Office Suite Round-up: iWork '09 vs. Office 2008 vs. Google Docs On to Presentations, Templates, and Online Collaboration Ryan Faas
Presentation Animation
PowerPoint and iWork's Keynote both offer a range of features for developing presentations (as does Google Docs but with such limited support for slide and theme templates and formatting that it really isn't anywhere near the capability of either PowerPoint or Keynote).
Keynote, however, offers a much broader range of animations and special effects that can be applied to both images and texts. Animated transitions between slides as well as for text and images within a single slide run the gamut from the generic dissolve through 3D visual animations that look more like Hollywood movie effects than transitions in an office suite. The new Magic Move feature enables an amazing level of complex animation of elements from one slide to another, with almost no planning or complex mapping of the effect.
If you're looking to create presentations with a lot of visual interest, Keynote is a hands-down winner. It's also probably the easiest of the three iWork apps for long-time Office users to adapt to. The basic interface is largely similar to PowerPoint and offers the same features for creating slides, working with templates, editing and viewing presenter notes, and so forth.
Keynote also offers a range of export features including the ability to export to PowerPoint, QuickTime movie, direct upload to YouTube, and export to Apple's Garage Band for packaging as a podcast. A final great new addition to Keynote '09 is an iPhone/iPod Touch app that can control a presentation and display both slides and presenter notes on the device.
This allows presenters to present with all the resources that they would have on the Mac and run the presentation regardless of their location, provided they can connect to a WiFi network and thus the Mac in question.
Built-in Templates
Both Office and iWork come with a range of templates and themes for various projects. Those included with iWork tend to cover a broader range, however, and they also tend to have a more professional look to them. By contrast the Office templates tend to look, well, like templates or clip art. Both products also offer the ability to create your own templates or purchase additional third-party ones.
iWork's templates also function almost as demo projects — each tends to provide sample art, photos, text, and even formulas and charts. This can be viewed as both a pro or con depending on your point of view.
They do provide a lot of starting points for projects and can help you learn how to make use of each application in ways you might not consider. But it also means that to customize many of the templates, you'll need to replace a lot of existing sample or place-holder elements with your own images and text. Thus, it can help to create your own templates based on the original Apple templates.
What Do You Need in Collaboration?
When it comes to office suites, collaboration can mean different things. iWork, Office, and Google Docs all offer the ability for multiple users to work on a single document with features for adding comments to specific text or other data as well as tracking changes made by each user.
In the case of iWork, both track changes and comments will interoperate very well with the same features in Office. By contrast, Google Docs' track changes and version history features are not compatible with either Office or iWork.
This is pretty much the limit to the major collaborative options Office has to offer at this point. Although functional, these features require that a document either be saved in a shared file space (such as a file server) or moved from one computer to another (via email, external disk, or Internet-based storage) in order for another user to view and edit the file. If the second user makes changes, the updated version must then be returned to the original user in order for him or her to view the changes or comments and make additional edits.
Google Docs, on the other hand, is an online tool. This means that you can share a document with any other user. That user can simply view the document online, make changes or comments, and save the updated document.
In order to view their additions, all you need to do is access Google Docs through your account on any computer (the iPhone/iPod Touch is supported but currently in a read-only fashion). Google will also maintain a version history for each document, allowing you to view or retrieve a previous version with little effort.
Sitting in the middle of these two extremes is iWork.com, a new Web-based feature that Apple introduced in beta along with iWork '09. iWork.com allows you to publish any iWork document to a shared Internet storage space using an Apple ID (such as the account you use for iTunes Store purchases). When publishing, you can email invitations to other users to access the document using a Web browser.
iWork.com displays full formatting of any document through today's common Web browsers. When users access a document, they can see who else is accessing it as well as add comments directly to portions of the documents or general notes about the document as a whole, which all other users can see. If you allow, users can download the document in iWork, Office, or PDF formats.
iWork.com is a great first step for Apple in terms of Web- or cloud-based collaboration. It offers complete online viewing and commenting as well as complete formatting (rather than the limited formatting available in Google Docs).
The problem is that it doesn't offer online editing capabilities. Users (including the owner) cannot make changes to a published document. They can download the document, make changes, and re-publish it, but each time a document is re-published it is treated as a separate document.
This presents a massive version control issue as there is no easy way to track different revisions of a single document across user accounts. The problem extends not just to edits, but to comments and notes added to each varying revision.
So, it's a tough call for which solution is the best collaborative tool. Google get's high marks for online editing, but at the expense of extensive features available in the other suites and at the requirement that collaborative features are largely limited to Google Docs.
iWork.com works great for sharing documents and receiving feedback and notes, but falls short on actually allowing multiple users to easily and efficiently work on a single document.
iWork and Office both get high marks for offline editing and collaboration, but require a bit of work or some form of shared space for actually sharing document files.
Overall: Apple iWork vs. Microsoft Office vs. Google Docs
In the overall scheme of things, the choice between iWork, Office, and Google Docs comes down to what you need and are comfortable using. iWork provides a host of innovative features and is great for consumers, small businesses, and users not satisfied with the Office interface or its lack of media integration.
iWork's ability to interoperate with Office makes it a perfectly functional alternative even if you need to collaborate with Office users. Anyone even remotely curious should check out the free trial version.
Users familiar with Office and comfortable with its feature set and interface will probably be most comfortable sticking with it. This is particularly true for users that spend a large amount of time in Excel. However, with its relatively low price tag, iWork can make a good complement to Office even if you're not looking to replace Office completely (like if you want to just replace PowerPoint with Keynote).
Google Docs is ironically the lowest cost (free) option and the one that can easily be accessed from any Mac or PC. However, it is also the most constrained in terms of features, formatting options, and interface. While a useful complement to either iWork or Office, it's hard to envision Google Docs as a complete solution for many users.
