I signed up for two Apple Work­shops this week, one for iWork and another for iLife. I’m pretty pro­fi­cient when it comes to using both prod­uct fam­i­lies from Apple, but my par­ents can barely do any­thing past the basics. I con­vinced my step-mom to come with me, but unfor­tu­nately my dad was busy with ten­nis. We showed up to our local Apple store and didn’t really have any idea what to expect. It turned out just being us and one other lady who hadn’t actu­ally bought a Mac yet (so I ques­tioned how effec­tive the work­shop would be for her). One of the employ­ees set up some fold­ing chairs in front of one of the Mac Pro dis­play mod­els and started up Keynote.

It was kind of dis­tract­ing run­ning this infor­mal work­shop in the mid­dle of the store where there were a hun­dred other peo­ple run­ning around and mak­ing tons of noise, but then again it was a free work­shop. Since I’ve taught a class that intro­duces peo­ple to an office suite, I was pretty curi­ous as to how the Mac Spe­cial­ist would approach this quick overview.

He started by insert­ing text and then moved on to insert­ing pho­tos from iPhoto. Very sim­ple, very intu­itive, duh, it’s Apple. The ani­ma­tion was a lit­tle trick­ier. I’ve only used Pow­er­Point to put together pre­sen­ta­tions and I couldn’t tell you the last time I had to use it. Another class I’ve taught requires an auto­mated Pow­er­Point pre­sen­ta­tion, I tried to chal­lenge the Spe­cial­ist with mak­ing the entire pre­sen­ta­tion play with­out any inter­ac­tion from the user. After a slight stum­ble, he deliv­ered and I thought the solu­tion was much eas­ier than what you have to do in Pow­er­Point. He ended the Keynote overview by insert­ing a chart. I was a lit­tle dis­ap­pointed that you couldn’t link data between Keynote and Num­bers (have a spread­sheet in Num­bers with data, insert that data into Keynote, change some­thing in Num­bers, it auto­mat­i­cally updates in Keynote)

Next, he showed off Pages, which is Apple’s word pro­cess­ing pro­gram. It was much of the same. Started with text, inserted images next, tried to explain the dif­fer­ence between posi­tion­ing them inline vs float but I didn’t think it was the great­est expla­na­tion. Some­thing I found neat was the abil­ity to fill shapes with images so you could take some­thing like a star­burst and insert one of your pho­tos from iPhoto behind it so it looks like you masked the photo with the starburst.

The last part of the work­shop briefly cov­ered Num­bers, Apple’s equiv­a­lent to Excel, but the Spe­cial­ist was hon­est in say­ing he had very lit­tle expe­ri­ence using it since he didn’t ever work with spread­sheets. The most advanced fea­ture he show­cased was the abil­ity to “Auto­Sum” a col­umn (whoopee).

After we had all these doc­u­ments cre­ated, the Spe­cial­ist gave us an overview of export­ing options. Pages has the abil­ity to export as a PDF, a Microsoft Word doc­u­ment, a Rich Text File (RTF), and as plain text. I was most impressed by Keynote’s abil­ity to export as a Pow­er­Point pre­sen­ta­tion, Quick­time movie, Flash movie, as a set of Images, and as HTML!

Since noth­ing is free in life, the work­shop ended by pro­mot­ing Apple’s One to One per­sonal train­ing. It sounds like a great deal. For $99 you get 52 classes with a spe­cial­ist where you ask all the ques­tions and get to choose when and what con­tent you’ll be cov­er­ing. I’ve seen other per­sonal train­ing where $99 gets you just one session!

All in all, I thought it was a very pos­i­tive expe­ri­ence. My step-mom, who is a com­plete new­bie to Mac, said she learned a lot in the short hour long work­shop. She’s plan­ning on going to another free work­shop that cov­ers iLife this Fri­day, but since I’m mov­ing back to Bloom­ing­ton I won’t be able to accom­pany her.