Word vs. Pages: What exactly makes Word better?

For being so new in the market- I am thoroughly IMPRESSED with both Pages and Keynote- yes, I use Office 2004 more frequently, but I definitely prefer those features and elegant style iWork has over Office. They're just different, with their unique pros and cons, but it will be no time before Apple catches up, and surpasses Microsoft's software in this area.

I mean, why can't word, after all this time, allow you to simply place on the page ,a picture, EXACTLY where you want it? Pages can...

I suppose if you don't have a lot of memory in your system, then it might be impossible to run the huge iWork applications- if you do have the memory though, to run a 300MB app--IMO, the application that trumps all others: NeoOffice/J {or OpenOffice, if preferred}
Does it all. spreadsheets, word processing, pdfs, conversion, webpages, etc..
And its Free.

I think the benchmark for Pages should be FrameMaker. It has styles, crossreferences, multiple text flows, drawing tools etc - unfortunately Adobe killed it by not creating a Mac OS X version, even though it started out on Unix.

As far as Word is concerned, I dislike the crashes (very often completely unexpected, in short documents, and sometimes destroying your even your file). It cannot keep things ordered on a page (depending on fonts, printer margins etc your line and page breaks will change using the same file). I dislike the non-consistent way of doing things (things that could work the same way don't). If you can do things very often they are far from intuitive or easily found.

Pages fares much better in most of these respects while still in version 1. That is an accomplishement.

Marc

Any idea on when we might see iWorks 2.0? I too get tired of the crashes. But have to use Word for my mail merge and Excel for charts in a report I have to send to those who aid in my support.

Mike Hughes, Th.D.

Your advice to use the font panel is great - if you happen to think that they font panel is part of a good user interface. I don't. Of course, if my PowerBook's screen was a few inches wider I might not dislike it so much.

A few days after Pages came out I decided to perform an experiment. I decided I'd use Pages exclusively and work with Word only for testing Pages/Word compatibility and to open files that Pages wouldn't/couldn't play nicely with. The experiment was successful from the standpoint that I never had to use Word for personal or professional document correction. But it was an experience of sometimes monumental frustration.

As mentioned above. I hate the Font control Panel. Anything that forces me to take my hands away from the keyboard is a bad idea in my book. And let's not forget that in Pages I can create paragraph styles but cannot assign keyboard shortcuts to them. Who let that slip through the cracks?

Pages is a great start but it lacks maturity and features that, frankly, Apple should be embarrassed about. I can support it as a generally well done first release with the missing features and annoying bugs that such products have. But with the start of this new school year I'm returning to Word as my default word processor - at least until Apple releases version 2 of Pages.

Is Word better than Pages? Yes, in that it has features I need that Pages lacks or doesn't implement well. Yes, in that it is more mature. But that's not to say that many people won't find Pages plenty useful.

My guess, & it's only a guess, is that Pages 2.0, as part of iWork '06 (no 's'), will be announced next January at Macworld San Francisco.

I think the answer is simple - word was around before pages. Almost everyone got used to word and when something else comes along it creates fear of the unknown. As Rino said it takes time to learn and that is frustrating.

Being new to pages I am pushing through. It is taking time to learn but it is taking a lot less time than it ever took me to learn word. I find pages to be a far easier program to use and the intuitiveness is in stark contrast to the unending conflicts that I find arise with word. Moreover I find that I WANT to go places in pages that I never went in word simply because a) it is easier to learn new things, b) the end result is a higher quality document.

For me the answer is simple and I would encourage others to take some time out and play with pages. The quality of my documents has never been better since using pages and with time efficiency will increase also.

I think the answer is simple - word was around before pages. Almost everyone got used to word and when something else comes along it creates fear of the unknown. As Rino said it takes time to learn and that is frustrating.

That's exactly what I said. Glad to see another user agreeing with me 🙂

Since the Apple Censors killed my first reply, I'll try again.

Of course I know that Command T will open the Text Panel. But that just opens the dialog box and now we're back to the mouse. You can't select a font or do anything else without using the mouse.

Okay Apple, is that better? Of course acknowledging that there are censors is also probably a deleting offense.

Command-t is very close to the track pad on the laptops by apple. It can't be that hard to move your fingers to the trackpad from the keyboard (you complained about the size of the powerbook screen, so I am assuming you are using the powerbook to write with) While the font panel may not be quite as useful as some would like, it is a system wide choice Apple has made, and many have chosen to use it rather than complain about it.

If you would like to have access to the character and paragraph styles then by all means send feedback to Apple. It may make it into a future revision of the program. Ask for access to Font Families (and a 'thumbnail' of the font) to be in the Text inspector, but not just scroll through a list of fonts in the menu

Can Word let you choose fonts and such with keyboard commands? do you think it did with it's first version? If you find that you must use Word for your main projects, hey, that's fine. I have to use it at work, and I am busy writing a training manual for work at home on the Mac. That's because Pages isn't quite there yet, but for a lot of things it is there, and it's great.

