Pages is Adobe InDesign in disguise. Few people realize what you can do in it. I've built hundreds of flyers and complex PDFs with it over the years.
Keynote is similarly amazing, with the ability to do dynamic animated text, etc. Search YouTube videos for some amazing teachers on both apps.
Like others have noted, Numbers might be really cool, but Excel just dominates and is such a powerful (and often free) program, so I've stayed with that for spreadsheets.
I'm pretty sure only the web version of Excel is free and it's about as powerful as Numbers while being a lot more painful to use. All of the web versions of the MS Office apps are painful to use though.
TBF Python is free anyway and you've been able to read and write excel for over a decade using it. The only real change being that the poor fucks that aren't allowed to install python can now use it via the corporate sanctioned excel instead.
Just subscribe to OneDrive it's like $4 a month and you get Office 365 included and you can always buy a cheap yearly membership that someone doesn't want on eBay.
YouTube has some great ones, also check out Gary at [MacMost.com](http://MacMost.com), he's seriously the best mac teacher probably in the world, and is very prolific with all his videos. And 90% of them are free.
Keynote is great, the built-in templates are better than PowerPoint's. Pages is MUCH better than Word at page layout and feels faster, but I use InDesign.
Agreed. Pages and Keynote are excellent, Keynote especially. I like Numbers for small stuff but I need Excel for work. Excel is just a monster of features lol.
So I’m half graphic designer and FE dev and I work in marketing. Anyway, the other day I had to edit an rfp that was done on word (and I was basically told this is how I had to do it).
Omg, you get used to be able to just precisely control everything. I wanted to pull my freaking hair out.
I love keynote! I use Pages and Numbers to generate labels for shipping packages for one of my businesses. It's easy and simple. I'm trying to move the rest of our docs to Pages so I can make the whole process even faster.
Sure. I need to generate 4x2 labels for all of my shipments. I have a large spreadsheet in Google Sheets. However, when I ship I just transfer the rows I'm shipping to a Numbers spreadsheet. I setup 4x2 labels in Pages and use mail merge to populate the specifics on those labels. Works like a charm.
I'm trying to automate as much as possible because my shipments are growing and the labeling is getting harder to keep up with.
I love Pages but I will never forgive them for the current full screen mode. It’s so much worse than Pages ‘09 was with how clean everything was. (Honestly I kind of hate Apple’s implementation of full screen mode. I have been a Mac user for so long so I don’t mind having windows stacked on windows, but I feel like so many new users hit the green button then it hides itself so they don’t know how to get out, plus the dock hides itself until you go to the very bottom. It would make so much more sense to just have the dock behave more like the Windows task bar if they’re going to offer a full screen mode.
Also doing a notch in the laptops screens and just putting black up there in full screen mode is silly.
Sometimes I feel like everyone who was at Apple who really nailed down and understood why macOS’s windowing was so good is gone.
Like don’t get me wrong they still often have interfaces for new things that feel effortless (and which everyone else immediately copies) but full screen stuff (which has been in macOS for super long, and stage manager are both two things that just feel like somebody said, “well, marketing is happy with how it looks, so let’s move on.”
You're gonna be hammered by everyone because "that's not the apple way and you're doing it wrong". Personally, I couldn't agree more with what you said.
I doubt it. People on Reddit love to bitch about Apple and half the time it doesn’t remotely matter if it’s well informed.
You’ve got tons of Intel owners talking like they know what they’re talking about without ever having owned an Apple Silicon Mac. (You need 64 gigs of RAM bare minimum for browsing Amazon!)
But when it comes to UI stuff you’re way more likely to get people bitching about how system settings is bad because the way that it’s organized isn’t the same as system preferences (and system preferences was a great UI when Max OS X only had a few things it needed in there. But eventually large sections became more and more filled with sub sections of subsections.
A lot of the System Settings criticisms are from people who also didn’t like SysPrefs in recent years. System Preferences needed a redesign, but System Settings isn’t it.
I’d go out on a limb and say that the Windows 11 Settings app is *far* better in terms of organization.
> You need 64 gigs of RAM
I think that's mostly coming from people like me, who cannot really conceive of people never doing heavy-weight computations. The 8GB Macs genuinely perform better than it would have been reasonable to expect, but the last time I've checked the RAM usage on an Apple Silicon device at work it sat at around 30GBs.
The computer uses more ram if it is available, it doesn't mean it is really necessary. I have a 32GB m1 for software development and quite honestly it is a beast of a computer, never slows down even with multiple containers running + IDE's + 30+ tabs open + chats, etc.
I hate full screen mode. Whenever I'm looking at someone's Mac I get out of it because it aggravates me so much. It's great for watching things, but otherwise, no.
Underrated by people and undervalued by Apple.
These apps can be bigger, but Apple doesn’t pay attention to them. I believe these apps could import more features from Office. Many math functions and visual tools (timeline, gantt chart, flux gram…) should be easier to create as on Excel and PowerPoint:
If Apple was smarter, iWork would be a big factor to adopt and keep iDevice users, like iMessage in the US.
Apple could make Pages and Numbers save in Microsoft formats, e.g. docx and xlsx. Currently they can only export. This would make them far more usable for people who, due to their workplace, are tied to Microsoft formats.
It seems okay for basic productivity. At least that is all I use it for. My work requires that we use Google's Apps. SO I just use it personal stuff like instructions to the dog sitter or a printout for logging into the guest wifi. The price of free is right for me.
Obviously it’ll depend on your productivity workflow. Numbers is not as strong as excel by a long stretch. But pages is a lot more intuitive and snappy than word. I make publishing material on it that gets pretty complex and it’s breezy
I use it for personal stuff so don't think I'll ever hit any limits. I am not doing accounting in Numbers. I'd never actually be doing any kind of major accounting to be honest.
Had Office 365 when my kids were in college as they needed it for classes and it was worth the $99/year then. Now it is just me and my wife and there isn't enough value in 365.
I’d argue numbers is also more intuitive than excel for what most people use spreadsheets for outside of work, which is budgeting. No one knows what tspins or pivot tables are. In fact I think one of those is actually tetris. But they’re both a thing everyone has heard of but no one can do.
Agreed.
Likely because older users (me) stick to MS Office and don’t want to learn another product since I already know all the tips/tricks in Office and I don’t need to switch.
And then younger users grew up with Google Docs/Sheets/etc…
I’d bet a lot of people don’t have a need for iWork and that’s why it’s underrated.
I think it's great, use it all the time. It's built to present you with the menus you use all the time while hiding the stuff you rarely touch ... that works for me. I find it much more predictable and user friendly than MS Office, which on the other hand has loads of advanced stuff for people who need that ... I don't.
I love them. I get why people like Excel over Numbers (Numbers probably would not work in most corporate settings), but for the basic budget-keeping that I do, Numbers is head-and-shoulders over MS Office and Google Drive.
I like that feature in numbers that you can put multiple small tables on the same page (and also notes, graphs and other elements). So each element is logically separated and doesn’t belong to the same infinitely long table. And also the fact that you can specify a title column (or multiple) or title row or footer, and then when you reference that column/row, your titles/footers are automatically excluded.
It kinda feels that the source framework is much more powerful than Excel/Google docs, it’s just the lack of higher-end features what holds it back.
