I’d bought this with my Macbook in Australia (just A$89 from A$129, so cheap!) but never opened it until I came home. This software package comprises of word processor (Pages), spreadsheet (Numbers) and presentation (Keynote) components. It works well with Thai language, except the annoying backspace which deletes both normal, upper as well as lower level characters at the same time and occurs with every single program that use Apple input method (Firefox is not the case).
The package is very tiny and minimal (compared to MS Office package), composed of a box containing an iWork ’09 with templates DVD and 2 flyers which tell you the features, how to install the software and warranty conditions...
This is not a review, so you can find some reviews from somewhere else like here and here
Why did I decide to buy this piece of software? Because I just don’t want my Macbook to become only an entertainment machine. So I have to have some pieces of productivity softwares on it and it’s cheap. MS Office 2008 is not the choice because not only it has Thai language problem on the Mac version, but also compatibility of MS Office between platforms is quite poor and it’s sort of, well, expensive. Of course, you almost can’t share iWork’s documents with others but, at least, you can export it to PDF, MS formats, RTF or even plain text (why not OpenDoc? Apple?). And the most important reason… I just want to buy it! lol
OO.o 3.1 is working great on Mac but with some problem which I haven’t investigated and report the bugs. But one thing is that it didn’t enable Thai from start and the default font can’t use Thai (default font is Tahoma which I don’t understand why it displays box rather than Thai character). At the moment, Thonburi is the font of choice on the Mac platform.
Pages is quite easy and intuitive to use but I don’t know how good it can handle the large document (like thesis or book) as I never tried to do things like that on Pages (LaTex should do this job better). Numbers is quite hard to use and need some times to get familiar with, especially for the one who formerly uses Excel or Calc. Keynote has good templates and transition animations and I think it’s a great piece of software for presentation on the Mac but don’t even think about export it to ppt as it will be worse than you can imagine.
In conclusion, I’m happy with iWork’09. It can do what I want (I wrote this offline on Pages) and is quite cheap when compare to its competitor. But for a serious document and spreadsheet, not presentation, though, go for OO.o :P
1 comment:
nice kub'' original software user haha :)
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