentation look like a multimedia jewel. Pages allows you to do desktop publishing and print media with the finesse and end results of professional looking print catalogs and brochures. Both applications are well designed and, just like all of the iLife apps, feature the classic Apple interface whereby all of your media content is available and intermeshed into the work flow. There is not really any new earth shattering features in 06 from the 05 version, but mainly just tweaks and enhancements.

By far, the biggest disappointment is in the lack of upgrade pricing availability for users of the previous versions. You will have to pay full price even if you bought iWork ’05. The family pack version for $99 is a really good buy as you get five licensed copies versus the single user copy which only gives you one installation for $79. The family pack is definitely the way to go especially if you need to install to more than one Mac. This is an excellent product that works really tight. I only give four stars for no upgrade pricing and for no new applications bundled with the package. If you need to do slide show presentations in front of a group, then the purchase price is worth the cost of Keynote alone. It really rocks.

I got the iWork software after buying my new iMac 24 and was excited to learn how to use the word processing program with all of it’s graphics capabilities. I even subscribed to Lynda dot com training for a month to learn all of the program’s capabilities. I have not used the presentations software program yet but the word processing was extremely frustrating to a person who has spent the past 15 years using WordPerfect and Microsoft Word for word processing. I prefer to be able to set up short cuts with icons and I found it extremely confusing trying to learn how to combine graphics boxes, etc., etc., with my word processing docs. And that’s really what attracted me to the iMac in the first place! Even after going through the professional on-line training I still can’t get around inside the program and function effectively. After several frustrating days of working at it I purchased and installed the new “Parallels” program on my iMac along with a full-priced new version of Microsoft XP and reinstalled my do-able windows programs on my new iMac. So far, buying iWork was a mistake for me and combined with having to purchase Parallels and a $200 Windows XP, an expensive one. I love the screen colors and hd resolution on my iMac but found the Pages program to be too confusing for me utilize as a researcher/writer. I needed to be able to customize the way my documents look with adjustments that are not part of Pages. If your documents are for school or are fairly simple and you can figure out how Apple combines graphics with word processing, maybe it will work for you and it will be cheaper than getting the windows programs. Pages comes with dozens of ready-made templates which look great but as soon as you try to change the way they look confusion sets in, at least it did for me.

Apple has created a new version of iWork, and they provide no upgrade pricing, effectively sticking it to customers and vendors. If you buy this product, you will be stuck with the old version and have to pay FULL PRICE for the new version that contains a spreadsheet application.

And, yes, Apple deleted any comments complaining about the upgrade policy on their discussion boards.