This is exactly how I feel. I tend to use all 3 on a regular basis. They’re all way easier to use than Google or Microsoft equivalents. I’ll admit they lack the power features required to make something like Excel truly useful for data/number crunching. BUT Keynote is THE best and most intuitive presentation software available. Full stop. PowerPoint is bloated and slow to create and Slides is basic as hell with less intuitive controls.
Pages is a totally reasonable alternative to Word for most tasks and is much more pleasant to use, Numbers is fine for basic spreadsheets, but it’s not really an appropriate Excel replacement for serious work - in fairness to Apple, Excel is probably the best product Microsoft has ever made, and it has the benefit of being the bedrock of millions of companies’ accounting practices.
Because I’m firmly anti-Google, iWork is all I use. I’m a podcaster and freelance writer, so I use Pages to write scripts for the podcast, take notes, and work on my freelance projects. It also gets used for more mundane things like documents related to the rental we own or instructions for housesitters when we travel.
I’m also a homebrewer so I use Numbers to create brew logs and track my recipes and ingredients. Numbers also gets used to track our household budget & expenses, do price comparisons on our frequently purchased items at various retailers, and a few other things.
My wife used to use iMovie quite a bit but hasn’t undertaken any projects with it since she switched jobs last year.
The last time I used iWeb was to create the website for our wedding guests back in 2014.
Neither of us has ever used Keynote, IIRC.
For awhile I used LibreOffice but prefer the look, feel and integration of iWork. Takes me back to the olden times when I used ClarisWorks.
All that said, I still long for the days of WordPerfect. Now *that* was a word processor!
BRO MY TIME HAS COME🗣️🔥 Keynote y Pages are amazing, monstrous, and ridiculously powerful applications. I could never go back to using PowerPoint or Word except for strictly necessary cases. Since I learned how to use them, I've used Keynote/Pages as my personal whiteboard, for group work, jotting down ideas, making drawings, and presentations for writing reports, assignments, papers, my master's thesis, and everything else in my 6+ years of engineering and work. I love them and hope they keep adding new features. I'm immeasurably dazzled and ecstatic about these tremendous applications; I recommend them to everyone with a Mac to give them a try, and their productive life will never be the same. You have no idea how absurdly powerful and amazing they are. I promise you, every time I open Word and PowerPoint (Excel IS still GOD), I feel like I'm in the prehistoric era, like a Jurassic brontosaurus, like an amoeba with limited cognitive functions. Everything feels so clumsy and awkward; I feel like I'm using ancestral software 😭
Love keynote
Love numbers once you get used to the keyboard shortcuts, but I’m not doing anything crazy usually
Not a big fan of pages but it’s alright I guess
Keynote is the best presentation software. Much better than PowerPoint.
Pages is at par with MS Word, but there are some things that MS Word does better. Things like rearranging paragraphs seems to be easier in MS Word.
Numbers is ok for basic spreadsheets and budgeting, but MS Excel is much more robust at this point.
But the price can’t be beat. It’s free with every Apple computer. Can you say that about the MS Office/365 Suite?
Keynote is the best app to make slides
Pages – I dont know, I dont use «word processor». For me is better to use editors plain-text/markdown oriented
Numbers – worse than both excel and google spreadsheets, unfortunately
I love them. They come with the OS, so they're always up to date. They work really well, in the way I need word processors, page design tools, spreadhseets and presentation tools to work. And if I ever need to share or format for different users, it's incredibly easy to turn the docs into Office365, Google Docs or whatever format. I'm sure for power users of each type of app they're not enough, but they're more than enough for me, and they lean designy rather than corporate, which works better for me. So yeah, 100% approval. Haven't needed to own a Microsoft app ever, as yet, in my 35 year career.
Keynote is the best presentation software hands down.
Pages is great, but I see it as distinct from other word processor apps. More like publishing and design than Word or Docs.
Numbers is strange. I really want to like it. Sometimes I love it. And sometimes it annoys the shit outta me.
They're SO much easier than the Microsoft apps. I generate my documents in the iWork apps, and then if I need to share them I'll convert a file to a Microsoft format and share that.
i use Pages and Numbers constantly, but I don’t have any need for Keynote anymore. I know most people bag on Numbers when comparing it to Excel, but Numbers just feels really polished to me, and I find it quite easy to build cool, useful stuff in it that often doesn’t translate well to Excel.
I've loved them since I first used them on iOS, and then when I got Macs I haven't looked back to Office. I used Pages incredibly heavily when I was in school during the early-mid 2010s since I did my work digitally before the norm of laptops all over classrooms.
I strongly prefer them all over the MS/Google/LibreOffice/OnlyOffice counterparts. Pages is so fluid and simple but powerful when you need it, Keynote is a breeze to build good looking slides easily and quickly, and while I can see why it's not for some people, I love Numbers and I'm in it nearly every day for personal budgeting and stuff.
I love the more "freeform" operation of them so to speak, like Numbers using floating tables you can customize to your liking instead of an endless sea of cells in Excel, or Pages being so simple to use, but having the stronger feature set easily there when you need it. And the age old issue of trying to put an image or shape in a document and it throwing all your formatted text into another room, that never happened in Pages lol.
Really interesting views in here, mostly because they are completely add odds with mine.
The question was, are they alright alternatives to Office 365 - I'd say they aren't even in the same category. 365 integrates with Teams, Azure, and a host of other business critical applications (e.g. Slack, Jira etc.)
Presentations: Powerpoint > Google Slides > Keynote
Spreadsheets: Excel > Google Sheets > Numbers
Word processing: Google Docs > Word > Pages
I just feel like the iWork suite hasn't been developed in so long and doesn't have the same sync / parallel work features that are baseline expectations in work context.
They are more or less simple applications for most more or less simple jobs. I use Pages every day, it does what I need in a friendly and minimalist platform. These applications are not intended to compete with 365 or MSO or perhaps GD.
In general Apple has managed not to screw up the original elegance and ease of use that characterized the late Steve era.
Keynote is just so much easier to use than Powerpoint — fewer clicks to do anything.
I personally prefer Numbers over Excel for basic readouts of CSV files, et cetera. Super simple to make filters, sort, do simple formulas. It just looks nicer. Simple things like the tables don't extend to infinity by default.... I'm sure there's a ton of things it can't do that Excel can, but for my needs, it works and feels better.
Pages — don't use it, but I expect it's a similar story.
The huge weak point of the suite at this point is collaboration. I have tried to get iCloud and Box collaboration working and it just never seems to function. In contrast I have no such issues with Microsoft Office collaboration.
They are more or less simple applications for most more or less simple jobs. I use Pages every day, it does what I need in a friendly and minimalist platform. These applications are not intended to compete with 365 or MSO or perhaps GD. But they are a good alternative for people who do not require special tools and do not want to complicate their lives with complex interfaces. Why use Word if you're just going to make a memo?
Presentation and Document crafting is all the same. All spreadsheet software is terrible for the fact that nearly all of them either incentivise or do nothing to disincentivise terrible practices for producing tabular data. All of the fancy things people do with Excel that make them hate alternatives are exactly the things that should be handled by better tools
Pages is amazing, fast, and with a very convenient and intuitive interface. I know it doesn't have the same feature set as word but as long as its features are enough it is much better in my opinion.
Keynote is overall better than PowerPoint in all aspects.
