'Free your mindset': a new review of my iWork book.

An active Amazon reviewer W Boudville has published an article about my new book on iWork. It captures, I think, exactly what I was trying to achieve with it. 

The gist of what the author is trying to convey is to free your mindset when using iWork. Do not be conceptually confined to just having iWork be for one purpose. See if what it outputs or can accept as input can also be associated with other supposedly unrelated packages on a machine, like the Microsoft Office suite, or its arch competitor, Open Office. 

At a more mundane level, iWork can import and export to those packages, so as to transparently enable these data interchanges. So why doesn't the book just say so? Because Anichkin is making a deeper point. In your mind, ask what possible benefits could arise from this cross overs. Keep doing this, rather than putting iWork or those packages into standalone concrete silos. 

Chapter 6 addresses a long running complaint about iWork - that it lacks a Clip Art folder. Apparently, this just keeps recurring in blogs and forums related to iWork. Instead, the author suggests that the complaints are misplaced. There are numerous other applications from which you can readily import images. And he goes on to show at some length how to do this. Again, as earlier, this is simple. Once you know that it is possible, that is the main thing. The precise steps involved are a lesser detail. 

Going further, chapter 8 is for the person needing professional quality output printing of graphics. It shows how iWork can be used at this level, for creating press ready PDFs. The process steps here are not confined to operations inside iWork. You are advised about manual real world steps that you need to coordinate with your local print shop to achieve the best quality hardcopy.

My thanks go to W Boudville!

Excerpts from the book can be seen on the publishers' website Packt Publishing, on Amazon, and, in full colour, on Safari Books.