iWorks will kill MS Office

[nippyjun]

Maybe Microsoft will release their office for ipad. Imagine outlook on the ipad!

And/or

Google documents can be used on the ipad as well.

Printing easily from the ipad is the only feature that is a make or break for me as far as doing a lot of my documents/speadsheets on it.

 

[MacinJosh]

I'm a big fan of iWork. I use it quite extensively. I'm a missionary in Papua New Guinea and I do all kinds of things on top of bible bashing.

I've written 2 textbooks for our bible school using Pages
I write our regular newsletter using Pages
I run a retail/wholesale store to fund the school using Numbers amongst other tools.
I sometimes preach using Keynote remote controlled from my iPhone or iPod Touch.
I used Keynote for most of the graphics on our school's promotional video

I could never see myself using Office again.

 

[wyneken]

That's cool that you've been able to do all that stuff with Pages, MacinJosh. I'm hoping to get some real writing done on the iPad, so this is heartening. (I've used Pages on a desktop Mac, but it's not my word processor of choice. Neither is Word.)

Here's how I see it:

• Pages is NOT going to kill Word, obviously. The two products are very different, and they are aimed at different kinds of users.

• That having been said, it's not absolutely true that you CAN'T use Pages in a Word-dominated world. For relatively simple text-based documents -- student papers, for example, that don't require a lot of special formatting -- the ability to read and write .doc files works pretty well, in my experience. A lot of people -- in the publishing industry, among others -- use .rtf instead of .doc on a routine basis, since that is a more easily portable format. I was REQUIRED to turn in my last book manuscript to Random House as an .rtf file. So it really wouldn't have mattered what software I used to create it. (I used Nisus Writer Express on a Mac.)

• Pages will probably turn out to be popular among iPad users, and not just because it's got a head start on Word. Judging from the regular iWork version, Pages on the iPad should turn out to be a flexible, adaptable, easy-to-learn, and surprisingly powerful little productivity app. Even when competing products like the Office suite become available, many people will choose to stick with Pages and Keynote because they are well suited to the kind of things we are likely to be doing on an iPad, as opposed to a full-featured laptop or desktop computer.

All of this is in keeping with Apple's intention of creating an "in-between" device. People who need all the capabilities of Word will use Word, just as people who need all the capabilities of a "real" computer will use one, and no doubt already own one or two of them.

I think we're still struggling to understand the iPad as a new KIND of device -- something that is not intended to replace a desktop or a laptop, but that will probably turn out to be very useful (and fun to use) for a fairly wide range of purposes, even if it's not the ultimate productivity device for everyone.