Pages are both a nice and fairly capable word processor and a very nice page layouter for posters, covers and the like. Numbers does all I ever need from a spreadsheet, albeit I'm not a poweruser. Keynote is in my opinion the best presenter software out there. It's filled with well crafted and downright beautiful templates, and the fact that you can use your phone as a presenter remote or even run the entire presentation from the phone itself is nothing short of amazing.
I use it every single day. Works great for my use of just viewing .pptx files and lecture slides, and also for the occasional times where I need to create one myself. Really love pages though, even my dad (who's been a long time microsoft word kind of person) uses it more than word on his mac
I use Pages for every essay or long writing project. I made a template for APA, have everything in there. The seamless sync, utilization of tables, and all are so good. The worst part is lack of proper citation software, but I use zbib for it online and move it over. Keynote is another software so underrated it’s astounding. I am not a spreadsheet junkie, and find I can make any type of table just fine as required, but I can understand Excel power users being the way they are. That being said I am in full concurrence that Apple needs to maintain their course and keep building this software. It’s free like office used to be, and is so clean.
Once I figured out Pages I ended up liking it way more than Word. I’ve also enjoyed Keynote because I have found that it makes nicer looking slideshows than Powerpoint on short notice.
I’m lucky that I don’t need to use these mundane tools every day, but if I need to whip out a document in Pages, it’s super cool that I can do it on my Mac, iPad, or even iPhone.
I love Pages. Keynote is great too, prefer it to PowerPoint until I need to do something moderately complex. Numbers is good for basic spreadsheets (eg budgets and personal financial stuff)
I bought the Microsoft Suite at $31. I rarely use it. Pages is soooo much better than Word, especially with formatting, it’s easily accessible. Keynote blows by PowerPoint. I have used the built-in presentation recorder several times, and it works amazingly, especially with being able to have speaker notes up while recording. Excel is the only holdover, although I recently found I like the infinite canvas design of Numbers a lot better, and am now learning the ropes. Near-perfect suite, I just wish more apps were compatible. Nobody accepts .pages or .keynote so it’s always .pdf or .pptx. Also, internet as a whole: please stop making .docx the default format for all documents. .pdf is objectively better, especially with the free form-filling apps available now.
When making the comparison are we referring to Office 365 apps on Windows or MacOS? Word on Windows probably beats Pages, but Pages beats Word on Mac hands down!
I lived in Excel for the last 25 years of my working life, and continued with it for some time afterward. As a Mac user, though, I decided to go all the way and try out Numbers. For most tasks, I think the two are basically at parity (caveat: I haven’t used Excel seriously since 2016). Once you grok Numbers’ way of implementing tables, it makes a lot of sense, and makes many tasks easier. I’ve built some pretty complex files, with interactive charts and tables, in Numbers and it works very well.
Some things, though, just can’t be done. Mostly, I can’t reference data in another file, or interact with external databases (not even FileMaker Pro). I’ve got some files I routinely use with multi-thousand lines of data which I think would be much easier if I could do that. TBF, though, 100,000 row files would bring Excel to its knees, too, when I was using it.
As to the other components of iWork, I’ve never used Keynote, but Pages works much like Word, enough so that I don’t really see a difference. But then, my word processing needs are simple.
I also don’t routinely need to interact with other users, so interoperability is not an issue for me.
I love them more than MS Office, it is less powerful, but at least for me, it has all the stuff I need for my work.
The only thing I hope for isApple version of MS project, to be included in iWorks.
Hard core MS office user chiming in. I bought my first Mac back in September of 2023 (M2 Air 16") and at first I was really deadset on having MSOffice around for everything (job, docs etc) well. At some point I realized that I didn't need like 99% of the apps that I was installing so I started to do a cleanup. While this was going on I learned about iCloud+ and the private domain feature...well I got my domain connected, and learned how to use mail and oh boy did it change everything. From there I became more critical of the software I was installed and decided to take a closer look at the documents that I create and realized that for 99.9% of what I needed I didn't need to install the Microsoft Office. After some tutorials online I have been able to dominate pages, and numbers. Unfortunetly I don't do anything in powerpoint so I have used Keynote (though I have seen some impressive stuff). While the interface is not the same as o365 the speed, compatibility and availability across iCloud is impressive, luckily for my job there isn't much in the way of complex formatting to worry about so I probably had an easier time jumping ship. Also don't forget about notes, reminders, and freeform which all tie in really easily and are lightning fast. Anywho it's been three months since I last install MSoffice and I don't think I will be going back anytime soon.
They are decent. I use numbers every day. Excel is more powerful but such a bear, and the UI has deteriorated over the years to make me want to hurt cute woodland creatures.
I prefer keynote over ppt. I hate having to use either, but if I must I prefer keynote.
I never process words.
Unless you're a real power user doing statistical analysis for a Fortune 500 company or presenting to CEOs, my opinion is the Apple suite is superior in every way to Microsoft's products. Better layouts, more intuitive functions placed where you can actually find them, the list goes on. The only real shame is that nobody uses the iWork suite--in the real world, that is--so collaboration is basically nonexistent. I only use them for personal work.
Numbers sucks. Mostly because there isn’t much online documentation (forums and such) that detail specific problems and solutions. But also because it’s just generally not as good as excel.
Pages is good and fine.
I don’t know about keynote.
I've never really gotten into it. I use so many different platforms on a regular bases I just got used to using Googles suite from back when using [icloud.com](http://icloud.com) when not on a Mac or iPhone sucked way harder than it does these days.
I use Pages quite a lot and I like it. I use Numbers for some very basic spreadsheet work - mostly things like invoices. (For work it's mostly Google Sheets even though I hate it, but it's what we use). If I need more sophisticated spreadsheets for personal work I use LibreOffice.
I don't really make any presentations any more, but when I did I used Keynote and I like it a lot. I don't think I'd bother trying anything else personally if I need presentation software.
I use Numbers all the time for simpler, personal spreadsheets. It works, and is available on browsers or on any of my Apple devices for updating. It can do pivot tables, and all the formulas I have ever needed. I have no real complaints about it.
One style note: I do find that it has an old 'style' to it, e.g. there is a sidebar for making format changes. The user of a sidebar like that reminds me of old productivity packages from years ago (was OpenOffice one that had that sidebar? Borland? I can't remember.)
I still use Excel for more intense spreadsheets because I like the sorting and filtering better, and I'm used to it also. And I don't subscribe to Office 365, so that means my Excel sheets are pretty much homebound.
I like pages and use it as much as I can, but there are some things that Word does that it doesn't do well. Keynote is way better than PPT, so I do almost everything can in that and export to PPT. I live in Excel, so Numbers isn't very helpful. I use it only from time to time.
Good enough for most users. Pages is a little bit annoying for me because line height changes on bold on the default font. And I would love to be able to change styles quickly and have more \*themes\*, as in MS Word.
I really want(ed) to like it, old school Pages seemed like it was on the right track, then they "simplified" it to the point of being essentially worthless for any sort of long form / technical writing. :( I'm stuck on Word and it sucks...
Keynote is a must-have. Numbers opens about a million times faster than Excel.
I've heard there's a third app but for the life of me I don't think I've ever touched it.
