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

[steve123]

Frankly, Apple does not pay enough attention to these apps and they are constantly behind the MSO curve lacking important features. They are simply not competitive apps. I use them but I wish Apple would either start taking them seriously or open source them and allow third party contributions..

 

[jlc1978]

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.

Exactly. I use MS Office for that very reason, my clients use it so my stuff needs to be 100% compatible.

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 doubt they drop it as it offers an Apple ecosystem set of tools that are fine for users that don’t need or want MS Office; plus since it is included there is no additional costs.

They first developed AppleWorks since there was no office suite available for Apple products, that morphed into iWorks and now PKN; now it is a way to assure buyers, especially first timers, they don’t need to buy additional software to be productive. Garage Band and iMovie perform similar roles.

 

[steve123]

If you need MSO compatibility, Libre Office is a good alternative. Not sure it is "100%" but it is pretty close.

 

[0ceans]

Keynote is fantastic. Pages is a little wonky for anything more than a simple short writeup. Numbers is straight up not usable.

 

[jaw04005]

iWorks' competition is Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, not Microsoft Office.

You either need Office or you don't.

I'd take Keynote over PowerPoint any day, Pages is good too especially if you care about layouts and I like Numbers for household spreadsheets.

Apple needs to fix the collaboration and sharing features and stop locking older Macs out by "upgrading" files every few years.

There's no reason a Mac on Mojave shouldn't be able to open a simple Pages document that's been created on Ventura. Very stupid.

 

[svenmany]

One of my favorite apps is Numbers. I love the way I can position tables in a single worksheet. Each table handles a separate idea. It's a great way for me to organize things.

I don't use Numbers for anything too complicated. For complicated work spreadsheets which I open but don't maintain, I use Excel. They wouldn't function in Numbers. I opened one and after the import Numbers reported "Unsupported formulas were replaced by the last calculated values."

 

[dk001]

When I think about it, I do use iWorks occasionally, maybe less, but working in a multi-OS environment why would I use these as my main?

 

[oakrrl]

I agree with all the above, especially the superiority of Keynote over Powerpoint. And the main disadvantage being cross-platform compatibility.

I want to add I've found Pages superior to Word in its page-layout functions. I've formatted and self-published two graphics-heavy books using Pages (exporting to PDF for the printer). OTOH when I published a book with a professional publisher, I had to use Word for its tracking and collaboration features (and it was a bear....)

 

[shenfrey]

Frankly, Apple does not pay enough attention to these apps and they are constantly behind the MSO curve lacking important features. They are simply not competitive apps. I use them but I wish Apple would either start taking them seriously or open source them and allow third party contributions..

I feel support for these apps have drifted by the wayside since iWork 09. They use to get updated yearly as a package and would even have a section in each MacWorld/WWDC to go over some of the new features, however now it just seems as if they are treated as these stand alone apps that occasionally get updated and there's much less attention given to them.

FWIW, I will always think of them as iWork and even have all 3 applications in an iWork folder on my Mac.