If all you want to create are mundane spreadsheets and letters, you might not get excited about Apple's iWork suite of office software. But if you want documents that pop and are fun to create, you'll find iWork to be an intriguing alternative to the standard Microsoft Office Suite.

IWork consists of three applications -- Pages (a word processor), Keynote (a presentation software), and Numbers (a spreadsheet). The three applications all work off the same concept that Apple calls a "canvas." That is, your document, presentation or spreadsheet is placed on a background that is extremely flexible and provides some interesting advanced functions all by itself.

For instance, in Microsoft Excel, you work on a stationary grid of rows and columns. On the iWork canvas, you can have multiple grids you can place wherever you want on the canvas, so you can present your data in a much more flexible, compelling way. In that respect, iWork behaves in much the same way as a page layout program such as MS-Publisher or Quark Express, so you can think in terms of what your output will look like even if you're creating only a spreadsheet.

That page layout concept follows through in other places in iWork. You can, for example, create two text boxes on a page, then flow the text -- so when it fills up the first text box, it automatically will put the rest of the text in the next text box -- anywhere on the page. Similarly, the layout adapts to what you place on the page. So in a Numbers spreadsheet, it adjusts the position of images and text as you resize tables or add and subtract columns and rows.

As you might expect, the imaging tools in iWork are Apple-easy and powerful. If you have a photo or other image, you can change its shape by applying a mask. That mask doesn't have to be limited to the usual rectangle-shaped structure. It can be round, oval, jagged -- it even doesn't have to include parallel edges.

If you want to manipulate your image, you can do that easily too. Let's say you want to zoom in and crop your photo. Just click on it so a slider control pops up, then slide the pointer until it zooms you to the point that your edges fit inside the edges or the mask. You can even change the mask.

With such user-friendly features as these, and a large assortment of Apple-supplied templates, you should have no trouble making professional looking documents, spreadsheets and presentations. I used Keynote instead of MS-PowerPoint to create one of my recent presentations. Even though I'm much more experienced with PowerPoint, I was able to make a good-looking presentation with Keynote, and do it in a similar amount of time as if I had been using PowerPoint. I then exported it to PowerPoint format to use on my PC. There are a lot of other tools in Keynote that are advanced beyond what most people usually need, which collectively allow Apple to say Keynote creates cinema-quality presentations.

IWork runs on a variety of Apple systems, not on Windows. So if you have a nice bright MacBook Air or similar Mac, you're in luck. If you're a Windows user and are willing to switch to Mac to use iWork, you'll need to get used to the differences between Windows and Mac OS X operating systems -- which some people will find easy; others will find it difficult. I had problems getting used to the single mouse button that comes on the MacBook Air. But Apple now supports a multibutton mouse.