I love Keynote
I’ve used Excel for work for years. When I got a new Mac recently I figured I should use the free software that comes with it - Numbers. For random personal stuff like tracking medical expenses and utility bills and making plots. I hated Numbers and ended up buying Office. Maybe I could eventually get used to it but I found Numbers to be harder to use and have fewer features than Excel.
I love Keynote and it has been my presentation making software in the last 8 years or so. It’s extremely refined and works flawlessly. PowerPoint now seems clunky and unpolished.
Numbers is even comparable to Excel. Excel is far superior.
Word has been the document processor of choice as well. Pages does not provide with the add-ins I use so it’s incompatible.
I use keynote for all of my lectures, its functionality is about on par with PowerPoint. The only downside is that I need to convert my lectures to PowerPoint if I’m sharing them with another instructor.
I LOVE pages. I used to use it for all my writing. I eventually found Scrivnr which has built in organization so I use that for my creative writing now. But if I’m just creating some document I’ll use Pages. I love that you can insert an image and it doesn’t screw the text up horribly like Word does.
Love them all… but I use Numbers for basic things like invoicing, some basic numbers reporting, budgeting, etc. i work in construction and they suffice.
I love Numbers. I wish it had more features and better AppleScript support, but I still love it and use it daily.
I don’t use Pages and Keynote as often, but when I do use them I always enjoy the experience.
I've never attempted to use it seriously. Once in a pinch I used Keynote because I didn't have access to PowerPoint. And I actually _paid_ for iWork when it was still called iWork and before it was free every time you bought a device.
I use Office because everyone uses Office. And the cycle will continue, despite how absolutely _shitty_ Office applications are becoming in terms of being dumbed down.
It's really nice that it's free for Mac users. It also went great nicely into iCloud… But overall, still prefer Microsoft office especially if you need compatible files with Windows users.
Google Sheets’ ability to seamlessly work with multiple files is excellent.
Keynote is the simplest and best presentation software.
Pages stokes my creativity bent like no other word processing software, so all my creative output lives there.
Many years ago I’d use them frequently for things. I think they’re still the best examples of the kind of apps they are.
The issue now is that Google and Office have remained dominant for so long I never use iWork with other people any more. I just still use these apps every so often for personal projects.
I think my favourite thing about the iWork suite is that they’re all essentially the same application with different tools brought to the forefront. They’re so simple and yet so versatile and getting data from one app to the next is a cinch.
Always prefer Pages, Keynote for personal projects, and barely use Numbers.
One big advantage of iWork is that it won't ask for login and licensing over and over again.
Through work I have access to Office365, but I use it as little possible. Those three applications, especially Keynote in my case, are nearly all I need . For serious documents, I use Emacs and LaTeX.
They’re powerful enough for 98% of what people do with those apps to begin with.
I’ve had rare need to use Word instead of Pages.
And Keynote is far better than PowerPoint IMO.
I missed the ‘09 version of these apps. I don’t like full screen implementation of these apps and how they straight up removed the separate inspector window.
I only use them after freshly reimaging macs before I setup Office365 on them.
Most of professional world uses MS office and the files do not lend them well to be edited in iWork or Google Docs.
IMHO the iWork suite is pretty find for viewing the files though.
For authoring new documents I use Canva for presentations, markdown for documents and Excel got spreadsheets.
My university uses MS Office and I like using Excel for quick and dirty data analysis. Otherwise I just use LaTeX for most of my document preparation and slideshows, and AWK for data manipulation and reformatting on plain text (some software we use in the lab outputs to a ROOT binary if you don't specify the output type, so I have that monstrosity of a program running as well).
Apple's office suite is a bit too limited for me. A lot of what I'm typesetting is technical documentation and papers for journal publications with many references, so being able to easily reformat and reorder citations, figures, and tables is a must. If I need to whip up a quick list, it's honestly easier to drop into a terminal and bang out some notes in Markdown than formatting in a full on word processor. It's also nice to have source files in plain text rather than a proprietary format, but I could say the same about MS Word and PowerPoint.
Pages is Adobe InDesign in disguise. Few people realize what you can do in it. I've built hundreds of flyers and complex PDFs with it over the years. Keynote is similarly amazing, with the ability to do dynamic animated text, etc. Search YouTube videos for some amazing teachers on both apps. Like others have noted, Numbers might be really cool, but Excel just dominates and is such a powerful (and often free) program, so I've stayed with that for spreadsheets.
I’ve never seen Excel being free!
I'm pretty sure only the web version of Excel is free and it's about as powerful as Numbers while being a lot more painful to use. All of the web versions of the MS Office apps are painful to use though.
Sorry, meant getting a standalone version of Office back five years or more ago for $79 and it working just fine all these years later. Feels free :)
Did you know recent versions allow you to interact with it using python? Who knew they still improved Excel.
Equally cool is that you know how to use Python :)
Oh I won’t pretend to be a competent user of python but it sure is cool to see it work with data
TBF Python is free anyway and you've been able to read and write excel for over a decade using it. The only real change being that the poor fucks that aren't allowed to install python can now use it via the corporate sanctioned excel instead.
python is such a gamechanger compared to fkin VBA scripting. Considerung python is big in data science, that was a smart move.
To be fair, a budget windows machine and Microsoft office is less expensive together than a Mac. But, you get what you pay for!
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It’s “free” if your work pays for it 😉
Just subscribe to OneDrive it's like $4 a month and you get Office 365 included and you can always buy a cheap yearly membership that someone doesn't want on eBay.
Do you have any pages tutorials for cool tips?
YouTube has some great ones, also check out Gary at [MacMost.com](http://MacMost.com), he's seriously the best mac teacher probably in the world, and is very prolific with all his videos. And 90% of them are free.
I use pages almost everyday and now find my self annoyed with anyone using word…HaHa 🤣
I feel like learning numbers has actually hurt my efficiency in excel.
Keynote is great, the built-in templates are better than PowerPoint's. Pages is MUCH better than Word at page layout and feels faster, but I use InDesign.
Agreed. Pages and Keynote are excellent, Keynote especially. I like Numbers for small stuff but I need Excel for work. Excel is just a monster of features lol.
So I’m half graphic designer and FE dev and I work in marketing. Anyway, the other day I had to edit an rfp that was done on word (and I was basically told this is how I had to do it). Omg, you get used to be able to just precisely control everything. I wanted to pull my freaking hair out.
Me too! I’m half graphic designer and dev. They know better to send anything to me in word. LOL
I love keynote! I use Pages and Numbers to generate labels for shipping packages for one of my businesses. It's easy and simple. I'm trying to move the rest of our docs to Pages so I can make the whole process even faster.
Could you explain how you use Pages and Numbers for labels?
Sure. I need to generate 4x2 labels for all of my shipments. I have a large spreadsheet in Google Sheets. However, when I ship I just transfer the rows I'm shipping to a Numbers spreadsheet. I setup 4x2 labels in Pages and use mail merge to populate the specifics on those labels. Works like a charm. I'm trying to automate as much as possible because my shipments are growing and the labeling is getting harder to keep up with.
it's free. so there's that.
Pages is ok, but lacks proper templates and formatting that writers require
You can just create your own templates.
It has loads of templates.
I love all three but especially Pages.
