In a comment on yesterday’s post Chris Heard draws attention to Apple’s iWork suite. (I’m really pleased to have this advice from an avid user.) I left Pages off my list of word processors, partly because I wanted a short separate post on office software, and partly because I have an aversion to its template based approach. (Having said that, I recognise that it looks like it provides a quality set of templates).
On the whole, word processing aside, my office needs are minimal. I use a great many of Word’s features; I’ve barely got beyond a handful of Excel’s. I suspect Numbers would be more than adequate for any task I care to put it to. When it comes to databases – not a part of iWork – just about any package on the market would meet my occasional needs. I’ve knocked up the odd quick and dirty solution in both Access and Filemaker on Windows. I don’t see this as anything that would make any real difference to me one way or another. Bento might be worth a look (and would hardly break the bank).
However, from what I’ve seen of it (whether trying it out on someone else’s machine, or seeing it delivered as an end product) Keynote, as Chris says, “runs rings around PowerPoint.” Now I will have to take into account that PowerPoint is regularly used by those who have no sense of design, and very few communication skills, to try to spice up something that is intolerably dull. A great many of the bad PowerPoint presentations around owe far more of their awfulness to the user than to the software. It is (he says modestly) perfectly possible to produce elegant and effective PowerPoint presentations. It’s just that they can be more elegant and effective, I think, using Keynote’s tools.
While I wouldn’t see it as the killer app which makes my decision for me, it is the one piece of Mac software I know I would like to be able to use, and that I would use a great deal in training, education and worship. The question is whether this software lust outweighs any other consideration.
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