As a civil engineer, I love Excel. It is amazingly powerful and it can do almost every thing possible in mathematics. But it has a steep learning curve for anything but the basics, and it is butt ugly unless you have the time to tweak it just right. I think there is a good size market for a elegant easy to use solution with some of the power of excel. This will not replace excel, but if it comes as advertised, I will likely use it a home over excel.

I'm revolted by Pages and Numbers, and even Leopard! Apple's quality has steadily declined in the quality assurance and beta testing areas. Releases are becoming buggier and while needed features are being added, supreme sacrifices to UI design are being made. In so many instances, Apple is reinventing things when they need not to, and not even following the Apple HUman Interface Guidelines!

One thing I have found with Numbers is that you can set the preferences so that you can edit a cell containing an email address or URL without it opening your mail client or browser. I know that there are tricks to do that in Excel, but it should be an option. Now I am using Excel from 2004 so maybe the later versions fixed that situation.

My spreadsheet needs are not too great, for the time being, so I may purchase iWork. Currently I am "trying" the trial version.

My wife and I are in the midst of publishing a book and have found Pages far better for editing and proofing. I have also switched from Excel to Numbers and, for my basic needs, have not run into any problems using my old Excel files.

One thing that's being overlooked in all this, IMHO, is: IWork is $79 and Office is $300+, unless you get the Student version which is still $150.

A significant difference for the average, basic user.

I've found Numbers a little frustrating so far (i.e. cutting and pasting a set of columns with Formulae doesn't seem to move the references as well as Excel) but what does strike me immediately is that it's a perfect 'post-production' tool for Excel spreadsheets.

i.e. it's very rare you need to send a finished spreadsheet with all the Formulae, etc, intact for someone else to edit. It is just like Word, in that people send the editable file as the final version.

So I can see a workflow involving using Excel (and your Excel skills) to get the results you want, then pasting the actual cells into Numbers just to create a nice presentation version (esp. as printing is the worst part of Excel).

For right now I'll stick with my old MS OfficeX and even older FileMakerPro. But as soon as they add a simple database to iWork I'm there.

I'm not sure iWork is supposed to compete with MS Office. As others have pointed out it does basic functions well and costs less than a third of what Office costs. For those of us with simple needs it's perfect (as soon as they add a database that is).

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geoduck wrote:
For right now I'll stick with my old MS OfficeX and even older FileMakerPro. But as soon as they add a simple database to iWork I'm there.

I used Office X for a long time but eventually found the lack of support for special characters and the number of crashes intolerable. Entourage was rendered unusable within weeks of loading it onto my PowerBook G4 and Word suffered quite a considerable number of crashes too. Office 2004 is much more stable (but not perfect) and restores my faith in the fact that Office deserves to be at the top spot. Having had a quick glance at the iWork trial, I can say that I agree it is not an Office replacement, more of a text editor upgrade, but then for the price what can you expect. My one hope was that Apple would have snuck in the ability to read .dot templates from Word and Visual Basic - but it looks like we are waiting on Open Office to be the real challenger.

Since I am not a big Excel user, I may be just the person Apple is aiming at with Numbers. I bought the package mostly for the upgrade to Keynote, but have been waiting for an alternative to Excel. I have been using Numbers to manage some financial issues. It is elegant and a joy to use. I am sure that there is a lot that it can't do that Excel does, but it is unlikely that a user like myself will ever find those things. One particular thing that I appreciate is the way it handles formulas using referenced cells. If you are using whole columns of cells such as "cost" or "sales tax", it will use those terms in the formula so you can more easily see what you meant it to do. For single a formula, when you go back to look at it, you will see the referenced cells are highlighted in distinct colors. This has helped immeasurably when I have worked to figure out why a resulting number was not what I expected.
Beautiful program; great price.

I think Mosshead is missing the point. 25 years ago M$ promised Multiplan for Apple and where have Apple themselves been on the spreadsheet front since then? This is a watershed. And I am sorry but XL sucks like mad. Just see what fourmilab.ch said about it.

Sometimes there are too many people playing the game of "in order for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose", and it is clear that you don't have to play that game. I use a ibook G4 and plan on buying a Macbook this winter and what I have found that a lot of people always try to see which company out does each other. Now, I will say that I personally feel that Mac is by far the best computer that I have worked on. I enjoy working on OS X and I am using the free trial of iwork and plan on buying it as well. Many people will have different opinions as to which spreadsheet program they feel is better. I have a friend that uses Excel 2007 on his HP laptop and he feels that Numbers blows it out of the water. : ) Some people that have used Excel for years will probably feel refreshed about the look and feel of Numbers, and some die hard Windows users will down play it now matter how good it is just because it is an Apple product. In short, Apple does what they do best which is making great software that people enjoy using. Numbers to me is Awesome!

Hello Im a student currently in my Freshman year at highschool. I am currently using a MacBook Pro and have found that whilst using iWork '08 the amount of crashes I endure with a single assignment are almost intolerable. If anyone is aware of this issue, and is willing to help me; please email me at aturner@turnerzworld.com or aturner@tpc-studios.com.
Thanks.
Alexander Turner

For anyone to be of any help, to say that it continually crashes is not actually much use. Can you give a better idea of what you are doing when it crashes? Does it fall over immediately upon starting up? is it a particular type of process that you're executing that is causing a problem?

If you think iWork is just a glorified text editor, you need to spend some more time with it. I've migrated completely off of Word on my G5 in the last year and embraced Pages -- tired of the crashes, slug speed and awful templates. And for those of you who don't think visuals and presentation matter in your documents, you must be working in IT. A great-looking report is well worth the 30% or 40% sacrifice in Word functionality, which no one uses anyway.