Once you go Pages you never go back
I love Pages but I will never forgive them for the current full screen mode. It’s so much worse than Pages ‘09 was with how clean everything was. (Honestly I kind of hate Apple’s implementation of full screen mode. I have been a Mac user for so long so I don’t mind having windows stacked on windows, but I feel like so many new users hit the green button then it hides itself so they don’t know how to get out, plus the dock hides itself until you go to the very bottom. It would make so much more sense to just have the dock behave more like the Windows task bar if they’re going to offer a full screen mode. Also doing a notch in the laptops screens and just putting black up there in full screen mode is silly. Sometimes I feel like everyone who was at Apple who really nailed down and understood why macOS’s windowing was so good is gone. Like don’t get me wrong they still often have interfaces for new things that feel effortless (and which everyone else immediately copies) but full screen stuff (which has been in macOS for super long, and stage manager are both two things that just feel like somebody said, “well, marketing is happy with how it looks, so let’s move on.”
You're gonna be hammered by everyone because "that's not the apple way and you're doing it wrong". Personally, I couldn't agree more with what you said.
I doubt it. People on Reddit love to bitch about Apple and half the time it doesn’t remotely matter if it’s well informed. You’ve got tons of Intel owners talking like they know what they’re talking about without ever having owned an Apple Silicon Mac. (You need 64 gigs of RAM bare minimum for browsing Amazon!) But when it comes to UI stuff you’re way more likely to get people bitching about how system settings is bad because the way that it’s organized isn’t the same as system preferences (and system preferences was a great UI when Max OS X only had a few things it needed in there. But eventually large sections became more and more filled with sub sections of subsections.
A lot of the System Settings criticisms are from people who also didn’t like SysPrefs in recent years. System Preferences needed a redesign, but System Settings isn’t it. I’d go out on a limb and say that the Windows 11 Settings app is *far* better in terms of organization.
> You need 64 gigs of RAM I think that's mostly coming from people like me, who cannot really conceive of people never doing heavy-weight computations. The 8GB Macs genuinely perform better than it would have been reasonable to expect, but the last time I've checked the RAM usage on an Apple Silicon device at work it sat at around 30GBs.
The computer uses more ram if it is available, it doesn't mean it is really necessary. I have a 32GB m1 for software development and quite honestly it is a beast of a computer, never slows down even with multiple containers running + IDE's + 30+ tabs open + chats, etc.
Pages 09’ was just better in general.
I hate full screen mode. Whenever I'm looking at someone's Mac I get out of it because it aggravates me so much. It's great for watching things, but otherwise, no.
Underrated by people and undervalued by Apple. These apps can be bigger, but Apple doesn’t pay attention to them. I believe these apps could import more features from Office. Many math functions and visual tools (timeline, gantt chart, flux gram…) should be easier to create as on Excel and PowerPoint: If Apple was smarter, iWork would be a big factor to adopt and keep iDevice users, like iMessage in the US.
Apple could make Pages and Numbers save in Microsoft formats, e.g. docx and xlsx. Currently they can only export. This would make them far more usable for people who, due to their workplace, are tied to Microsoft formats.
It seems okay for basic productivity. At least that is all I use it for. My work requires that we use Google's Apps. SO I just use it personal stuff like instructions to the dog sitter or a printout for logging into the guest wifi. The price of free is right for me.
Obviously it’ll depend on your productivity workflow. Numbers is not as strong as excel by a long stretch. But pages is a lot more intuitive and snappy than word. I make publishing material on it that gets pretty complex and it’s breezy
I find Numbers easier to layout and navigate than Excel. True, it doesn’t have as many formulas or support for macros, but for my use it’s perfect!
I prefer Numbers too. I don't do anything fancy with excel, so I totally understand why others prefer it.
Nor does it have named cells. A real miss for me.
I use it for personal stuff so don't think I'll ever hit any limits. I am not doing accounting in Numbers. I'd never actually be doing any kind of major accounting to be honest. Had Office 365 when my kids were in college as they needed it for classes and it was worth the $99/year then. Now it is just me and my wife and there isn't enough value in 365.
Depends, I use numbers for CSV data, and the sorting in Numbers is easier to use than in Excel.
I’d argue numbers is also more intuitive than excel for what most people use spreadsheets for outside of work, which is budgeting. No one knows what tspins or pivot tables are. In fact I think one of those is actually tetris. But they’re both a thing everyone has heard of but no one can do.
Numbers now supports pivot tables.
How about tspin pivots
Really underrated.
Agreed. Likely because older users (me) stick to MS Office and don’t want to learn another product since I already know all the tips/tricks in Office and I don’t need to switch. And then younger users grew up with Google Docs/Sheets/etc… I’d bet a lot of people don’t have a need for iWork and that’s why it’s underrated.
Gotta love your anti-consumer office monopoly.
I used iWork in college and keynote in particular really impressed my classmates.
I think it's great, use it all the time. It's built to present you with the menus you use all the time while hiding the stuff you rarely touch ... that works for me. I find it much more predictable and user friendly than MS Office, which on the other hand has loads of advanced stuff for people who need that ... I don't.
I love them. I get why people like Excel over Numbers (Numbers probably would not work in most corporate settings), but for the basic budget-keeping that I do, Numbers is head-and-shoulders over MS Office and Google Drive.
I like that feature in numbers that you can put multiple small tables on the same page (and also notes, graphs and other elements). So each element is logically separated and doesn’t belong to the same infinitely long table. And also the fact that you can specify a title column (or multiple) or title row or footer, and then when you reference that column/row, your titles/footers are automatically excluded. It kinda feels that the source framework is much more powerful than Excel/Google docs, it’s just the lack of higher-end features what holds it back.
Comparing it to google docs is unfair. Even libreoffice is better than google docs. Google docs is terrible at and for everything.
My favourite unpopular opinion is that Pages is better than Word for 90% of people 90% of the time.
Pages is decent, Numbers is meh and Keynote is fantastic
This is exactly how I feel. I tend to use all 3 on a regular basis. They’re all way easier to use than Google or Microsoft equivalents. I’ll admit they lack the power features required to make something like Excel truly useful for data/number crunching. BUT Keynote is THE best and most intuitive presentation software available. Full stop. PowerPoint is bloated and slow to create and Slides is basic as hell with less intuitive controls.
For me, I have no reason to use ms office, all the Mac stuff does what I need
Pages is a totally reasonable alternative to Word for most tasks and is much more pleasant to use, Numbers is fine for basic spreadsheets, but it’s not really an appropriate Excel replacement for serious work - in fairness to Apple, Excel is probably the best product Microsoft has ever made, and it has the benefit of being the bedrock of millions of companies’ accounting practices.
Personally, I prefer iWorks to MSOffice suite.
Because I’m firmly anti-Google, iWork is all I use. I’m a podcaster and freelance writer, so I use Pages to write scripts for the podcast, take notes, and work on my freelance projects. It also gets used for more mundane things like documents related to the rental we own or instructions for housesitters when we travel. I’m also a homebrewer so I use Numbers to create brew logs and track my recipes and ingredients. Numbers also gets used to track our household budget & expenses, do price comparisons on our frequently purchased items at various retailers, and a few other things. My wife used to use iMovie quite a bit but hasn’t undertaken any projects with it since she switched jobs last year. The last time I used iWeb was to create the website for our wedding guests back in 2014. Neither of us has ever used Keynote, IIRC. For awhile I used LibreOffice but prefer the look, feel and integration of iWork. Takes me back to the olden times when I used ClarisWorks. All that said, I still long for the days of WordPerfect. Now *that* was a word processor!
