Tom Gorham
By the time you read this, shrinkwrapped and snazzy copies of Microsoft Office 11 will probably be gracing the shelves of your local PC World or Apple Store. While I don’t plan to use a column about iWork to talk about Office – particularly when I’ve not used the product, even in beta form – I’ll stick my neck out on one point. Contrary to the opinion offered by a glut of Internet articles pointing out that iWork hasn’t been updated for nearly two years and how far behind Apple has fallen in the office suite battle, there will be no panicked flight of iWork users to the comforting fold of Microsoft Office over the coming weeks.
That’s because it doesn’t matter that iWork 09 clearly lacks many of Office 11’s features. iWork has only ever offered a fraction of the features of Microsoft Office. Strange to say, that’s why a lot of us use iWork in preference to Office.
In any case, I’d wager that many of Office’s new features will be met by iWork owners with bemusement, rather than wonderment. Unless you’re operating a lone Mac in a sea of corporate PCs, the arrival of Outlook on the Mac isn’t the sort of new product announcement that keeps you awake at night in anticipation.
The addition of a ‘dynamic ribbon interface’ that claims to put commonly used features right where you want them, is, I’d hazard a guess, something that most iWork users will somehow manage to live without. And – oh cynical me – the reintroduction of Visual Basic to Excel will excite about five Numbers users – and that’s probably a couple more than those who give two hoots about Excel’s improved PivotTables.
Joking aside, do I wish iWork was better? Without a shadow of a doubt. But rather than hope iWork starts playing feature catch-up with Office – something it’s never done in the past – there are four big changes I’d like to see in the next version of iWork.
1. Save Pages documents in RTF by default
Pages is a fine word processing application – certainly for most of my uses, it’s far better than Microsoft Word – but it doesn’t live in a bubble. Sometimes Pages users have to share their files with people not lucky enough to own the application. That’s where the problems start. While Pages will happily import files from a variety of sources, the ‘Save as Word’ option in the Save dialog box is too often overlooked by iWork users, rendering the file unreadable to Word users.
So why isn’t there a default option to save in another format, such as RTF? Decent word processors, such as Nisus Writer Pro, use RTF as their native file format, and in Word 2008, you can change the default format for saved documents in its Preferences dialog. Yes, you’d lose some Pages-specific information if RTF was the default, but it’s a compromise worth making. As mentioned in a past column, I’ve got round this using an AppleScript to automatically convert files saved to a particular folder, but, come on, Apple, it has to be easier than that.
2. Sort out autorecovery
If any of your iWork documents have ever crashed towards the end of an afternoon’s solid writing or as you create your final summary cell of a spreadsheet, you’ll be aware of what is iWork’s greatest weakness: lack of any sort of automatic save or autorecovery feature. Every application in Microsoft Office has this.
As if to rub it in, just a couple of days ago, my wife’s copy of Word crashed, losing two or three hours’ work. And even though Word has an autorecovery option, the program crashed again when she tried to open this and the autorecovery option seemed to disappear. However, a quick trawl in the Microsoft User Data folder inside her Documents folder found an near-perfect copy of the original file. I’ve made a mental note to wait a few weeks before singing the praises of Pages in her earshot.
In a column a few issues ago (see MacUser, 30 July 2010, p84), I showed how a rudimentary way of automatically saving through an AppleScript, but in the interests of full disclosure, if I didn’t describe it as a Heath Robinson approach, I should have. We really need this feature built directly into the program.
3. Make it a better DTP tool
As a consumer application, Pages was never designed for serious print work. Perhaps not surprising, but in some ways that’s a shame. Some of its features – integration with Numbers, alpha channel masking and so on – have the makings of a decent page layout tool.
The first problem is that Pages isn’t designed for the CMYK four-colour process favoured by most printers. Instead, it uses RGB mode, which was designed for screen. Second, although it can export to PDF, the choices are limited to the esoteric ‘Good, Better or Best’, options, which don’t match up with any printer spec sheet I’ve ever seen. The inability to specify a resolution for output files doesn’t matter so much when you’re printing on a small digital printer, but on large presses, drop shadows and embedded images could start to suffer.
There’s a rather convoluted way to improve PDF export options and specify an output resolution, and that’s to use the ColorSync utility in your Applications/Utilities folder to allow export to a more printer-friendly PDF/X-3 format. Under the ColorSync utility’s Filters tab, you can use – or build your own – PDF filters. Select Generic PDFX-3 profile from the list and, under the disclosure arrow on the right, choose Duplicate Filter. In the duplicated profile, set its destination profile to Generic CMYK and adjust the resolution to 300dpi or so, depending on what you’re printing. You should flatten all transparencies and add a bleed to ensure the printed area extends to the paper’s edge – something that’s not possible in Pages’ Page Setup.
Under Domains, choose PDF Workflow to ensure this appears in the drop-down menu under the PDF option in the Print dialog. The theory goes that you first export the document to a PostScript file from the Pages Print dialog, then you open this file this in Preview and select the PDF/X-3 option to convert it to that format.
Would I have the guts to try this out with a printer? No – although I’d love to hear from someone who has. However, what would be great is if Apple built this sort of facility right into the program so those who couldn’t stretch to a copy of InDesign or QuarkXPress didn’t have to resort to this sort of fiddling about.
4. Bring back the database
One of the reasons – actually, perhaps the only one – why ClarisWorks and its AppleWorks successor remained a valid alternative to Office on the Mac for so long was their built-in database module, which could perform simple organisational tasks and linked with other parts of the suite. It’s the one feature of ClarisWorks that still doesn’t have an equivalent in iWork. Remarkably, until iWork 09 there was no way to integrate with any database, and while the latest version at least lets you work with data from Numbers spreadsheets, I know many businesses that would find a standalone database a huge selling point.
These aren’t the only features that I’d like to see in iWork. Live collaboration in Pages and Numbers would be wonderful, and the ability to directly link to Internet sources in Numbers is something I’ve long hankered for. But these would be the icing on the cake. If Apple was to address my four big moans in iWork 11 – whenever it’s released – I’ll be happy.
