They’ve been a long time coming, and talked/rumoured about, and at last Apple has updated its iWork and iLife applications, bringing up to ’08.

iWork 08 not only enhances the Pages and Keynote applications, but includes the new “Numbers” spreadsheet application that many believed Apple would, and needed to, introduce if they stood any chance of competing against Microsoft.

Interestingly, Apple has gone for a new approach to spreadsheets with the Numbers application. Instead of copying Excel, as so many others have, their approach allows people to organise and interlink information on different sheets on a flexible graphical canvas. This should make it easier to build relationships between the intelligent tables, each of which is a spreadsheet in its own right, as well as printing them.