How come iWork (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) are not more popular?

[shenfrey]

Considering the fact it comes FREE on all devices to EVERYBODY, I don't understand how it isn't more widely used. I don't know a single person who uses it, and I am curious if any of you use this, or know anyone who uses it?

Microsoft Office is quite expensive these days, considering many will need to pay every single month/year to continue to use it, and of course it doesn't beat free, so I am just scratching my head asking myself where did it all go wrong?

 

[miemo]

Considering the fact it comes FREE on all devices to EVERBODY, I don't understand how it isn't more widely used. I don't know a single person who uses it, and I am curious if any of you use this, or know anyone who uses it?

Microsoft Office is quite expensive these days, considering many will need to pay every single month/year to continue to use it, and of course it doesn't beat free, so I am just scratching my head asking myself where did it all go wrong?

Keynote is relatively well-loved and -used in the designer circles – it just works sooo much better from the angle of creating beautiful slides than Powerpoint, let alone the horror that is Google Slides. Esp. the animation capabilities are completely next level.

Personally I haven't owned a MS Office license for ages (apart from something that came via work) and am perfectly fine without Word & Excel, and using Pages and Numbers instead (and Google Docs & Sheets for anything more collaborative).

 

[svenmany]

Considering the fact it comes FREE on all devices to EVERYBODY, I don't understand how it isn't more widely used.

Probably because it's Apple only. People need to share documents with other people easily.

 

[shenfrey]

Probably because it's Apple only. People need to share documents with other people easily.

That's true, though I thought the compatibility between the two was pretty good these days?

 

[heretiq]

Probably because it's Apple only. People need to share documents with other people easily.

^This! I prefer iWork over Office — Particularly Pages and Keynote; but the people I work with use Office. Because the document export compatibility is not 100% between the two I end up defaulting to Office to minimize productivity hit whenever I need to deliver anything other that a pdf. I think iWork would be a very popular cross-platform productivity product.

 

[heretiq]

That's true, though I thought the compatibility between the two was pretty good these days?

The compatibility is pretty good, but not good enough to eliminate a non-trivial productivity hit from correcting small issues arising from minor header and footer, tab, font, style definition, and table of contents incompatibilities.

 

[estabya]

The compatibility is pretty good, but not good enough to eliminate a non-trivial productivity hit from correcting small issues arising from minor header and footer, tab, font, style definition, and table of contents incompatibilities.

This has been my experience. Something simple like a letter or essay will convert fine. But I found doing things like reports or proposals with images, tables, and complicated formatting almost never convert without issues.

 

[svenmany]

In a business setting it would be a disadvantage to just throw out the collaboration features that are available when everyone is working with office. Since so many people use Office at work, using it at home is probably free for them.

 

[CTHarrryH]

Having used it for decades, I'm an "expert" in office and thus never really bothered to learn the Apple apps. Probably should but...

 

[dk001]

I use Office for work and basically get a full copy free for home use.
For most businesses it is MSO and pdf. Why use iWorks? It would be another suite of software that is semi compatible and another that would have to be vetted / maintained for a work environment.

 

[AZhappyjack]

Considering the fact it comes FREE on all devices to EVERYBODY, I don't understand how it isn't more widely used. I don't know a single person who uses it, and I am curious if any of you use this, or know anyone who uses it?

Microsoft Office is quite expensive these days, considering many will need to pay every single month/year to continue to use it, and of course it doesn't beat free, so I am just scratching my head asking myself where did it all go wrong?

Microsoft Office is king in the world of office suite software. It is the de facto standard, and it's hard to "go against the flow", especially in the business world. Also, if one needs to share documents with non-Mac users, MS Office is pretty much the only way to go.

I have Pages installed on all of my Macs, and use it some for my personal stuff, but frankly, it's just far more convenient to just use a single tool.

 

[gilby101]

I don't understand how it isn't more widely used

Keynote - is used widely used for reasons already given amongst designers.
Pages - doesn't have full compatibility with Word, so lots of problems when sharing with Office users.
Numbers - at best a pale imitation of Excel (once you get beyond very basic use).

 

[shenfrey]

Keynote - is used widely used for reasons already given amongst designers.
Pages - doesn't have full compatibility with Word, so lots of problems when sharing with Office users.
Numbers - at best a pale imitation of Excel (once you get beyond very basic use).

Do you think work on Pages/Numbers will continue and hopefully have compatibility improve or do you think Apple may at some point just say abandon most of this suite?

 

[gilby101]

Do you think work on Pages/Numbers will continue and hopefully have compatibility improve or do you think Apple may at some point just say abandon most of this suite?

I am sure they will continue.

Pages certainly has its place. It is different to Word as well as being easier to use. Document compatibility (Pages read-write Word docs) has improved over the years (decades), but there are functionally differences/details which will remain.

Numbers will limp along, and for those that need a simple spreadsheet it is great. Excel is intimidating to the casual user. Numbers will never be an Excel - and that is as it should be.

 

[Alpha Centauri]

Office 2021 Home&Student Edition for Mac can still be purchased as a stand alone license. There's no need to subscribe to Office 365.

 

[6916494]

Wild guess:

One factor could be the deal Steve Jobs made when he returned to Apple in 1997. Microsoft purchased stock to save Apple from bankruptcy, and in return agreed to develop a version of MS Office for the Mac (among other things).

