[CubaMark]

The combination of iLife with NeoOffice is finally a realistic MS-Office-killer.

I've been playing with Keynote '08 today - a great upgrade! The new animation possibilities alone make this worth the upgrade. One issue related to this: slides can now become very, very complicated to deal with if you are combining lots of elements with lots of actions! But for 95% of people doing presentations, that's not likely to be a huge issue.

I would also like to have seen a bit more control over the audio (narration and soundtrack) features, but this would seem to put ProfCast on the sidelines.

M

 

[CubaMark]

What is the difference between NeoOffice and Open Office? Do both do perfect translations of Word documents? Do both read Word documents flawlessly?

NeoOffice is OSX-native, and much prettier than OpenOffice.

OpenOffice requires you to install the X11 windowing environment from your original System DVDs, and must be running in order for OpenOffice to work (essentially, you're running two programs).

I haven't seen any major arguments for running OpenOffice instead of NeoOffice - the Neo crew have done an amazing job.

 

[CubaMark]

Hmmm. Found one sniggling little thing that Pages apparently can't do (easily?):

Pages: Table of contents uses Arabic numerals only

When you create a document in Pages, you can add page numbers to your pages, and even choose a numbering format (such as 1, 2, 3; A, B, C; or I, II, III). If you create a table of contents (TOC) for your document, the TOC will always display page numbers as Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3), even if you selected a different format for your page numbers (such as if you chose the letter scheme A, B, C).

If your page numbers are not Arabic numerals, your document may be difficult to navigate since the TOC and page numbers won't match. As a general rule, you should use Arabic numerals to number your pages if you plan on including a TOC so that the TOC will reference page numbers correctly.

If you've used a different numbering format, you can edit your TOC using this workaround:

Export your document as an RTF (Rich Text Format) document (from the File menu, choose Export, then select the RTF radio button in the resulting dialog).
Open the RTF in Pages (from the File menu, choose Open or drag the RTF file onto the Pages icon in the Dock).

Manually change the numbers in the Table of Contents section so that they match your page number scheme.

Please note that some of your formatting may change during this process and may need to be corrected.

Well... this won't work for me. I need a TOC that is capable of showing i, ii, iii, etc. for the frontmatter of a document, and then begin with the main body text using Roman numerals 1, 2, 3, etc.

Shoot.

M

 

[CubaMark]

There is one critical issue with Keynote that - hopefully - will be addressed by Apple soon, and one that makes it problematic for any presentation.

The darn thing reboots my MacBook at the most inopportune moment.

See this thread at Apple Discussions, where we're trying to make heads & tails of this thing.

If anyone else has experienced this, please contribute to the thread.

M.

 

[CubaMark]

I just warms the cockles of my heart when this happens...