Apple iWork 05

Apple's iWork 05 is a productivity package for Mac users who don't need the power, or want to pay the price, of Microsoft Office. It includes an updated version of Keynote, Apple's popular presentation tool, and Pages, a new word processor.

The software installs from a DVD in the usual MacOS way, and both products include an extensive selection of templates (Themes) that you can modify for your own use.

The first version of Keynote costs £79, but iWork gives you more, for £30 less, which is a good start. Keynote was a capable presentation tool and this version adds more themes, and some impressive animation features, which can make transitions or individual slides more eye-catching.

The other major addition is a presentation view, which allows you to show the slides on one display while you view your own notes, along with a timer and a preview of the next slide, on another.

It's surprisingly easy to create good-looking effects; the iWork tour is a Keynote presentation and you can view and edit it to see how things are done. You now also get the option to export a self-running presentation to Flash, as well as PDF or Quicktime.

A new feature in Keynote and Pages is the media browser, which integrates with Apple's iLife products, so you can view photos, movies or music and just drag them from the browser into your document.

In Pages, you can drag in just about anything, even a whole PDF, so you can use the front page as a picture, although you'll end up with pretty big files as a result.

For most people, a word processor is where they'll spend a lot of the time, so how Pages performs is important. We found it to be a mixed bag. Like Keynote, there's a wide range of themes, designed to help you create newsletters, reports, brochures and other types of document.

They're all designed for you by Apple, and you can just replace pictures and text with your own material to achieve a very slick look; most have several types of page, so you can add a three-column page following a front page, for example.

But here we found our first glitch: although there's a DTP-like 'add page' command, there's not one to delete them. You need to select the items on a page and delete them.

In many ways, Pages is more of a layout application than a word processor. There are tools to rotate images and control the text flow round objects, add charts via a data editor and, of course, all those themes to help you create documents.

If you need hardcore word processing, Pages may not be for you - there's no revision tracking, for example, which you need if you're editing work. In addition, the built-in word count only applies to the whole document (though you can download a free service applet to count the words in a selection).

On the positive side, Pages can read and write Word, Rich Text Format and Appleworks documents, and you can create PDFs, so you can carry on using your existing files.

It's very easy to create multicolumn layouts, tables, and even manage footnotes or tables of contents. We do think, though, that you'll need a reasonably fast machine if you're planning on creating graphics-heavy documents.

IWork 05 isn't a complete office suite but, with a capable presentation tool and a pretty good word processor for under £50, it's worth a look.

Keynote will suit just about everyone's needs, and the new presenter view should be a great help. As a half-way house between word processor and DTP package, Pages is a strange beast.

You can easily produce great-looking documents from the templates, so it'll suit people who need to knock up brochures, flyers and newsletters, as well as most casual word processor users. Even things like footnotes and tables of contents are simple to manage.

But if you require features such as revision tracking, mail-merging or macros, you'll need to consider an alternative.