And at the beginning of that deal, there may have been restrictions in what AppleWorks – and later iWork – were allowed to implement to not rival MS Office. Maybe: not all Excel formulas may be replicatedto make it fully compatible with Excel. Maybe: Pages and Numbers can't read and save Word and Excel files directly, there has to be a conversion process. And so on.

 

[gilby101]

One factor could be the deal Steve Jobs made when he returned to Apple in 1997

I hope you realise that Word and Excel for Mac were first released in 1985. The Windows versions were two years later.

 

[James_C]

I use a Mac at work in a business where most other employees use PC's. I have been doing this for over 20 years now. I prefer Keynote to Powerpoint and will use Keynote for my presentations, unless I know that I need to collaborate with others in which case I use Powerpoint. I will create PDF's for people that want a copy of the presentation. I don't do very much word processing, so generally use Word in case I have to share the document. Notes are either handwritten using Rocketbook or  Notes As I work in the Finance department most of my time is buried in spreadsheets. I sometimes use Numbers for Charts and Tables for Keynote, otherwise I use Excel as I am a spreadsheet power user and Numbers can't hold a candle to Excel for financial model building.

As others have said Compatibility is the main reason that Office is the preferred choice for anyone in a work environment. Keynote > Powerpoint. Word is more powerful that Pages, but Pages is enough for most users. Numbers is fine for simple spreadsheets but for complex financial modelling Excel is the king. Numbers takes a very different approach to tables compared to Excel's multiple tabbed spreadsheets. Conversion of a Numbers Spreadsheet with Multiple tables looks completely different in Excel as Excel is designed differently. Where Numbers stands above Excel is the ability to create very nice looking reports using multiple tables and graphs on the same page that can be moved around and resized.

 

[Farrgazer]

In the digitized office era, collaboration now plays a bigger role in office. This can be in either real time, or tossing and receiving documents multiple times a day. Each suite does real-time collaboration only with the same suite. And iWork is Apple-only, iCloud version notwithstanding.

MS Office is often part of a much larger MS service offering for enterprises.

 

[SalisburySam]

I wish the iWorks suite had an Access-equivalent database tool like MS365 includes. Now there is a version of ninox and it works quite well, but I’d still like to see something in the Apple portfolio with interoperability with the Pages, Numbers, even Keynote.

 

[sracer]

Do you think work on Pages/Numbers will continue and hopefully have compatibility improve or do you think Apple may at some point just say abandon most of this suite?

I highly doubt that Apple will abandon the iWork suite. It is a integral part of their cross-platform strategy. iWork doesn't have to compete feature-for-feature with MS Office, but simply be seamlessly available across the Apple product line.

Apple essentially rewrote the iWork suite in 2012 to include iCloud versions. And although they have been slowly reintroducing features that were removed in that release (relative to what was available in iWork '09) over the years, they still have not restored all of the functionality.

iWork's support for MS Office file formats has improved slightly, but really only reliable for the most basic of files. It's passable for getting content across, but in terms of retaining fit, finish, and formatting, not so good.

Where iWork still shines, IMO, is in the consistency between iPad OS, iOS, Mac OS, and web versions. I can work on Pages or Keynote documents on my Mac Mini and iPad, and continue to work on them on my chromebook. That's been very helpful. I have many documents with advanced formatting and they're preserved regardless of where I'm modifying them.

I wish the iWorks suite had an Access-equivalent database tool like MS365 includes. Now there is a version of ninox and it works quite well, but I’d still like to see something in the Apple portfolio with interoperability with the Pages, Numbers, even Keynote.

Relational databases are a bit overkill for the target audience of the iWork suite, and flat-file databases fell out of favor over 10 years ago. Bento was a terrific database solution that fit well with iWork, but because it was a flat-file database, it needed to die (according to those who were in the position to extend it or kill it).

But then again, I'm just an old caveman who really appreciated ClarisWorks/AppleWorks. It was my experience with ClarisWorks for Windows that caused me to get into the Apple universe in the first place.

 

[Love-hate 🍏 relationship]

There are many reasons, but the biggest one to me is the fact that as usual these apps AREN'T platform agnostic and only work on apple devices really

 

[sgtaylor5]

another factor might be that there are people who need to make fancy multimedia documents, and there are those that don't. iWork is great for the former, and possibly overkill for the simpler documents.

 

[SalisburySam]

Relational databases are a bit overkill for the target audience of the iWork suite, and flat-file databases fell out of favor over 10 years ago.

Yeah, possibly correct about the relational databases, though I use ninox extensively for very simple tasks and find it extremely useful. I think one of the reasons flat-file database products lost steam is that most of what they can do is pretty easily done in Excel/Numbers. The need for them just went away.

 

[FreakinEurekan]

I use Pages, Numbers, and Keynote quite a bit. But, there are certain things Office can do that iWork can’t, and I recently bought a copy of Office 2021 for one of my Macs to take care of an issue I was having.

IWork is getting better… the loss of Mail Merge a decade or so was a big hit, it’s finally back in Pages - that was the biggest missing feature for me. There is nothing I’ve personally found in PowerPoint that Keynote doesn’t do better, and simpler.

Numbers… I have to say, basic Numbers sheets are SO simple and now that PivotTables exist a lot of basic analysis can be done too. For me, some simple formatting (for printing) are the only thing that send me back to Excel; being able to rotate text on a tick-box column head for example. Number is sooooo close but still missing those few features.