Keynote is amazing, in my experience. I mostly present from my computer, so I don't need to worry about PPT compatibility. I find PPT to be unusable/prehistoric by comparison (when I try to help my wife with it on her computer, which is running a current version).

Glad to know that Pages does a good job as a Word replacement. I do track changes pretty frequently and have wondered how solid the support/translation is for that feature.

The origin of Keynote is supposedly the requirement to create Apple-keynote-ready presentation software that would pass the extremely specific and persnickety Jobsian requirements for aesthetics and attention to detail in an age of Powerpoint dominance. Updates notwithstanding, Keynote shows its age — but all these years on, it still produces great-looking presentations.

The application Steve used was made by Lighthouse Designs on the NeXT platform.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthouse_Design

Some great applications. I would love to have a direct port of all of them today. Of course I also want the shelf back and I want my menus on the side like NeXT. Oh well.

Keynote was created so Steve could have something that worked and looked the same as Concurrence. He would use his old NeXT to create presentation until Keynote.

Curious to know how it shows its age. Does PPT surpass it in some ways?

Try opening presentation you made a couple of years ago. Might not work. A colleague of mine ran into this, he couldn't open files created with Keynote a couple of years back.

I do recall a changeover around 2009 — was this a presentation more recent than that? I’ve had no problem with this and have used Keynote since it came out (and was a paid application, not free!)

I would think it was a little bit later, but I can't say for sure.

I believe iWork '09 was the final lineup of the original Mac codebase. After that, they basically back-ported the iOS versions to the Mac and from then on had a shared codebase, file format, and feature updates were pretty much in lockstep across Mac and iOS.

Yeah, back then there was a huge uproar about the dumb-down and loss of features.

They worked their way up, but I miss the layout of old Pages, it was brilliant as long as you accepted it to be not-Word (which many people did not)

My favorite feature of Keynote / Pages is that the equation editor is simply a native LaTeX editor. You have to wonder why Word didn't simply do this in the first place

LaTeX Math is good for people who know LaTeX but Word's Unicode Plain Text Math is arguably better otherwise.

The Microsoft equation editor also allows you to mix LaTeX and their own syntax, which is nice, since LaTeX is fairly verbose at times.

Word does it since 2017.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/murrays/2017/07/30/latex-ma...

Pages is the only word processor I know of that refuses to open documents that it created just a couple years prior (version 5 would refuse to open documents created by version 3, for example).

If Pages works for you, great: but save a copy in a different format if you want to be able to edit it in a couple years.

This is exactly the mentality this entire thread is about! Here we see it clearly demonstrated in another product. Apple says "update, upgrade or you are dead to me."

I have been stuck multiple times with users upgrading Pages two versions later on a desktop and then unable to read on their laptop or vice versa. Inexcusable!

Yeah, I was dumbfounded when I ran into this problem. I would be ashamed if I was on that team. At least include a converter.

Numbers is actually the best spreadsheet for stuff where presentation matters. For example, me and my friends use it for our D&D (and invisible sun) character sheets - the formula language is powerful enough to do what we need, and its ability to manage multiple tables per sheet is uniquely powerful.

And the icloud version of Numbers is pretty handy when you don't have a Mac around (but the collaboration capabilities suck compared to Sheets).

Excel does support multiple tables per sheet through the format as table (?!) feature. But yeah, still hard to make those multiple Excel tables look good with sheet-wide column and row sizes.

I believe the Office-idiomatic approach there would be to create one Excel file containing multiple sheets, and then OLE-embed a view of each sheet into a Word (or Publisher) doc. Lets each tool do what it's good at.

I think for the way most people use excel it’s adequate and in some ways superior (e.g. I made a cute weekly chores-tracking sheet with photos on it for the fridge), and presume that’s why Apple appears to have stopped work going on it.

If you’re even a halfway serious user of Excel than indeed, Numbers is a complete joke. But if google sheets would work for you numbers probably would too.

Sheets is actually pretty powerful. I can do 99% of what I used to do with Excel. Numbers is way under-featured in comparison. I would categorize Numbers as “family-friendly” and Excel and Sheets as “business-friendly”. Only Excel gets “finance-friendly” and I’m not sure about that anymore. My finance partners now deliver all my budget read outs via Sheets.

I think Numbers is a great spreadsheet application. It just doesn't even try to be the kind of spreadsheet application that can be abused as a poor man's DBMS.

For simpler tasks where a spreadsheet program is obviously the right tool for the job, Numbers tends to be plenty capable and give a nicer user experience than Excel and clones. For example, a few weeks ago I discovered that Numbers is vastly better at doing time-related calculations than Excel.

Numbers fails completely when you start moving into the problem domains where a SQL database and/or scripting language are good tools to consider.

I ran into serious problems with Numbers (it just wasn't good with them, and broke some of my existing spreadsheets...), and I didn't like Pages because it makes it a serious pain to work with or save into MS .docx or rtf, or anything other than pages format. I found Libre Office to be waaaay closer to the office suite of tools I was looking for on my MBP. (and less buggy, believe it or not).