Best Office Software reviews

• Install iWork ’09 on up to five Mac computers in your household with the iWork ’09 Family Pack
• iWork ’09, Apple’s office productivity suite, is the easiest way to create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations the Mac way
• Creating the perfect brochure, flyer, report, or resume is faster and easier than ever with Pages ’09
• Create spreadsheets, organize data, and write formulas with simple yet powerful tools using Numbers ’09
• With great new features in Keynote ’09, creating a show-stopping presentation is surprisingly simple

Product Description
iWork ’09, Apple’s office productivity suite, is the easiest way to create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations the Mac way. Pages is both a streamlined word processor and an easy-to-use page layout application. It allows you to be a writer one minute and a designer the next, always with a perfect document in the works. Numbers, with its great-looking templates, easy-to-create formulas, and dynamic tables and charts, gives you simple ways to make sense of your data. Use Keynote to create your presentations, and you’ll be a hard act to follow. Its powerful yet easy-to-use tools and dazzling effects put the show in slideshow. Packed with over 250 Apple-designed themes and templates—including 60 new designs overall–iWork lets you create projects that look polished from the first page or slide. And iWork is compatible with Microsoft Office, so it’s easy to share your work.Amazon.com Product Description
iWork ’09, Apple’s office productivity suite, is the easiest way to create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations the Mac way. Writing and page layout are easy in Pages. Numbers gives you simple ways to make sense of your data. You’ll captivate your audience with new, sophisticated features in Keynote. And iWork is compatible with Microsoft Office, so it’s easy to share your work. Install the iWork ’09 Family Pack on up to five Mac computers in your household.

iWork ’09 Family Pack
The Family Pack Software License Agreement allows you to install and use one copy of the Apple software on up to a maximum of five (5) Apple-labeled computers at a time as long as those computers are located in the same household and used by persons who occupy that household. By “household” we mean a person or persons who share the same housing unit such as a home, apartment, mobile home, or condominium, including students who are primary residents of that household but reside at a separate on-campus location. This license does not extend to business or commercial users.

Creating the perfect brochure, flyer, report, or resume is faster and easier than ever. Click to enlarge.

Pages ’09. You have a beautiful way with words.
Pages is both a streamlined word processor and an easy-to-use page layout tool. It allows you to be a writer one minute and a designer the next, always with a perfect document in the works.

Easy from the start

Your instant design studio.
Even before you start writing, your document looks great. With over 180 Apple-designed templates, a professionally polished resume, brochure, school report, or invitation is waiting for you to make it your own. Use the Template Chooser to find the one you like. Add your own words inside the text placeholders. Use the Media Browser to drop photos from your iPhoto library directly into graphics placeholders. And there you have it: a beautifully designed, professional-quality document made in minutes.

Tables and charts make data instantly more compelling. You can copy and paste charts from Numbers into your document. The data is linked, so when you change the data in your spreadsheet, you can update your chart in Pages with just a click.

With over 180 Apple-designed templates, a professionally polished resume, brochure, school report, or invitation is waiting for you to make it your own. Click to enlarge.

Pages makes it easy to format text, adjust images, and write the perfect document. Click to enlarge.

Focus on your writing in full-screen view. Click to enlarge.

Streamlined word processing

Every word counts.
Creating great-looking documents is simple with Pages. At the top of the page, the contextual Format Bar lets you do the basics–formatting text and adjusting images–with just one click. View and choose fonts with the “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) font menu. Change text size and color. Adjust line spacing and paragraph alignment. Apply character and paragraph styles. When you select a photo, shape, or table on the page, the Format Bar displays tools to adjust the images. And while you write, Pages can automatically format lists with bullets or numbers, check your spelling, proofread your document, and generate a table of contents.

Fine-tuning your document is easy, too. You can add headers, footers, footnotes, and bookmarks with a few clicks. Insert section, layout, and page breaks from a pull-down menu. And the word count is visible at the bottom of the page–just click the total to see details including the number of characters, lines, paragraphs, and more. When it comes to word processing, streamlined and smart come standard in Pages.

Advanced writing tools

There’s more to the story.
Any word processor can help you type. Pages gives you all the tools you need to write and perfect your writing. Now you can view your document full screen. With one click, clutter disappears so you focus on what you’re writing and make changes without distractions. Organize your ideas in Outline mode. Create an outline with multiple levels, expand or collapse topics, and drag and drop to promote or demote items. Mail merge takes your data from Numbers or your contacts from Address Book to create personalized letters, invoices, and faxes. And in Pages, you can insert sophisticated equations into your lab reports with MathType 6 and add professional bibliographies to your research papers using EndNote X2.

