Sunday, November 23, 2008

iWork Improvements

Righto - more and more suggestions! Keep em coming to joel [dot] esler [at] me [dot] com!

Dear Cupertino,



I love the simplicity of iWork. It's a great alternative to the Microsoft Office Suite for Mac, and, being an Apple product, you know that It Just Works. Creating fancy slideshows in Keynote is as easy as creating professional ones, and writing a letter or a resume in Pages is but one click away. Numbers, while not as fully-featured as Excel, makes spreadsheets easy for the uninitiated.

However, there are two things I'd like to see in the next iWork update:

  • The ability to copy and paste data into the graph data box in Pages.
    Why this isn't already a feature I don't quite understand, but graphs in Pages seem a lot harder to do than their Numbers counterparts. Unless I'm missing something profoundly simple, this just isn't possible with Pages graphs. Pages' graphs in general, are not intuitive, they're finnicky, and generally require a lot of messing around to work right.
  • One click line of best fit.
    Again, unless I'm missing something that's staring me in the face, I'm not quite sure why it's so hard to draw a line of best fit for the data given in a Numbers graph. Numbers is great in that it automatically shows us the sum, average, max/min values of any selected data, but seriously - why no line of best fit? This is another feature that should have come standard. I mean, sure, it can be done - but it should be easier than that, Apple.
That concludes my rather short list of iWork suggestions. If I've missed anything you'd like to see added, shout out in comments below.

Thanks,
Benny Ling.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Also a big improvement will be to be able to choose the paper size independently of the language and keep it that way. The paradox is when your System is in french, by default, paper size is "A4" (even if you specify that you're locate in another country). But if you're in Quebec or other french corners of Americas, you still use "Letter" or 8-1/2" x 11" as a standard. Pages and Numbers doesn't keep this preference, instead when you make a new document, all templates will show in "A4". It seem a little issue but when you're prepare to print a document and have to change the paper size, all you're layout is f**k-up, very annoying.