I just wish Word would let me set up families of fonts instead of having to scroll through the hundreds of fonts some idiot put on the system. I like being able to choose sets of fonts I have designated as Body, Sidebar and Display fonts. Being able to see them is fine, but scrolling through dozens to get to Optima would be less than useful. (Oh yeah, and Control-D lets you open the Font Dialogue box in Word. That's intuitive)

Look - I'm not complaining that I cannot open the Font Dialog panel. What I'm saying is that once I've opened it NOW I have to use the mouse. I cannot use the keyboard to select a font or font size. Nor can I select a paragraph style via keyboard. That is simply mind numbingly inexcusable for a Mac word processor written in 2005!

Yes, Word can let me select fonts via keyboard shortcut using at least two different methods. I can create a simple macro (something AppleWorks would allow before OS X) and I can create a paragraph style and assign a keyboard shortcut to it (something AppleWorks allowed). Note the AppleWorks reference here - this isn't an idea foreign to Apple programmers.

Whether MS Word could do this in version 1 is irrelevant. What was considered a standard feature of a word processor 10 years ago and what is standard today are quite different. Apple has been involved in creating three word processors - MacWrite, AppleWorks, and now Pages. We aren't talking about a new startup company here - we are talking about a software company that has created standards that other software companies follow. To suggest that Apple should be excused for leaving out a user friendly feature like selecting fonts and styles via the keyboard because Pages is a version 1 product isn't realistic.

Furthermore, the font dialog panel has been complained about from day one and Apple has done little to address those complaints. That Apple has attempted to address the issue of font selection so it is standard among all applications is laudable. But what we have so far isn't very well done. Pages compounds that by its inability to assign keyboard shortcuts to styles - it cannot even be done using a macro program like QuicKeys or through AppleScript. Or through AppleScript! Imagine that - Apple releasing a product that doesn't even use its own technology!

No, I don't think Word is a paragon of user friendliness but at least MS made a serious attempt to make Word more Maclike with Word 98 and jumped in to support Apple technologies. And no, I don't think Pages is unusable. Word will be my default for the coming year but I'll continue to use Pages quite a bit when its strengths trump its weaknesses.

And finally, I am so hard on Pages because it is so very close to being great. But it has some foibles that will surely be corrected in version 2 and it has some lapses which - as I've already mentioned - are mind numbing.

Word and Pages are in fact two very different apps. If you are new to Macintosh, this is kind of a confusing time to figure this all out. Word is a word-processing app, albeit one that has become bloated and unweildy over the years. It's only real value is in communicating in business, with people who can't handle any other app. Word-processing hasn't changed.

Pages comes at the task of creating a page of text from a very different ange. You are meant to replace the designs and text you find with your preferences.

And a Pages document is not really a document. The metaphor of a sheet of paper is . . . history. A Page doc is a package, and you can view the contents of any package using your contextual menu. Pages primarily relies on xml for its text. Thus, it is an app, yes it makes all kinds of documents . . . but it is really geared toward the future of the web, besides being incredibly more flexible and fast. It may or may not fill your word processing needs. If I were you, I'd sure try, though. Whatever problems are croppping up now, with Pages, will be fixed with every new release. That is never going to happen with Word.

Or try the more modest wp apps for the Mac: Nisus Writer, Mellel or even Mariner Write, which is exactly what word processing has always been.

And good luck!

Maybe Word is forced to have more features, which makes it "better" for some.

Think about it... Word is Microsoft's product, and every Mac version of Word is probably modelled after some Windows version. Does Windows have a bunch of system-wide tools, such as the Font Panel, spellchecking, dictionary and so on? No...

Alright, now to Pages. Does Pages need all of the features that Word provides? Not really... OS X does the rest! In the end, Word and Pages turn out to be very similar programs that are capable of very similar things, on the Mac. Now if you put Pages on Windows XP (which doesn't have the built-in features that the OS X has, right?), it'll be like a boat out of the water... and Word... well, it'll be Word.

That's my opinion.

If what you want to do is write fairly common letters and reports, Word works very well. It is faster than Pages, at least at this point, for some things such as tables. It has some important features such as mail merge.

What it doesn't handle well is page layout. Placing graphics and text in an artful way is possible but rather difficult. Pages does that better.

I think that pages can be improved; in particular, it can be faster. It is a cross between a desktop publishing and word processing application. It is designed to produce various types of graphic media. We'll see what happens whenever 2.0 is released. I think that a version 2 will give us a very good idea of the direction Apple is taking.

My opinion on this subject:

Pages is nice for desktop publishing functions, but it's slow. I couldn't imagine writing a long document in it--I found it disconcerting to be typing much faster than letters were appearing on the screen. For pure writing of a long document, I find that Word is better. Word also has bookmarking, indexing, automatic bullets and numbering, many differing pagination formats, and other ways to treat text that I don't think exist in Pages. These things are not "bloat," believe me, they're nice to have in a two-hundred page document.

OTOH, I recently prepared a job application in pages, and it's true, you can do some beautifully formatted work much easier in Pages than in Word. Pages would be my tool of choice for work that requires attractive formatting.

It all depends on the use, and I'm happy to have both.