THE LATEST APPLE PRODUCTIVITY SUITE combines a brand-new spreadsheet program-Numbers-with updates of the Pages word processor and Keynote presentation packages, creating a real
(and low-priced) Microsoft Office alternative. While we gave you a preview of iWork in the last issue, this time we give a complete overview of the suiteThe suite, iWork '08, imports Office documents, includ¬ing those created in Office 2007, and exports to the Office 97-2003 format, which Office 2007 can read. To open documents from other suites, such as Word¬Perfect for the Mac or OpenOffice.org, though, you have save them (in their native apps) as Word-com¬patible files or use a third-party translator.

All iWork applications use a common interface.
At the top you'll find a toolbar in which most icons have drop-down options. A context-sensitive For¬mat Bar displays choices suitable to what's cur¬rently selected-text, a graphic, or a table. The most impressive graphics option, Instant Alpha, lets you easily remove background color regions in an image. It works better than any corresponding feature I've seen in high-end graphics programs.
Numbers is the biggest spreadsheet innovation to come along in the past two decades. You create your documents on canvases where you plaee charts graphics, text blocks-almost anything in any quan-tity-in an easily tweaked layout. A panel shows ~ tree view that lists the objects on the page, and yOl can create multisheet files.

Blank Numbers documents look like traditiona spreadsheets, but aren't. For example, you can clicl on the corner of a table and move or resize it. You cm add controls to individual cells that let the spread sheet's users choose a value from a pop-up menu 0 adjust a value by dragging a slider or clicking on up. down arrows-a feat that's difficult to accomplish iJ Excel but effortless in Numbers.
The 150 functions in Numbers tables provide a!
I'm likely to need, but advanced and corporate user will be disappointed to find no equivalent of Excel' PivotTables, and complex Excel spreadsheet generally won't import well. You won't be turnin your Excel macros into AppleScripts, either: Yo can't write programs that create or modify table:
And though charts look beautiful, you won't find th more sophisticated features, such as error bars.

You do get some impressive powers out of th box, however. The 18 supplied templates jump-staJ budgets, return-on-investment calculations, an other tabular functions. To create a chart, you just select some data, click on Charts in the toolbar, and select a type (such as a histogram). The chart appears with all data correctly labeled and lets you apply 3D effects. As with the rest of the suite, Numbers gains from tight OS X integration: For example, you can build a name-and-address table simply by dragging a group of contacts from the OS X Address Book.

Previously, the Pages word processor was more of a page layout program: Using canned templates, you created newsletters, posters, and other graphics¬heavy documents. Now you choose from one of two editing modes when you first create a document. Page Layout mode works much as before: You start from one of dozens of templates or from a blank canvas, then add text and graphics boxes. The new Word Pro¬cessing mode lets you begin with a template or blank page and create documents in which text flows freely from page to page, as in traditional word processors. Both modes let you insert text boxes and link them so that copy flows from one to the next, and the modes support revision tracking. Pages files transferred to and from Word retain their revision tracking.

You can't build automated templates that prompt you to fill in fields, and compared with Word, Pages has limited capabilities for creating footnotes, end-notes, and tables of contents. Also, the mail-merge feature works only with the OS X Address Book, not with Excel or Numbers data. But Pages outclasses Word in text formatting because it has access to OS X capabilities, so the application offers advanced typographic features like ligatures.

Keynote finally records spoken narration for a whole presentation, and its graphic enhancements might be enough to dislodge PowerPoint from some Macs. As in Power Point, slides can now include ani-mations in which objects move along predefined paths while growing, shrinking, fading, or rotating¬but Keynote makes the process easier and more fun. Still, despite nifty graphics features such as transpar¬ency effects in videos, nothing in Keynote matches Microsoft's Smart Art feature, which creates easily modifiable diagrams out of text data.

Interestingly, iWork '08 works closely with the mail and information management software in OS X. For long, complex, automated documents, you'll still need Office. But for graphics-intensive home, student, and small-office use, iWork is, in many ways, very much an improvement over Office. And once you've broken out of the grid-only Excel interface by using numbers, you may never want to go back. Overall, a refreshing new suite from Ap¬ple.