https://appleinsider.com/articles/07/11/14/road_to_mac_offic...
Since then Apple switched from having a seperate inspector window for the controls to having a sidebar. I see this as a downgrade, but a minor one.
And MS kind of went for the same idea but laid out the blocks horizontally. Which… since text is wider than it is tall, makes labels hard to fit in.
And because people don’t scroll horizontally, they made the available options change based on the window width. So if you want to see everything, you’ll make the window fairly wide, at which point you’ve got the ribbon using up vertical real estate, and blank space on the sides where a side-bar or inspector could’ve been.
We have given Keynote the colloquial name "iPreach" for a reason ...
I used to use it, but Pages forced an update and clobbered a final I had made right before I needed to print it out. That was the start of my leaving the Apple ecosystem.
Pages and Numbers exist because Apple wanted a modern office-lite suite to cheaply bundle in place of the increasingly ancient AppleWorks for users who needed basic functionality.
Keynote exists because Steve personally preferred to use a particular NeXT app for presentations — I don’t recall the name —- and it was no longer available. It’s bespoke presentation software originally built directly to Steve’s specifications.