In my experience of many years, not only is Keynote fantastic, but Pages is better than Word and Numbers is better than Excel (though not the extensive Excel ecosystem).
I agree. I recently tried to do something in MS Office that was fairly simple in Pages: create a straightforward invoice.
I discovered that Word doesn’t even support formulae in its tables, which came as a great surprise. Apparently I needed to do this in Excel, which of course meant that the whole document needed to be written as fixed-width cells. This totally sucked for my use case.
Not too long ago I had to write a short paper in the current version of Word for Mac for a class I was taking and was surprised at how frustrating the experience was, in several ways feeling like stepping back in time a couple decades. Thankfully assignments since have accepted PDFs so using Pages is no problem.
Keynote is awesome. Last I checked a few years ago though Numbers was nowhere even close to Excel. No dynamic array formulas, Power Query, lambda functions, VBA, etc. All are pretty essential if you're doing anything beyond basic spreadsheets but I may need to checkout Numbers again.
I should have qualified "better". I find Numbers easier to use for basic spreadsheet tasks. Advanced, programming-like tasks are better in Excel, which has many more advanced features. I don't think Numbers is Turing complete, but then again I tend to use Python rather than Excel for advanced math processing.
Word has some features that Pages doesn't have, but they're not commonly used, and if you're doing any kind of page layout, Pages is __much__ easier to work with than MS Word.
Agreed. I've been using Pages quite a lot during the past year, growing frustrated with Word, and Pages is surprisingly good. It is much easier to use and to get nice results.
