Product comparison: iWork details

General

• Separate applications, no integration between Pages, Numbers and Keynote
• A Numbers document is a Mac OS X bundle (Folder with included files and folders). This makes sharing Numbers documents more difficult when exchanging files
• Missing HTML export does not allow publish Numbers documents as HTML docs
• No AppleScript automation features
• All placed images are copied into the document, no references to external linked images possible
• All applications are Mac only

Numbers page layout

• No custom page sizes
• No placement of a Numbers document into Pages
• Copy/paste a table from Numbers into Pages works, but links to other tables or graphics are lost
• Copy/paste a Numbers Graph into Pages loses its spreadsheet references
• No character and paragraph style sheets, every paragraph needs to be formatted/verified manually
• All colors are RGB based, no option to specify gray, black, CMYK or spot colors
• Black/gray text is always RGB based and will print four CMYK colors for PDF or PostScript output

Text within Numbers

• Limited formatting features
• Text box cannot be precisely positioned, height cannot be specified
• No text hyphenation
• No references between spreadsheet cells and text boxes
• No text box pipelines, text can not flow
• No inventory list of text and images used in Numbers

Spreadsheet

• No spreadsheet references between different documents
• Limited cell contents adjustments
• Limited page layout capabilities
• Very limited to generate interactive forms
• No protection of cells and formulas
• No SQL or FileMaker database access option
• No option to edit a small scaled table into a separate full sized Window
• No mail-merge functions
• No spreadsheet 3rd dimension option (z is missing)

 
Tested Versions: iWork 08 with 0.2 updates (March 2008)

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