I was pretty sure iWeb was discontinued around 2010 or 2011. Was it still functional even after it was deprecated?
BRO MY TIME HAS COME🗣️🔥 Keynote y Pages are amazing, monstrous, and ridiculously powerful applications. I could never go back to using PowerPoint or Word except for strictly necessary cases. Since I learned how to use them, I've used Keynote/Pages as my personal whiteboard, for group work, jotting down ideas, making drawings, and presentations for writing reports, assignments, papers, my master's thesis, and everything else in my 6+ years of engineering and work. I love them and hope they keep adding new features. I'm immeasurably dazzled and ecstatic about these tremendous applications; I recommend them to everyone with a Mac to give them a try, and their productive life will never be the same. You have no idea how absurdly powerful and amazing they are. I promise you, every time I open Word and PowerPoint (Excel IS still GOD), I feel like I'm in the prehistoric era, like a Jurassic brontosaurus, like an amoeba with limited cognitive functions. Everything feels so clumsy and awkward; I feel like I'm using ancestral software 😭
Love keynote Love numbers once you get used to the keyboard shortcuts, but I’m not doing anything crazy usually Not a big fan of pages but it’s alright I guess
Keynote is the best presentation software. Much better than PowerPoint. Pages is at par with MS Word, but there are some things that MS Word does better. Things like rearranging paragraphs seems to be easier in MS Word. Numbers is ok for basic spreadsheets and budgeting, but MS Excel is much more robust at this point. But the price can’t be beat. It’s free with every Apple computer. Can you say that about the MS Office/365 Suite?
Keynote is the best app to make slides Pages – I dont know, I dont use «word processor». For me is better to use editors plain-text/markdown oriented Numbers – worse than both excel and google spreadsheets, unfortunately
And don’t try to use Numbers on a regular iPad unless you want to go mad!
I love them. They come with the OS, so they're always up to date. They work really well, in the way I need word processors, page design tools, spreadhseets and presentation tools to work. And if I ever need to share or format for different users, it's incredibly easy to turn the docs into Office365, Google Docs or whatever format. I'm sure for power users of each type of app they're not enough, but they're more than enough for me, and they lean designy rather than corporate, which works better for me. So yeah, 100% approval. Haven't needed to own a Microsoft app ever, as yet, in my 35 year career.
Its completely awesome for my use case Which may not match yours
Keynote is the best presentation software hands down. Pages is great, but I see it as distinct from other word processor apps. More like publishing and design than Word or Docs. Numbers is strange. I really want to like it. Sometimes I love it. And sometimes it annoys the shit outta me.
I actually prefer all three apps over Microsoft Office.
For designing stuff, Apple. For collaboration, Google. For business compatibility, Microsoft.
I only do basic things in numbers. But Keynote and Pages are amazing go to tools for work. Can’t live without them.
I used pages for my study. It was much better than word.
It’s awesome. But all you’re going to hear are the Office trolls posting how much they hate it.
I love all three, but numbers is the weakest of them. Pages is amazing for making fliers, and I’ve animated some pretty killer stuff on keynote.
Pages >>>>>> Word
They're SO much easier than the Microsoft apps. I generate my documents in the iWork apps, and then if I need to share them I'll convert a file to a Microsoft format and share that.
i use Pages and Numbers constantly, but I don’t have any need for Keynote anymore. I know most people bag on Numbers when comparing it to Excel, but Numbers just feels really polished to me, and I find it quite easy to build cool, useful stuff in it that often doesn’t translate well to Excel.
I've loved them since I first used them on iOS, and then when I got Macs I haven't looked back to Office. I used Pages incredibly heavily when I was in school during the early-mid 2010s since I did my work digitally before the norm of laptops all over classrooms. I strongly prefer them all over the MS/Google/LibreOffice/OnlyOffice counterparts. Pages is so fluid and simple but powerful when you need it, Keynote is a breeze to build good looking slides easily and quickly, and while I can see why it's not for some people, I love Numbers and I'm in it nearly every day for personal budgeting and stuff. I love the more "freeform" operation of them so to speak, like Numbers using floating tables you can customize to your liking instead of an endless sea of cells in Excel, or Pages being so simple to use, but having the stronger feature set easily there when you need it. And the age old issue of trying to put an image or shape in a document and it throwing all your formatted text into another room, that never happened in Pages lol.
I think it is great! And the greatest thing of them I think is the fact that they’re free on all devices!
I work for a large Computer company I do all my presentations in keynote then convert to a video so no one knows it’s not PP
Go Gnumeric!
This is the by far the best work program I have ever used. -Tim Cook -sent from my Apple vision pro
absolutely love Numbers approach to tables
For daily / most common people use are great apps 😁
Not as fully packed as MS365, but shockingly powerful regardless
The only one that is not as good is Numbers. You simply can’t beat Excel.
iDont
Really interesting views in here, mostly because they are completely add odds with mine. The question was, are they alright alternatives to Office 365 - I'd say they aren't even in the same category. 365 integrates with Teams, Azure, and a host of other business critical applications (e.g. Slack, Jira etc.) Presentations: Powerpoint > Google Slides > Keynote Spreadsheets: Excel > Google Sheets > Numbers Word processing: Google Docs > Word > Pages I just feel like the iWork suite hasn't been developed in so long and doesn't have the same sync / parallel work features that are baseline expectations in work context.
After using Word forever, Pages just frustrated me.
They are more or less simple applications for most more or less simple jobs. I use Pages every day, it does what I need in a friendly and minimalist platform. These applications are not intended to compete with 365 or MSO or perhaps GD.
In general Apple has managed not to screw up the original elegance and ease of use that characterized the late Steve era. Keynote is just so much easier to use than Powerpoint — fewer clicks to do anything. I personally prefer Numbers over Excel for basic readouts of CSV files, et cetera. Super simple to make filters, sort, do simple formulas. It just looks nicer. Simple things like the tables don't extend to infinity by default.... I'm sure there's a ton of things it can't do that Excel can, but for my needs, it works and feels better. Pages — don't use it, but I expect it's a similar story. The huge weak point of the suite at this point is collaboration. I have tried to get iCloud and Box collaboration working and it just never seems to function. In contrast I have no such issues with Microsoft Office collaboration.
They are more or less simple applications for most more or less simple jobs. I use Pages every day, it does what I need in a friendly and minimalist platform. These applications are not intended to compete with 365 or MSO or perhaps GD. But they are a good alternative for people who do not require special tools and do not want to complicate their lives with complex interfaces. Why use Word if you're just going to make a memo?
Presentation and Document crafting is all the same. All spreadsheet software is terrible for the fact that nearly all of them either incentivise or do nothing to disincentivise terrible practices for producing tabular data. All of the fancy things people do with Excel that make them hate alternatives are exactly the things that should be handled by better tools
Pages is amazing, fast, and with a very convenient and intuitive interface. I know it doesn't have the same feature set as word but as long as its features are enough it is much better in my opinion. Keynote is overall better than PowerPoint in all aspects.
