Product Description

iWork 08
Keynote, Pages, Numbers

Apple's enhanced iWork productivity suite is poised to allow Mac users to create, present, and publish their work with style. iWork '08 offers three powerful applications—Pages ’08, Keynote ’08, and the brand-new spreadsheet program, Numbers '08—for creating everything from newsletters and stationery to polished business presentations to graphics-rich spreadsheets.

This self-paced learning guide, which includes  a companion CD jam-packed with practical media files, takes readers step-by-step through essential, real-life tasks for home and office that cover all aspects of iWork '08. The book is both a self-paced learning tool and the official curriculum of the Apple Training and Certification Program, used by schools and training centers worldwide, and is ideal for users of all levels.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #208596 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-27
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

About the Author
Richard Harrington has worked with media for his entire professional career. He's held such diverse jobs as directing television newscasts to publishing music magazines to consulting nonprofit agencies. Richard is the owner of RHED Pixel, a visual communications company in Washington, D.C. The Project Management Institute certifies Richard Harrington as a Project Management Professional. Richard is an Apple Certified Trainer and holds two Adobe Certified Expert certificates. He is the author of the previous edition of this book.

Customer Reviews

Excellent Resource
Contrary to the other reviews posted on here, I found the content to have the right mix and proper focus. So many of us have been subjected to awful PowerPoint presentations and the info here on Keynote really opens a whole new world to energizing presentations.

The info on Pages and numbers is more than sufficient in getting a handle on the programs and is a great guide to getting into the nuts and bolts of both. For a new MAC conver like myself, I am more than satisfied with the info presented here. Definately a sound purchase.

Detailed tutorial for absolute beginners
This is good tutorial on these three programs, with extremely detailed step-by-step instructions. It assumes essentially no prior knowledge of the programs or even of Macintosh software.

Each chapter works through building a complete document, and the book covers most kinds of work that people would typically need. It makes heavy use of the existing templates that come with the programs, which again is probably good for beginners but less useful for professionals or advanced amateurs who want their own formats.

The book sticks closely to the script in going step-by-step through the examples, with few digressions or explanations of why things work this way. It has a lengthy index which seems well-done and would probably be adequate to look up any particular technique you needed. There's a puzzling reference (p. 239) to a mail merge feature--puzzling because the continuing absence of mail merge in iWorks is one of the biggest gripes users have about it. The mail merge mentioned here is just an intelligent drag and drop that puts the lines of the address in the right place when you drag and drop from the address book. You can only do one at a time, though; it's not a true batch mail merge.

The book has a very heavy emphasis on Keynote, the presentation (slideshow) software, with over half of the book devoted to this topic. Pages (word processor and page layout) gets about one-quarter of book, and Numbers (spreadsheets) and an integrated example get the remaining one-quarter. There are two additional chapters on the included DVD-ROM dealing with linked text in documents, camera RAW image files, and multimedia. The DVD-ROM includes all the needed files for the examples as well as the finished documents for comparison.

I wonder about the emphasis on Keynote. I'm skeptical that the absolute beginner that this book is aimed at would do very many slideshows; they would be much more likely to start with page layout.

Very Good Feature: several pages explaining how to get your computer hooked up to a projector. This is a subject that always stumps people and has caused many delays in getting presentations started.

Bottom line: good for beginners, still useful but very slow paced if you already understand slideshows, page layout, or spreadsheets and just want to get smart about iWork.

Sadly Disappointing
I purchased and very much learned a lot from the prior book in this Peachpit series, iWorks '06. Since iWorks '08 added a completely new application, Numbers, for which no other book had yet been published, I was very much looking forward to learning as much about Numbers as the earlier book on iWorks '06 had taught me about Keynote and Pages. Unfortunately, there are only two very basic chapters on Numbers, and little new in the chapters on Pages and Keynote. So I bought an entire book for two chapters that don't go much beyond what I had learned myself about Numbers.

Perhaps I should have guessed this would be the case given that the book came out less than 2 months after the release of iWork '08, but I think Peachpit should have warned it's customers that this was a "minor upgrade" at best.