In iWork Smarter, not Harder I mainly talked about Pages, but the iWork suite also consists of Keynote and Numbers.
Keynote is for giving presentations, and if you’ve ever used PowerPoint, well, it’s like that, except you don’t want to kill yourself while you are using it. I mean, I’m sure there are people who enjoy using PowerPoint. I think they are called masochists. (I kid, I kid!)
PowerPoint, you’re fine for the Windows-wielding corporate drones of the world. Make your charts & graphs showing projections for the 4th fiscal quarter… someone has to do it. Is it my background as a designer that makes me feel like Keynote “gets it” where PowerPoint does not? I don’t know… but I actually like using Keynote for building presentations. In the olden days (2006) I’d probably be all hellbent on using S5 or some (web-)standards based presentation thingy, to avoid using a PDF, or a PowerPoint file, or some other thing I deemed “evil” or such… but I guess I’ve mellowed a bit… and, I like Keynote.
As for Numbers, I have less use for it, but appreciate the fact that I have a spreadsheet application that runs on my own computer instead of the cloud, and feels cleaner and functions better than the offerings of NeoOffice or OpenOffice. I tend to use spreadsheets as spreadsheets and not databases, as many people do, so I don’t use it a lot. I did find that making charts & graphs was pretty damn easy. I never knew how to make a damn chart in Excel, but Numbers was intuitive. In the olden days (2004) I’d probably be all hellbent on writing some Perl code to generate an SVG file if I needed a graph. It is nice to have Numbers around as an option though.
So while I’m thankful for these useful tools, I’m still a fan of writing HTML for presentations, and (being able to) write code to generate charts & graphs. I mean, choice is a good thing… right?
See Also: iWork Smarter, not Harder (Part I)