When it’s time for comments and feedback, change tracking makes collaboration with anyone easier, clearer, and more concise. And it’s always easy to find your place. Next to your document, you see thumbnails of all your pages and sections, including changes that have been made. Quickly copy or delete a section. Or drag and drop to move sections around. Scroll through thumbnails to preview your document or enlarge them for a better view.

Powerful page layout

Do-it-yourself design.
Create your own design from a blank canvas–Pages makes page layout easy. Choose fonts and add images, graphics, tables, and 3D charts. Powerful graphics tools let you resize and rotate photos, apply reflections and shadows, add picture frames, and remove backgrounds from images with a simple point and click. You can even control the text: how it looks, how it flows, and how it wraps around images. Move everything around on the free-form canvas until you see the layout you envisioned.

Compatibility and sharing

It’s an easy read. In any format.
Pages makes it easy to share your documents with colleagues or friends. You can open Microsoft Word files in Pages and save your Pages documents as Word files. With powerful graphics and formatting tools, it’s easy to make Word documents look great in Pages. You can also save your Pages documents as RTF files or plain text or export them as PDF files. With the new email option, send Pages, Word, or PDF documents right from Pages using Mac OS X Mail. Share your work on the Web.

What if you need to share your document, but you aren’t sure whether your colleagues use a Mac or PC, iWork or Office? Now you can upload it to iWork.com Public Beta.2 Reviewers receive a unique iWork.com URL where they can view your work, post comments, and download your document in Pages, Microsoft Word, or PDF format.

With great-looking templates, easy-to-create formulas, and dynamic tables and charts, spreadsheets suddenly make perfect sense. Click to enlarge.

Numbers ’09. Finally, data has its day.
With great-looking templates, easy-to-create formulas, and dynamic tables and charts, spreadsheets suddenly make perfect sense.

Easy from the start

Numbers, uncrunched.
Plan a wedding. Save for retirement. Track your workouts. Keep a baby journal. Spreadsheets can help you organize and plan, and great-looking, Apple-designed templates will help you get started. With the Template Chooser, you can preview over 30 templates to use for home, work, and school. Tables are already made. Formulas have been figured out. Fonts are in place. They’re all ready to go. Just find something you like and make it your own.

Start planning, tracking, and analyzing from 30 Apple-designed templates, and you’re already halfway there. Click to enlarge.

With over 250 functions and built-in help, writing formulas, formatting data, and making sense of it all is easy. Click to enlarge.

Transform your data into compelling 2D or 3D bar, line, area, or pie charts. Click to enlarge.

Open and save as Microsoft Excel files. Email your spreadsheets right from Numbers. And share with everyone on the web.

In Numbers ’09, spreadsheets are built on a flexible, free-form canvas. So you can move tables, charts, graphics, and text anywhere you want on the page. As tables resize, objects automatically adjust to fit around them. Create as many tables as you want. Change fonts, sizes, colors, styles, and borders. With graphics tools, alignment guides, and rulers, spreadsheet-making becomes a surprisingly creative endeavor. And suddenly, spreadsheets make more sense.

The Media Browser adds some excitement to your spreadsheet. With a click, you can access your photos from iPhoto, your movies, and your video. The Sheet Navigator lists every table, chart, and sheet in your spreadsheet so you can quickly jump to any part of your project and make changes.

Formulas for everyone

It all adds up beautifully.
Creating formulas may seem complex, but Numbers makes it uncomplicated. Using the intuitive browser, you can choose from over 250 functions (including more than 90 new ones). Tooltips and built-in help provide clear and concise explanations of each variable. You can even use visual placeholders for variables when you create formulas. The new Formula List view shows you every calculation on your spreadsheet at once. And with a few clicks on the Toolbar, you can create tables and charts and add images and graphics. Easily find fonts and format text styles in the Format Bar.

Intelligent tables

Brilliance in every cell.
Numbers is a blank canvas for tables. You can create as many as you want and resize them as needed. The layout of each table is independent, so whatever you do to one table won’t affect the others. Move tables anywhere–even to a different sheet–and the calculations remain intact. You can even share content between tables. WIth intuitive tools, Numbers helps you analyze data. Enter data and change values within the cells and use sliders, checkboxes, steppers, and pop-up lists to explore the results. With every change, formulas and charts instantly update and give you a new data scenario.

When there’s almost too much data to decipher, Numbers lets you create categories based on information from any column. It automatically generates a summary row for each category. By using just the summary row, you can collapse, expand, and rearrange categories to organize your data any way you want. The new Reorganize button in the toolbar lets you filter by category and gives you other advanced sorting and filtering options.

Impressive charts

Off-the-charts charts.
Transform your data into compelling 2D or 3D bar, line, area, or pie charts. Combine line, column, and area series in a single mixed chart. Create two-axis charts with different value scales. Apply trendlines and error bars. The charts you create in Numbers can be linked to your Pages documents and Keynote presentations.

