What’s Hot.
Apple’s intuitive design makes iWork easily navigable. New features make graphics and text easier to animate. More themes and templates will help even the most unimaginative seem super creative.
What’s Not.
iWork ’09 does not include an integrated e-mail program. Numbers application is beginner-friendly, but still not as advanced as Excel.
The bottom line.
At $79, iWork ’09 is a very good buy for personal and small-business use. The program has many more capabilities than its online counterparts. It makes creating impressive presentations seem almost effortless.
Mac users will appreciate Apple’s iWork ’09 for its updated capabilities, intuitive design and easy navigation. Although iWork ’09 includes upgrades to all of its applications (Pages, Numbers and Keynote), I’ve focused on Keynote and its new presentation-enhancing tools in this review. Best designed for personal or small-business use, the iWork ’09 suite makes it easy to create eye-catching and useful documents and presentations. The applications work well together, and users can easily update information across all applications with only a few clicks.
To run iWork ’09, you will need at least an Intel, PowerPC G5 or G4 machine with a 500 MHz processor and a minimum of 512MB of RAM, although Apple recommends 1 GB. The program requires that you be running OS X 10.4.11, OS X 10.5.6 or later. Overall, iWork ’09’s interface is fairly similar to the ’08 version, and all iWork files are fully compatible with Microsoft Office applications. iWork ’09 also allows users to reduce file sizes dramatically, making them easier to save and e-mail.
Unfortunately, iWork ’09 does not include an integrated e-mail program like Microsoft Outlook. Partly making up for this lack is Apple’s new iWork.com, a web-based service that allows you to post documents online. Invited viewers cannot edit your work, but they can comment on and download your files from iWork.com.
Keynote
My friend, who rarely uses the computer for anything besides Facebook, is so enamored with Keynote that she creates presentations just for fun. I’m sure she will be ecstatic to learn that Apple has included several cool upgrades to Keynote. Although the new “Magic Move” tool won’t teach you how to impress your next date, it will allow you to use preset slide transitions to animate text, images and graphics. New animations and styles for 3D charts will also please users and their audiences by making data more visually interesting. For the artistically-challenged, Apple has added 8 new presentation themes, giving users 44 to choose from.
Keynote works well with iWork’s spreadsheet application, Numbers. Users can easily illustrate Numbers data in Keynote charts in mere clicks. The same is true with Pages, iWork’s word-processing application, and Numbers. Apple has introduced a new feature that automatically updates any Numbers data you’ve used in Pages.
Finally, you can use the iPod Touch or iPhone as a remote control for Keynote presentations (as if you needed another reason to covet your neighbor’s iPhone). So get out there and create presentations on everything from your company’s new 5-year plan to what your new puppy did at the dog park this morning. Whatever the subject, you can rest assured that it will be visually exciting.
