Yesterday I ordered a copy of iWork ‘08 from the Apple website. I got an order confirmation in my inbox by 12:23 estimating delivery sometime ‘on or before the 13th’. When I got shipping notification late last night it had become ‘on or before the 10th’. I had it in my hand, delivered by UPS, in time to play with it whilst eating my Cornflakes this morning.

First impressions are never really very useful, but some of the things they’ve done in Numbers are quite nice.

For example, whilst in Excel you have multiple sheets and each sheet has one huge grid/table, with Numbers you can have multiple tables per sheet. That means that you can move inter-acting grids around and keep them self-contained, put bar charts and graphics next to data, and so on. It’s subtle, but makes more sense than one ‘big grid’.

You also don’t need to remember that the C column is Quantity and the D column is Unit Price and you’re on row 6 - if the header of the columns are set to the right titles, you can simply type ‘Quantity*Unit Price’ in a cell and it “just works”.

They’ve realised that most people use spreadsheets as single-table databases and have made it as simple as possible to do that. They don’t expect it to be a fully-functional Excel replacement for the kind of person who uses Excel because they don’t know how to use SQL, but for 99% of use cases out there, Numbers shapes up to be a fair bit easier to use than Excel and for the SME is good fit. More templates might be nice, but not a deal-breaker.

Keynote has features for interactive presentations that mean it becomes much simpler to provide interactive brochures - basically, you can embed hyperlinks to slides, web pages or e-mail addresses within the presentation itself. It has also borrowed some of the image editing functionality from iPhoto so that within Keynote you can muck around with graphics: given the trend within the Apple and Web Design community for much more visual presentations (no bullet points allowed) this seems like a great direction to take it. I’m not quite convinced by the ability to add Web 2.0-style reflections, but time will tell…

Within Pages, the interface has had a tweak to make it feel more compact and they’ve supposedly made it easier to separate word processing from page layout, but at first glance I can’t see the major difference just yet. Change tracking and Address Book mail merge are items I don’t recall from previous versions and they might be quite useful in some contexts.

I intend to play with it all over the next week and update my invoices, proposal templates and presentation templates to the newer versions and work out what I can do with the new features that is of any real value. If I find anything uber-cool and innovative that hasn’t been mentioned yet, I’m sure I’ll be updating stuff here.

In the meantime, if you want to see what you can get up to, Apple have placed all their iWork tutorials online