Apple paved its own path when creating the Pages word processor and Numbers spreadsheet apps. Both programs have features that you won’t find in any rival software and their native file formats can’t be read by any other apps. Pages, Numbers, and the Keynote presentation app are the three parts of an office suite that Apple’s website calls iWork but aren’t identified as such elsewhere. Whether Apple wants you to think of them as a suite, all three share a unique graphic-centric approach. If you find Apple’s apps sufficient for your needs, they’re a pleasure to use. Other rival office suites, including our Editors’ Choice winner Microsoft 365 Personal, offer better features and compatibility, however.
How Much Does Apple iWork Cost?
Regardless of whether you own an Apple device, anyone can sign up for a free iCloud account. Doing so gets you 5GB of online storage and access to the Pages, Numbers, and Keynote browser apps. If you own an Apple device, the three apps are free to download and come preinstalled on desktop systems.
Microsoft also gives you 5GB of storage and access to its web apps with a free account, though to download its desktop apps, you must sign up for a Microsoft 365 Personal plan that starts at $69.99 per year. A free Google account gets you 15GB of storage and the ability to use its online-only office apps.
Apple, Google, and Microsoft can all provide more storage if you’re willing to pay. Apple offers 50GB for $0.99 per month, 200GB for $2.99 per month, or 2TB for $9.99 per month. Google’s One storage rates are about the same. If you need more space than the 1TB that a Microsoft 365 Personal plan provides, additional storage rates follow a similar pricing structure, too.
An Apple-First Approach
Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are full of features that make them seamless to use across Apple’s entire ecosystem. For example, you can insert a photo, scanned document, or free-form sketch that you created with your fingertip or Apple Pencil on an iOS device into a document on your Mac.
Each of the iWork apps uses proprietary formats by default, which means that Pages documents, for instance, won’t open in any app except for Pages (or Page’s online version). If you send a Pages file to a Windows user, they won’t be able to read it unless they sign up for an Apple ID, save the file to their iCloud drive, and then open it in a web browser. Forcing people to deal with this format won’t make you popular with your colleagues, but you can at least export a Pages document in Word, RTF, or PDF formats. Just note that the document probably won’t look the same if you re-import it with any changes. All other major desktop-based word processors let you use Microsoft’s format as their default format for saving files, so your documents will be easily sharable with anyone else.
Fortunately, Apple’s collaboration features work smoothly, so you can avoid exporting a document altogether. Instead, you could edit it in Pages while a colleague edits the same document in a web browser. Like Microsoft and Google, Apple lets you browse through all revisions of your documents. The desktop versions of Apple’s apps use the elegant Time Machine interface; when you browse through the stack, older versions recede into space behind the current one.
Elegant and Flexible Canvasses
Pages, Numbers, and Keynote use a similar interface, with a toolbar at the top that isn’t cluttered with options like Microsoft’s Ribbon. The apps’ optional sidebars—again unlike Microsoft’s—feature easy-to-find controls for changing their display options. The desktop and mobile apps respect your operating system’s light or dark system preference, but the browser-based versions don’t offer that capability.
I’ve tested and reviewed most, if not all, of the word processors available, and they’re designed for you to start typing at the top of the page, and then continue typing until the end of your document. Pages acts that way by default, but you can switch to a Page Layout mode, which resembles a specialized publishing app. In this mode, you need to create a box on the page before you can start typing text, but you can drag text boxes and images anywhere on the page.
Competitors’ spreadsheet apps create one or more tabs (essentially pages), each with a glorified table of rows and columns starting at the upper-left corner. In contrast, each tab in Apple’s Numbers is a wide-open canvas and behaves like Page’s Page Layout mode. In other words, you have complete flexibility as to where you position tables and graphics.
As mentioned, trying to share any Pages or Numbers documents that take advantage of these dazzling graphic and layout features will make your life difficult. But if you want their graphic powers and Apple-style elegance, there’s no alternative.
Write Pages
Apple’s Pages word processor has a double personality; it’s either easy and intuitive or complex and frustrating. If you want to create a document with impressive typographic styles as well as images and videos inserted from your computer or the web, then Pages gets the job done quickly and impressively. Like Apple’s other office apps, Pages offers a selection of professionally designed templates that look better than anything you can create on your own. However, it’s almost impossible to adapt them to your own purposes, which limits their utility. You can create custom templates from any documents you make to help save you from a lot of formatting effort later.
Your document can fill the app’s window or, as mentioned, you can enable various sidebars. The left-hand sidebar can show comments, page thumbnails, and document-wide features like a table of contents. You can also open a right-hand sidebar with formatting and layout controls. Like most other word processors, Pages lets you divide a document into sections, each with a different layout. All this works well for simple layouts and short documents, but things get more difficult if you try to create something lengthy and complex. Pages is the only advanced word processor that lacks a draft view, so you can’t hide the blank space at the head and foot of your pages while you’re working either. This means that if you type a sentence that extends across a page break, you must shift your vision down an inch or more to finish reading that sentence.
Every major office suite adds features with each new version, but Pages is the only one that lost important features during an update and never got them back. Way back in 2013, Apple overhauled Pages and Numbers with an entirely new file format. During the process, Pages lost its mail merge feature—something that appears in every other office suite. Pages’ desktop-publishing mode previously supported text that flowed from one text box to another, too. The current version lacks all these features.