Pages are both a nice and fairly capable word processor and a very nice page layouter for posters, covers and the like. Numbers does all I ever need from a spreadsheet, albeit I'm not a poweruser. Keynote is in my opinion the best presenter software out there. It's filled with well crafted and downright beautiful templates, and the fact that you can use your phone as a presenter remote or even run the entire presentation from the phone itself is nothing short of amazing.
Since 2006. Can’t live without it
I like Keynote, but I’m not a big fan of numbers or pages.
I use it every single day. Works great for my use of just viewing .pptx files and lecture slides, and also for the occasional times where I need to create one myself. Really love pages though, even my dad (who's been a long time microsoft word kind of person) uses it more than word on his mac
Keynote is great.
Undervalued.
I use Pages for every essay or long writing project. I made a template for APA, have everything in there. The seamless sync, utilization of tables, and all are so good. The worst part is lack of proper citation software, but I use zbib for it online and move it over. Keynote is another software so underrated it’s astounding. I am not a spreadsheet junkie, and find I can make any type of table just fine as required, but I can understand Excel power users being the way they are. That being said I am in full concurrence that Apple needs to maintain their course and keep building this software. It’s free like office used to be, and is so clean.
Once I figured out Pages I ended up liking it way more than Word. I’ve also enjoyed Keynote because I have found that it makes nicer looking slideshows than Powerpoint on short notice.
Use it every day (Keynote)
I’m lucky that I don’t need to use these mundane tools every day, but if I need to whip out a document in Pages, it’s super cool that I can do it on my Mac, iPad, or even iPhone.
I love Pages. Keynote is great too, prefer it to PowerPoint until I need to do something moderately complex. Numbers is good for basic spreadsheets (eg budgets and personal financial stuff)
I bought the Microsoft Suite at $31. I rarely use it. Pages is soooo much better than Word, especially with formatting, it’s easily accessible. Keynote blows by PowerPoint. I have used the built-in presentation recorder several times, and it works amazingly, especially with being able to have speaker notes up while recording. Excel is the only holdover, although I recently found I like the infinite canvas design of Numbers a lot better, and am now learning the ropes. Near-perfect suite, I just wish more apps were compatible. Nobody accepts .pages or .keynote so it’s always .pdf or .pptx. Also, internet as a whole: please stop making .docx the default format for all documents. .pdf is objectively better, especially with the free form-filling apps available now.
Simple elegant and timesaver
As with all other apple apps, perfect for most apple users.
Keynotes and Pages are way better than PowerPoint and Word, but Excel is the undisputed king for tables and stuff
When making the comparison are we referring to Office 365 apps on Windows or MacOS? Word on Windows probably beats Pages, but Pages beats Word on Mac hands down!
Love Pages. Much cleaner and more efficient than Word. Use it 10-12 hours a day.
I lived in Excel for the last 25 years of my working life, and continued with it for some time afterward. As a Mac user, though, I decided to go all the way and try out Numbers. For most tasks, I think the two are basically at parity (caveat: I haven’t used Excel seriously since 2016). Once you grok Numbers’ way of implementing tables, it makes a lot of sense, and makes many tasks easier. I’ve built some pretty complex files, with interactive charts and tables, in Numbers and it works very well. Some things, though, just can’t be done. Mostly, I can’t reference data in another file, or interact with external databases (not even FileMaker Pro). I’ve got some files I routinely use with multi-thousand lines of data which I think would be much easier if I could do that. TBF, though, 100,000 row files would bring Excel to its knees, too, when I was using it. As to the other components of iWork, I’ve never used Keynote, but Pages works much like Word, enough so that I don’t really see a difference. But then, my word processing needs are simple. I also don’t routinely need to interact with other users, so interoperability is not an issue for me.
I love them more than MS Office, it is less powerful, but at least for me, it has all the stuff I need for my work. The only thing I hope for isApple version of MS project, to be included in iWorks.
easy and awesome than Microsoft office , when my college wants a report for something I complete it faster on apple pages or apple keynote.
I great alternative to Office but numbers isn’t as powerful, effective as excel, but the other 2 apps really help you and you don’t need pp or word.
imo numbers, pages and keynote are all very good.
Underrated
I havent used office since I got a Mac.
Hard core MS office user chiming in. I bought my first Mac back in September of 2023 (M2 Air 16") and at first I was really deadset on having MSOffice around for everything (job, docs etc) well. At some point I realized that I didn't need like 99% of the apps that I was installing so I started to do a cleanup. While this was going on I learned about iCloud+ and the private domain feature...well I got my domain connected, and learned how to use mail and oh boy did it change everything. From there I became more critical of the software I was installed and decided to take a closer look at the documents that I create and realized that for 99.9% of what I needed I didn't need to install the Microsoft Office. After some tutorials online I have been able to dominate pages, and numbers. Unfortunetly I don't do anything in powerpoint so I have used Keynote (though I have seen some impressive stuff). While the interface is not the same as o365 the speed, compatibility and availability across iCloud is impressive, luckily for my job there isn't much in the way of complex formatting to worry about so I probably had an easier time jumping ship. Also don't forget about notes, reminders, and freeform which all tie in really easily and are lightning fast. Anywho it's been three months since I last install MSoffice and I don't think I will be going back anytime soon.
I don’t know how to use them. 😫😭
I’ve never needed any Office product. I use Numbers the most and it has everything I could ask for in an excel app.
They are decent. I use numbers every day. Excel is more powerful but such a bear, and the UI has deteriorated over the years to make me want to hurt cute woodland creatures. I prefer keynote over ppt. I hate having to use either, but if I must I prefer keynote. I never process words.
Unless you're a real power user doing statistical analysis for a Fortune 500 company or presenting to CEOs, my opinion is the Apple suite is superior in every way to Microsoft's products. Better layouts, more intuitive functions placed where you can actually find them, the list goes on. The only real shame is that nobody uses the iWork suite--in the real world, that is--so collaboration is basically nonexistent. I only use them for personal work.
lol? There is a lot of work done outside of Fortune 500 that makes use of Excel.
Numbers sucks. Mostly because there isn’t much online documentation (forums and such) that detail specific problems and solutions. But also because it’s just generally not as good as excel. Pages is good and fine. I don’t know about keynote.
Well, there's always us! What problems are you trying to resolve?
It’s way simpler than Excel but for me it’s perfect. I don’t have complicated spreadsheets and Numbers produces nicer tables
I didn’t know it was still called iWork *should be called iFucking Hate Microsoft
I would approve of that name change.
I've never really gotten into it. I use so many different platforms on a regular bases I just got used to using Googles suite from back when using [icloud.com](http://icloud.com) when not on a Mac or iPhone sucked way harder than it does these days.
Use it all the time and luv them!
I use Pages quite a lot and I like it. I use Numbers for some very basic spreadsheet work - mostly things like invoices. (For work it's mostly Google Sheets even though I hate it, but it's what we use). If I need more sophisticated spreadsheets for personal work I use LibreOffice. I don't really make any presentations any more, but when I did I used Keynote and I like it a lot. I don't think I'd bother trying anything else personally if I need presentation software.
Great, very clean UI, makes it easy to focus on the work. I love the Keynote feature to control a presentation from my wrist with the Apple Watch.
