iWork '08 is an Office competitor. In some ways it's better, in other ways it's worse. I have iWork '08 and Office 2008 both installed for this reason. I use Pages far more often than Word and Excel much more often than Numbers.

I look forward to getting iWork '09 to try. It sounds as though Apple has addressed Numbers' major shortcoming, which was an insufficient collection of built in formulas. If that turns out to be the case, I'll be able to switch completely to iWork.

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MacBook Pro 2.8 GHz Core 2 Duo Dual Xeon 1.8 GHz 9 hdd RAID 5 NAS a few other older machines

Numbers stills needs significant work in the financial, information, and statistical categories (though much progress has been made).

Engineering, Numeric, and Text categories are about there, collectively lacking 4 functions when compared to Excel and not including the complex number functions in engineering.

Beyond completely the function suite, Numbers really needs to add data analysis and scenario analysis like Excel has. There really aren't any great options on the Mac and these capability would induce a lot of business users on Mac to switch.

I am aware of the lack of Pivot Tables, but the Categories functionality goes a long way.

For me, I will be interested in seeing the '10 version, but the strides made give me hope that I will one day be able to leave Excel behind forever.

Apple makes beautiful software. I love their approach. Start with a really well thought out human interface that is intuitive and easy to use, then build in the power.

I didn't like Pages when it debuted. Pages in iWork 08 was better. Now, with addition of Endnote and Mathtype compatibility along with dynamic outlines, Pages has become a serious word processor. And what a pleasure to use. That's something I haven't said about Word since version 5.1 for the Mac.

Numbers isn't really competitive with Excel. Still missing are scripting and pivot tables, however, I would venture to say that what they have delivered in iWork 09 addresses better than 80% of user's needs, i.e., opening and reading spreadsheets as opposed to actually creating them.

The real problem with Numbers isn't the feature set, it is the fact that Excel is the de facto industry standard and the community of PC based Excel users. The improvements in Numbers: ability to open current versions of Excel documents and save, email, over 100 new formulas, dazzling charts and lots of other zippy features are nice, but, they don't really address the more serious business issues of cross platform support. Excel has better than 90% of the spreadsheet market share which is dominated by PC users and it is doubtful that Apple will, or for that matter, ever intends to go after the entire installed base.

So, nice app, but in the business world it really won't have a tremendous impact unless Apple decides to compete head to head with Microsoft.

If so, they have one bloody battle on their hands and you better believe that Redmond won't be sitting idly waiting for Apple to trump them.

I believe that Numbers is really designed for Mac users who are sick and tired of lame Microsoft Office products which they hare endured for years. Instead of spending hundreds of dollars on Office, Mac users can buy iWork for $79. And with the ability to open and save Office documents, this may be enough of an enticement to abandon the Office suite in favor of something elegantly designed, fun to use, feature rich and Office friendly.

Keynote. You know, when you use Keynote and then use Powerpoint, you realize just how much of a kludge Powerpoint really is. Keynote is so easy to use and the presentations are beautiful. I'm sold.

Adding interoperability between Pages, Numbers and Keynote was badly needed and will help attract new users. And, I'm sure we will continue to see even more improvements as the iWork suite continues to mature.

iWork.com? I don't know about that. If Apple handles this like .mac or me.com, I don't really see this going anywhere. If Apple is really going to get serious about collaborative computing, they've got some homework to do. And, then they'll be competing with google. I'm not sure I would want to bet the bank on that one.

I've been using a Mac since 1984. I would rather use an abacus than use a PC. But like many people, I have to use Windows for a variety of reasons and now I even do that on my Mac.

iWork 09 is a significant update and will be well received in the Mac community.

Yes, you are absolutely correct on all points made.