On the other hand, Apple has added support for its Scribble feature; the app will convert words you write with the Apple Pencil on an iPad into editable text. On any iOS device, you can add drawings with a pencil or your fingertip, too.
Pages, unlike LibreOffice‘s and Corel WordPerfect‘s word processors, doesn’t have a master document feature that lets you edit chapters in separate files and combine them temporarily to print or export a complete book. Microsoft Word officially supports this feature, but its implementation is so buggy that you won’t find it in the app’s menu. Pages, like the current version of Microsoft Word, lets you type in an equation, but you can’t select equation symbols from a palette, as you can from all other major office suites.
Crunch Numbers
The Numbers spreadsheet app won’t tempt high-powered business or scientific users away from Excel, but for everyone else, it’s the easiest-to-use spreadsheet software ever made and by far the most beautiful. Numbers’ elegant rounded boxes for row and column numbers and its lucid formula-building bar are wonders to behold.
Numbers makes it easy to create graphic-rich worksheets and it has built-in conveniences that correspond to advanced, expert-level features in Excel and Google Sheets. For example, Excel and Sheets let you select a range of cells and give it a name that you can use instead of the letters and numbers of cell addresses. Numbers makes this easier: If your table has a header row or column, you can use any of the names in the header cells to represent the data in its row or column. Excel’s and Sheet’s capabilities are more flexible because you can give a name to any range of cells, but Numbers’ implementation is simpler to grasp, especially for beginners.
Every few months, a new release of Numbers adds advanced functions that match those in Excel. For example, the most recent update adds a function for non-periodic scheduled cash flows and makes it possible to use regular expressions in formulas. Excel users might be disappointed to find that Numbers seems to not support pivot tables—tables that offer different views of data aggregated in larger tables—but the Categories feature in Numbers is effectively a pivot table under a different name.
Numbers’ underlying canvas metaphor has lots of appeal even for traditional spreadsheet users. You can put images and text anywhere on the canvas. Formulas are color-coded and easy to read, rather than just a string of numbers and letters. If you create multiple tables on the same canvas, they work like multiple tabs in a traditional worksheet. With Apple’s typically dazzling graphic abilities, Numbers lets you create interactive charts that show different values as you drag a slider to represent different ranges of data.
Present Keynotes
Apple claims that Keynote is the most beautiful presentation app, and that’s probably right. Compared to its only full-featured rival, Microsoft’s PowerPoint, Apple wins hands-down in the elegance of its templates and the sometimes exhilarating clarity of its interface. In comparison, Google Slides, Libre Office Impress, SoftMaker Office Presentations, and Corel Presentations are underpowered and lack many features.
One example of Keynote’s excellence: When you want to show only part of an image in a slide, but keep the entire image in the file in case you decide to make adjustments later, Keynote gives you an Edit Mask option with a slider for reducing or enlarging the scale of the image while keeping it centered. PowerPoint gives you a similar Crop tool—though the name misleadingly suggests that you’ll crop the image permanently, with no easy way to keep the image centered while rescaling.
Keynote and PowerPoint both include gasp-inducing transition effects, but Apple’s are slightly wittier. I especially like Keynote’s clothesline effect that makes the outgoing and incoming slides seem to sway in the wind while moving from right to left. But you won’t choose a presentation app for its transitions. What may affect your choice is PowerPoint’s ability to change the layout of all the master slides in a presentation by changing a top-level master slide—a feature that ought to be in Keynote but, as far as I can tell, isn’t.
Apple’s Mobile Office Apps
Apple’s mobile apps are just elegant as their desktop and web counterparts. Their interfaces are slightly simplified, but, if you dive into the menus, you’ll find all the same major features. In Apple’s most-recent versions of the mobile apps, documents open in reading view that let you see more of your it on the screen and prevents inadvertent changes. You can switch to an editing view by clicking an Edit button.
Like Microsoft’s and Google’s apps, Apple’s let you use your phone to insert a photo or scan a document into your files. Apple goes one step further with the ability to use your phone to add an image to a document on your desktop.
Optimized Performance for M1 Macs
Apple’s apps perform at about the same speed as rival desktop suites running on the Mac on most hardware, but on an M1 machine, they fly. Documents open instantly. Navigation through large files is almost instantaneous. Microsoft’s apps are now Apple-Silicon-native and also very fast, but not quite as speedy. Apple’s, Google’s, and Microsoft’s browser apps struggle with large files and are sluggish, but that’s to be expected when you work online.
Productivity For the Apple Faithful
If you live and work in Apple’s ecosystem, and like the convenience of, for example, taking a photo on your phone and inserting it into a document or worksheet on your Mac, then you should use the iWork apps. Only the limited feature set in Pages and the suite’s lack of compatibility outside the Appleverse keep it from winning an Editors’ Choice award. If you and your work never stray out of Apple’s world, then keep Pages, Numbers, and Keynote handy for creating everything from graphics-rich worksheets or elegant presentations. I enormously admire Apple’s office apps for their sheer beauty and ingenuity—but that doesn’t mean I often want to use them.
Almost anyone else in today’s world of work and school is better off with Microsoft 365, even though you have to pay to use its desktop apps. Microsoft gives you essentially the same collaboration and platform flexibility that you get from Apple. Google’s free office apps can handle most of your productivity needs and are great for collaboration, but their online-first approach makes them less flexible.
