The whole point of iWork is to make nice looking documents, something Word, PowerPoint and friends cannot do because of MS's hideous concept of typography.

So, what's new in '06?

• 3D charts.
• Reviewer's comments that go back and forth with Word.
• Inline tables with calculations--for the most part, who needs Excel if your tables calculate?
• Address Book integration for mail merges--for the most part who needs Access if you can use your address book for content customization. Very well done!!
• Free-form shapes and curves.
• Image masking.
• Image relection.
• Cinematic transitions.
• Very nice new themes--something Word and PowerPoint cannot do because of MS's concepts of graphics and typography.

Using the font palette is difficult, but if you set up styles, which you should, this is not a serious problem.

Integration with iLife is very cool. Dang, Apple is good.

iWork seems to run slightly slower than '05, but it still waits for me more than I wait for it and, as is typical, it will be likely be speeded up with the first maintenance update.

Some professional reviewers say iWork is not professional. That is a matter of opinion. If they mean by professional no spread sheet, no database, then okay. But, really? Consider this, what do most of us do with a spread sheet? Data storage. Pathetic data storage, but data storage, none-the-less. And what do we store? Contact info such as names, addresses, phone numbers, comments and such. Use Apple's address book and you get it all. And what do we do with a database? Web stuff! Can you say My SQL? It runs fine on OS X and is a real database. But do you really need a database. For most of us, probably not.

So, overall, 4-stars. Points off for font palette, rough help docs, and slighly slower speed. The features are the best.