[Nobody]

When I heard a rumor about iWork on Think Secret site, I felt thrilled. Finally, a replacement for AppleWorks, eventually with Unicode support.
Now, after it is made official, I'm less thrilled, but still interested. Why?
As a productivity suite, I don't doubt its word processor, Pages, is piece of quality software. But, IMHO, iWork should've included also a spreadsheet (module).
How am I supposed to crunch my numbers? From within AW spreadsheet? Over-bloated and over-priced Excel? Sorry, I don't intend to pay several hundred bucks for Office. Not that Office for Mac is not quality, just too much money for me.
And what remains as a viable alternative? I hope Apple will eventually include some sort of spreadsheet functionality in iWork, because as such it isn't a complete productivity suite (words AND presentations, NO number crunching). Other than that, I'll consider either OpenOffice or OpenOSX Office.

[Earthling7]

My exact thoughts. I was interested in a suite that would replace MS Office. Office is fine, but I don't feel like paying 100% price for the 5% of the features I would use.
Pages looks interesting and Keynote is probably very useful for those that do presentations, but no spreadsheet program, however simple, makes this a rather half-baked "suite".

[bofus]

Isn't the stand-alone Excel upgrade only $79-$99. This does not sound like a high price.
Regards,

[RonAnnArbor]

There are also free stand-alone spreadsheets available through version tracker...I think the idea behind iWork was not to develope an all-around suite, but to have a top notch word processor that incorporates graphics and templates that can easily be exported to Keynote for presentations.
I think a lot of people misunderestimate what a huge market that is - people who need nothing but graphics, word processing, and presentation software. I know that the secretaries in our office never use spreadsheets, only Word and Power Point. I think this is direct response to that competition.
Apple Works remains available for someone who needs the all-around suite.
I think this is a smart move for Apple. They need to compete with that sector, and the better the graphics compatibility, the more the small-office worker will migrate from programs such as MS Publisher to iWork I believe.
If you read through the graphics forum, you will see constant repition of the same question about programs like Publisher which are easier to use vis a vis templates than programs such as Quark or InDesign.
I honestly think that if someone needs a true office suite, those already exist. iWork is aimed toward a different market.

[MacCheetah3]

Hi
"These two programs are what iWork is, building a successor to AppleWorks" - Steve Jobs - MacWorld San Francisco 2005 Keynote
The key term there is building. To me, this means that Apple is working on the rest of the "office" aspects, like a spreadsheet and database app, and waiting for a prime time to release it. Apple still sells AppleWorks 6.2.9.
Put simply, don't count your chickens before they hatch. Apple very well could have something up its sleeves yet.

[Nobody]

When I first turned on a computer, it was a Windows machine, and it had a program called Microsoft Publisher. I learned to use the computer via this program and after mastering it I then turned to MS Word, which in comparison just plains sucks as a basic page layout, newsletter, invitation, program. The only thing that MS Word does even today is write business letters, give me a page without a curser on it, I will put in my own text boxes.
When I switched to Mac several years ago, I purchased the Adobe suite, which I use, but after growing up on the simplicity of Publisher, I started to miss it, I even bought Virtual PC so that I could load some old files that I created for clients.
I think Pages is the Apple version of Microsoft Publisher, it is not in competition with Word, just filling a void that Microsoft left in the Office Suite for Mac. At least thats what I hope it is, I already ordered my copy of iWork and look forward to a simple page layout program.

[bofus]

Word is a word-processor, not a page layout program. Publisher does not work well as a word-processor on the other hand. Pages may try to be both (layout and word-processor).
regards,