I don’t use iWork often — although I’d love to — but from time to time, I give a presentation in Keynote or spill-out some pages in Pages.

One of my biggest gripes since Keynote 1 was the fact that the charts in Keynote (and nowadays Pages) could not contain “empty” cells. Wherever you put no value in a cell of a chart, you’d get a “0″ filled-in by the chart module. This was OK in most cases but as soon as you’d like to compare an actual data-set with a forecast, you’d end up having problems because there was no way of using an non-equal number of values per row. Even if you tried emptying the values in the XML[1], you would either end up with an empty chart or so, but definitely not with an non-equal number of values.

Today, I had the chance of trying iWork ‘06 and luckily they’ve changed this behaviour, as illustrated by the screen-shot. Yay! With the new Macs being Intel, there’s one more chance to convince our IT department that I need a Mac at work. :)

[1] Yes, I was that desperate at some time