Compatibility and sharing

It’s the universal language.
Numbers makes it easy to share your spreadsheets with colleagues or friends. You can open Microsoft Excel files in Numbers or save your Numbers spreadsheets as Excel files. With powerful graphics and formatting tools, it’s easy to make Excel spreadsheets look great in Numbers. You can also export your Numbers spreadsheets as PDF files. Numbers lets you import documents in other common formats as well, including Open Financial Exchange files from Quicken, files from bank or credit card providers, comma-separated-value or tab-delimited files, vCards, and more. Printing spreadsheets in Numbers is surprisingly easy, too. Use the interactive Print view to see how big your spreadsheet will print. Then scale it up or down with a simple slider. With the new email option, send Numbers, Excel, or PDF files right from Numbers using Mac OS X Mail.

Share your work on the web.
If your colleagues need to see your work, but you don’t know what format to use, upload your spreadsheet to iWork.com Public Beta1. Reviewers receive a unique iwork.com URL where they can view your spreadsheet, post comments, and download it in Numbers, Excel, or PDF format.

Create your presentation in Keynote, and youÕll be a hard act to follow. Click to enlarge.

Keynote ’09. Crowd pleaser.
Create your presentation in Keynote, and you’ll be a hard act to follow. Powerful yet easy-to-use tools and dazzling effects put the show in slideshow.

Easy from the start

It presents beautifully.
Even if you’ve never used Keynote before, you’ll find creating a presentation surprisingly simple. It all starts with an enhanced Theme Chooser that lets you preview an impressive collection of 44 Apple-designed themes. Drag across a theme to skim through its slide designs. Once you’ve chosen the perfect canvas for your presentation, simply substitute placeholder text and graphics with your own words and images. Thanks to the Slide Navigator, the progress of your presentation and its organization are always in view.

Easy-to-use tools let you add elements such as tables, charts, media, and shapes to your slides. Add a table with a click. Just as easily add a 3D chart that you can animate. With the Media Browser, you can drag and drop photos from your iPhoto or Aperture libraries, movies from your Movies folder, and music from your iTunes library.

Powerful graphics tools

Looking good comes easy.
Make each slide in your presentation look its absolute best, using the powerful graphics tools built into Keynote. Quickly and cleanly remove the background of an image using the Instant Alpha tool. Or mask it within a predrawn shape, such as a circle or a star. With alignment and spacing guides, you can easily find the center of the slide and see if objects are spaced evenly. So anything you add to your slides–graphics, images, text boxes, or shapes–is placed precisely where you want it. If you’re adding a flowchart or a diagram to your slide, then you’ll appreciate the new connection lines feature. Connection lines between two objects remain anchored, no matter what changes you make. Move the objects around, and the lines move with them.

Create your presentation using one of 44 beautifully designed themes, including HD themes with 1920-by-1080 resolution. Click to enlarge.

Make each slide in your presentation look its absolute best, using the powerful graphics tools built into Keynote.

Animations and effects

Standing ovation highly likely.
With your choice of more than 25 transitions, including 3D transitions, you’re sure to keep their eyes riveted to the screen as you move from one slide to the next. Apply the new Magic Move transition and a repeated object, such as your company’s logo, automatically changes location, scale, opacity, and rotation across consecutive slides. Add stunning effects.

Flexible ways to present

Your show. Your way.
Keep the pace of your presentation flowing smoothly with the Presenter Display feature. While your presentation appears on the main display for your audience, you can see the current and next slides, your slide notes, a clock, and a timer on a second display. Add Keynote Remote to your iPhone or iPod touch and feel free to roam around the room while you present. Using Wi-Fi, Keynote Remote turns your iPhone or iPod touch into a wireless controller. In landscape view, see the current and next slides. In portrait, see the current slide with your slide notes. Tap to play and swipe to advance, wherever you are in the room. Buy Keynote Remote from iTunes now

When you can’t be there, the show can still go on. Using the built-in narration tool, Keynote captures your audio voiceover and timing as you step through builds or move from one slide to the next.

Compatibility and sharing

Approved for all audiences.
Keynote gives you a variety of ways to bring your show to the people. You can use it to import presentations created in Microsoft PowerPoint and to create presentations that can easily be saved as PowerPoint files. You can also export your presentation as a QuickTime movie, or a PDF, HTML, or image file; or even directly to YouTube. Keynote does the format conversion for you. Share your work on the web.

When you need to share your presentation, but aren’t sure whether your colleagues use a Mac or PC, iWork or Microsoft Office, publish it to iWork.com Public Beta.2 Reviewers receive an email with a unique URL where they can view your presentation’s slides, post comments, and download a version ideal for them in Keynote, PowerPoint, or PDF format.

iWork ’09 Family Pack