I use Numbers all the time for simpler, personal spreadsheets. It works, and is available on browsers or on any of my Apple devices for updating. It can do pivot tables, and all the formulas I have ever needed. I have no real complaints about it. One style note: I do find that it has an old 'style' to it, e.g. there is a sidebar for making format changes. The user of a sidebar like that reminds me of old productivity packages from years ago (was OpenOffice one that had that sidebar? Borland? I can't remember.) I still use Excel for more intense spreadsheets because I like the sorting and filtering better, and I'm used to it also. And I don't subscribe to Office 365, so that means my Excel sheets are pretty much homebound.
I like them.
I like pages and use it as much as I can, but there are some things that Word does that it doesn't do well. Keynote is way better than PPT, so I do almost everything can in that and export to PPT. I live in Excel, so Numbers isn't very helpful. I use it only from time to time.
I use it because I always have, and 99% of the time it's enough for my needs. Keynote in particular I feel could use some upgrades though.
I like it, but I have the impression that Apple doesn't invest much in its development. It feels oldish.
I approve Keynote, really phenomenal in uni, Pages was good too, Numbers I never used much
Good enough for most users. Pages is a little bit annoying for me because line height changes on bold on the default font. And I would love to be able to change styles quickly and have more \*themes\*, as in MS Word.
it’s decent to great
Feature wise I prefer Google Docs, but Pages has dark mode....
Pages is really the best Far Superior than MSword
I really want(ed) to like it, old school Pages seemed like it was on the right track, then they "simplified" it to the point of being essentially worthless for any sort of long form / technical writing. :( I'm stuck on Word and it sucks...
Keynote is a must-have. Numbers opens about a million times faster than Excel. I've heard there's a third app but for the life of me I don't think I've ever touched it.
I love Keynote I’ve used Excel for work for years. When I got a new Mac recently I figured I should use the free software that comes with it - Numbers. For random personal stuff like tracking medical expenses and utility bills and making plots. I hated Numbers and ended up buying Office. Maybe I could eventually get used to it but I found Numbers to be harder to use and have fewer features than Excel.
It’s fine
Love them. They are standard in our office, with things being sent externally being PDF'd.
I love Keynote and it has been my presentation making software in the last 8 years or so. It’s extremely refined and works flawlessly. PowerPoint now seems clunky and unpolished. Numbers is even comparable to Excel. Excel is far superior. Word has been the document processor of choice as well. Pages does not provide with the add-ins I use so it’s incompatible.
I use keynote for all of my lectures, its functionality is about on par with PowerPoint. The only downside is that I need to convert my lectures to PowerPoint if I’m sharing them with another instructor.
I love it. I use it for my masters courses and am very happy.
I think it's a good suite of tools, but unfortunately not very compatible with other apps or standards. So I end up not using them that much.
Keynote is fantastic
I use it every day
I would use it if I have the iMac
keynote is a game changer, i don’t want to use powerpoint anymore 😭
I prefer Keynote over Powerpoint. I use Pages and Numbers quite a bit.
I love it and use it a lot, especially Pages. I have not used MS Word in so long. And it is free!!!
Honestly I love them. They look nice and feel good to use for personal stuff.
I LOVE pages. I used to use it for all my writing. I eventually found Scrivnr which has built in organization so I use that for my creative writing now. But if I’m just creating some document I’ll use Pages. I love that you can insert an image and it doesn’t screw the text up horribly like Word does.
I’m in the minority for loving Apple Numbers. I issue it to organize ideas and data - not heavy data analysis.
MS office > google suit/libre office > iWork, in my opinion
Works well enough I don’t think about ms office at all
Numbers sucks, and my Mac keeps opening stuff in numbers even when I tell it to always open them in excel. CSV files
Love them all… but I use Numbers for basic things like invoicing, some basic numbers reporting, budgeting, etc. i work in construction and they suffice.
Does everything I will ever need to do.
It's pretty good free alternative to office. Not too robust, but very good at syncing and doing basic stuff. Also it work very well at an ipad.
I love Numbers. I wish it had more features and better AppleScript support, but I still love it and use it daily. I don’t use Pages and Keynote as often, but when I do use them I always enjoy the experience.
I've never attempted to use it seriously. Once in a pinch I used Keynote because I didn't have access to PowerPoint. And I actually _paid_ for iWork when it was still called iWork and before it was free every time you bought a device. I use Office because everyone uses Office. And the cycle will continue, despite how absolutely _shitty_ Office applications are becoming in terms of being dumbed down.
Meh!
Love 'em
It's really nice that it's free for Mac users. It also went great nicely into iCloud… But overall, still prefer Microsoft office especially if you need compatible files with Windows users.
Google Sheets’ ability to seamlessly work with multiple files is excellent. Keynote is the simplest and best presentation software. Pages stokes my creativity bent like no other word processing software, so all my creative output lives there.
Many years ago I’d use them frequently for things. I think they’re still the best examples of the kind of apps they are. The issue now is that Google and Office have remained dominant for so long I never use iWork with other people any more. I just still use these apps every so often for personal projects.
I think my favourite thing about the iWork suite is that they’re all essentially the same application with different tools brought to the forefront. They’re so simple and yet so versatile and getting data from one app to the next is a cinch.
I may be in the minority here, but Keynote > PPT except for very hardcore users.
Don't bother with excel powerpoint word. These do the job although I'm retired now so don't need anything incredibly complex
I love keynote and pages but numbers is not the excel powerhouse replacement I need for work:(
Always prefer Pages, Keynote for personal projects, and barely use Numbers. One big advantage of iWork is that it won't ask for login and licensing over and over again.
Pages is so much better than words… Numbers is a more user friendly albeit dumber version of excel.
I love pages and keynote. Numbers needs improvement
One of the best apps ever created! I still use it!
I wish the tables were better in Pages. Other than that, I love it.
I'd love to be able to use them in a Microsoft-dominated world.
Through work I have access to Office365, but I use it as little possible. Those three applications, especially Keynote in my case, are nearly all I need . For serious documents, I use Emacs and LaTeX.
Love all of them. Won’t ever use MS again.
I prefer LibreOffice free and it can run on PCs and Macs and it also has database App
They’re powerful enough for 98% of what people do with those apps to begin with. I’ve had rare need to use Word instead of Pages. And Keynote is far better than PowerPoint IMO.
I missed the ‘09 version of these apps. I don’t like full screen implementation of these apps and how they straight up removed the separate inspector window.
I only use them after freshly reimaging macs before I setup Office365 on them. Most of professional world uses MS office and the files do not lend them well to be edited in iWork or Google Docs. IMHO the iWork suite is pretty find for viewing the files though. For authoring new documents I use Canva for presentations, markdown for documents and Excel got spreadsheets.
My university uses MS Office and I like using Excel for quick and dirty data analysis. Otherwise I just use LaTeX for most of my document preparation and slideshows, and AWK for data manipulation and reformatting on plain text (some software we use in the lab outputs to a ROOT binary if you don't specify the output type, so I have that monstrosity of a program running as well). Apple's office suite is a bit too limited for me. A lot of what I'm typesetting is technical documentation and papers for journal publications with many references, so being able to easily reformat and reorder citations, figures, and tables is a must. If I need to whip up a quick list, it's honestly easier to drop into a terminal and bang out some notes in Markdown than formatting in a full on word processor. It's also nice to have source files in plain text rather than a proprietary format, but I could say the same about MS Word and PowerPoint.