Dear Mr Jobs...
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♥May. 16th, 2009 // 04:45 pm♥
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I really am trying very hard to like iWork. I really, really am.
I love the bit in Keynote where you can see the current and next slides on your laptop, with the countdown timer. I hope there's also an option to put your notes for the slides on there, too, but I haven't had reason to play around with it yet. You can tell that Keynote's the one you use.
I mostly love Pages, too: it has lots of nice features, and it's really quite powerful for making things look well designed, although I don't understand either why you can't mix portrait and landscape in the same document or why you can't have more than one table of contents with different header types in different ones (so that you can have a standard ToC and then also, say, a list of illustrations). Treating .pdfs like images is a bit silly, too: there's no way of showing more than one page. It's be nice if there was more powerful control over formulae, and generally field code capabilities (that'd also fix the ToC thing), but hey.
I am struggling a bit with Numbers, though. I accept it's not as powerful as Excel. I can, mostly, live without pivot tables, and array functions. From the demos and screenshots, it looks very much as though it's intended to be used to produce shiny front-page-summaries of the nasty detailed complicated bits of spreadsheets. That's a valid goal, but where are you expecting people to actually keep the actual data?
It's rather annoying to select a block of cells, go to 'sort' and have the default be 'the whole table', though: if I wanted the whole table, why would I have selected part of it, hmm?
Those silly grey header rows and columns are just plain annoying, particularly the way that they bugger up formulae and force cells to have silly, made-up names based on the contents of their header rows and columns. I will agree, though, that they are moderately more useful since you can now have more than one of them (and since you made them repeat across pages, which was a woefully silly thing to have forgotten to put in, I guess I'm going to have to start using them again). Speaking of formulae, if I edit one I really don't want to have to click half a dozen times in order to edit a cell reference. I just want to be able to change it.
And speaking of clicking half a dozen times, what's the deal with the new search box? I don't want a search box to randomly appear and take up the bottom third of my window, listing every instance of the thing I searched for. I can see the point in something like iCal: it's quite handy, I can type "dentist" in and it tells me the dates of all my dental appointments since forever. I can't really see why I'd want that sort of thing in Numbers, but at least in iCal it goes away when I clear the search: in Numbers, I seem to have to go through three levels of menu to get rid of it.
Making default-grey cell boundaries print out is silly, too, particularly if you're going to make it such a pain to change them to white and then make the white be on top of any other lines, so that there are little gaps in the deliberate lines. Actually, the handling of cell boundary colours is fairly sucky: making me click on the cell, then select the boundary I want, then select the line type, then select the line weight, then select the colour is silly, particularly when clicking on another cell changes all those back to the default, rather than to the thing I just selected. It would be easier if I could highlight a row, say, copy the format and then select a different row and paste it, but I can't: for some reason, that puts the formatting onto every cell, rather than just the ones that had the formatting on the first row. And copying the row doesn't seem to copy the cell boundary format, either.
The combination of many of those things, although mostly the fact that I really *am* trying very hard to like Numbers, means that I've spent half the afternoon reformatting a Numbers table, so that it will print nicely, then trying to get it into Pages looking the same way, then saving it as a .pdf and trying to get *that* into Pages, then giving up and (oh, how we laughed) putting the page numbers onto the Numbers sheet and repeatedly printing them out and holding them up to the light until they were in the same place as the ones on the (otherwise blank) Pages pages....
But really, I really *am* trying to love it....
Me
PS: changing what alt+arrow key does in iWork09? Just bloody stupid. I don't want it to randomly insert things / scroll around the screen (although, again, this was rather something that Numbers needed). I want it to skip along the text by word, like it does Everywhere Else.
PPS: thanks for fixing the stupid thing in Numbers where charts were drawn based the rounded data, though: that was really stupid. Same with the one where sorting a column would include the stuff overlapping from the previous, not-quite-wide-enough column: that was really incredibly stupid. Do you think that, next, you could fix the thing where typing 1/1/9 into a date-formatted field results in 1 January 0009? I mean, c'mon: how likely is that? Isn't it just a teeeeeeensy bit possible I mean this year? |
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