Product Reviews

When Apple launched the first edition of iWork in 2005, it was seen as a shot across Microsoft's boughs. For the first time in six years - since the last full update to AppleWorks - Apple had brought out a fully fledged word processing application, Pages, to complement Keynote, its impressive presentation tool.

It was no surprise that it chose January 2006 as the time to update the

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suite, and the world was poised to welcome Sheets, a rumoured spreadsheet component. We were all a little disappointed when talk of this new addition to the family turned out to be hot air. What we did get, though, was an update to Pages, now at version 2, and a set of refinements made to Keynote, which reached version 3.

To put them to the test, we set aside our usual batch of writing tools, which comprise a mixture of Microsoft Word, Mellel, Mariner Write and Ulysses, and switched to Apple's new pocket-friendly suite to see how it fared in the real world.

On the whole, we avoided the pre-set templates in each, which would allow us to quickly knock up professional-looking documents and presentations; instead, we concentrated on putting things together from scratch, as would most often happen in a business environment.

Over the next few pages, we'll reveal our verdict on this much-anticipated update to one of the best-looking productivity suites around.