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The $79 iWork ‘08 appears to be a good deal for anyone needing an affordable office suite for the Mac. Apple has finally added a spreadsheet application. At first glance, Numbers is an elegant no-brainer for anyone migrating from Microsoft Excel. In the past, many Mac aficionados bought Microsoft Excel because iWork lacked a spreadsheet application. However, with the addition of Numbers and the release of Microsoft’s Office for Mac 2008 delayed until January, Mac users may stick to Apple’s less expensive option. We’re also happy that Mac hasn’t changed its file formats as Microsoft did with Office 2007.

We like the sparse interfaces throughout the iWork package. Its features aren’t as deep or rich as in Microsoft Office 2007, but iWork also hasn’t changed radically from its last incarnation, unlike Office. iWork also covers much more than just the basic productivity tasks offered by online tools like Google Docs & Spreadsheets or the Zoho suite, so it should be adequate for the vast majority of home and small-business users.

System requirements, thankfully, are gentle to users of older Macs. You’ll need an Intel, PowerPC G5 or G4 machine with a 500MHz or better processor in addition to 512MB of RAM minimum, running OS X10.4.10.

Pages

Apple tore a page out of Microsoft Office’s book by creating a Contextual Format Bar that displays different features according to your task at hand. Select text, and the bar shows font options. Click on a picture, and the bar displays image-editing features. Unlike the contextual formatting Ribbon interface within Microsoft Word 2007, however, Pages offers no live previews of font and image changes as you hover over them.

Pages ‘08 also adds Change Tracking, similar to the Track Changes feature adopted many years ago by Microsoft Word. We’re glad that Pages gets this treatment for displaying document revisions rather than the often confusing revision and commenting history offered by the online Google Docs.

Pages includes the usual must-have features for writers such as footnotes, bookmarks, and tables of content, in addition to integration with charts and functions from the new Numbers app. In addition, Pages now detects when you type a list and formats bulleted points automatically. We just hope that this won’t drive us batty (as it does sometimes in Microsoft Word).

There are plenty of page templates for letters, resumes, reports, and the like to get started if a blank slate poses too much pressure. Page Layout mode lets you create relatively complex designs without software such as Adobe InDesign, great if you’re throwing together reports for work. It lets you layer images on top of images too. The Instant Alpha feature, also found in Keynote, lets you cut out backgrounds in images without dealing with alpha channels, a la Photoshop. And we prefer Pages’ color wheel, crayons, and spectrum to Word’s color options.

Keynote

Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 may be richer, but Apple Keynote ‘08 adds some smart features that PowerPoint lacks. It’s also a breeze to figure out from the get-go. Action Builds let you create basic point-A-to-B motion animation, without needing to deal with motion tweens as in complex apps such as Adobe Flash. Smart Builds enable animation, such as rotating photographs, using images you can grab from the iLife media browser. And new voiceover recordings enable you, say, to narrate podcasts with pictures. There are new between-slide transitions and slide show themes too.

Numbers

Our early look at the new Numbers reveals ease of use novelties that competitive tools don’t provide. Microsoft Excel 2007 still appears to be more robust, particularly for number crunchers such as scientists, accountants, or engineers. Yet the majority of users who rely upon spreadsheets as one-size-fits-all tools for household and light office work should be pleased to have a new option for Macs.

Numbers comes with plenty of templates, including travel planners, business expenses, and school science lab reports. Of course, it can also save and export Excel-readable files. This application pleases the eye and can make attractive spreadsheets. We dragged around text boxes, images, and tables using alignment guides without a hitch. You can add 3D bar, pie, and other charts and even integrate maps into a spreadsheet.

The controls for working with tables were extremely user-friendly in our early tests. Slider bars allow you to adjust the numeric values within cells, handy if you’re looking to add a range of values. Resizing columns and rows appears to be less of a hassle than with Excel. You can drag data from a file of contacts or into a Numbers table that will automatically partition information into the appropriate columns. And sorting a table smartly leaves the headers alone. Formulas appear to be the same as those in Microsoft Excel, but Numbers also has easy-to-find natural language shortcuts for common calculations, such as sums and averages.

The Interactive Print View offers more controls than in Microsoft Excel, which easily leads to unwieldy spreadsheet printouts. Numbers shows where a stray column might take up an unnecessary extra page. You can eliminate the overlap with a slider bar that instantly scales the tables, charts, and images on a page.

If you would like to purchase iWorks 08, you can visit Electronics Store, or go directly to iWorks 08 or browse our Electronics Directory.

If you’ve never owned an Apple computer, you don’t know what you’re missing. On the other hand, if you regularly use Macintosh computers, you understand that once you have a Mac, you’ll never go back. An Apple Macintosh - whether it’s a MacBook, a Mac Pro, or an iMac - takes personal computing to a whole new level. I bought my first iMac in 1998, have upgraded twice, and am still happy as a proverbial clam. Here, then are five reasons to love the Apple Macintosh.

1. Cool elegance. If there’s one thing Steve Jobs knows how to do, it’s designing electronics that are ultra-cool yet beautifully elegant. Why have a cumbersome big box desktop computer when you can have everything you need in an elegant iMac? Behind that clear, bright 16:10 aspect ratio monitor is the entire computer, including a DVD drive and a 64-bit Intel Core 2 Duo processor. There’s even a webcam built into the iMac so you can video chat or video conference whenever the whim strikes.

2. Intuitive functionality. Even though Windows copied the friendly desktop interface from Apple Macintosh, they still haven’t been able to get it right. Navigating the Mac’s interface is truly intuitive, engaging, and just downright fun. With a mobile computing product like the MacBook, you can take full computing functionality wherever you go. And, wherever you’ll go, you’ll always be connected, since the MacBook automatically finds nearby wireless networks and gives you nearly instant online access.

3. Digital living. Macintosh computers are designed to embrace the digital lifestyle. MacBooks and iMacs come with iLife, a wonderful array of applications that let you effortlessly share photo albums, record podcasts and songs, and even create and edit movies. You can even publish your creations on the Web with a single click. How cool is that?

4. Bug-free. If you’ve been wrestling with Vista the past few months (or any other Windows operating system, for that matter), you don’t know the meaning of freedom. Macintosh computers’ operating systems are bug-free, and as for upgrades, you get to choose when to receive software update notifications, and always have the choice of updating now or in the future. Mac simply isn’t intrusive; you get to control technology, instead of having technology control you.

5. Workhorse. Macintosh computers are more than a way to frolic in your spare time. They’re also workhorses. For years, graphic artists and publishers have almost exclusively used Macs for work. With the Mac Pro, you can get Adobe Creative Suite 3, a suite of tools specifically designed for creative professionals. Whether you’re a web designer, a graphic artist, an art director, or a video professional, Adobe Creative Suite 3 will make your work easier, better, and more fun.

There are those who say that Macintosh computers are limited in that much of the available software is only compatible with PCs. My experience is that my Mac can do anything a PC can do - and do it better. But for those diehards who insist that they can’t live without Windows, the next version of Mac OSX, Leopard, will allow you to install Windows XP on the Mac. Right now, you can run Windows in emulation mode…although for the life of me, I don’t understand why you would want to!

To purchase a Mac Computer, you can visit Electronics, go directly to Cheap PC Hardware or browse our Electronics Directory.