I was up ‘til quite late last night putting together a presentation for our company’s annual sales meeting next week. Woo.

Anyway, I’ve put together presentations using PowerPoint before and always found it clunky and a little unattractive. When I bought my new baby MacBook a few months back, I decided to splurge and add iWork ‘06 to the package. iWork is a sort of productivity suite done the Apple way (which is always a mixed blessing), and its two components, Pages and Keynote, haven’t managed to come in particularly handy thus far.

That is, until I used Keynote to put together the presentation.

Keynote makes PowerPoint look absolutely sickly. The templates are gorgeous, the transitions are beautiful, and the way it handles media and text is about as simple as you can get. Except for the fact that I have to deal with interactivity issues, I can’t imagine why I would ever what to use PowerPoint again. While Pages didn’t impress me (it’s quite similar to Belight’s Swift Publisher, but in many ways not as good), Keynote is exceptional presentation software. Frankly, just for that application, iWork was well worth the cost.

Cool.