Hello,
I currently use word and powerpoint. I like what I see on Keynote. I am not sure of the advantage of Pages, except that it will most likely not crash as often as Word. I like the autotext feature in Word. I have looked at the materials on pages and have not found a similar feature. Am I missing it?
welcome to the Pages discussions. What is autotext? Is it the auto-completion of words you are typeing or the insertion of sentenses like macros? Both features are not implemented in Pages. There are some tools to do auto-completion.
Here is one:
"www.petermaurer.de/nasi.php?section=textpander"
I'm evaluating TextPander since some days and would like to second FrankBe's post -- TextPander looks promising. The current version is 1.2, it's donationware, and I can imagine more things to come if we are willing to appreciate Mr. Maurer's work.
One of the greatest advantages of Textpander is that the shortcut-expansion-"database" is an external XML-file (in /<user>/library/application support/textpander).
If you're using Word for Mac (vX or v2004), you should be able to read out your existing autotext-entries with AppleScript, change the result to XML, and import your entries into TextPander. Maybe you will have to puzzle a bit, but it may save you some work.
Oh, and of course there are three alternatives to TextPander (and Word's doc-based Autotext-feature):
(1) TypeIt4Me -- a veteran
(2) SpellCatcher -- another veteran *wich comes with a very flexibel AutoText-feature*
(3) Typinator -- ... is a newcomer like Textpander, native Mac OS X/Cocoa
All these products (incl. Textpander) work
systemwide in each and every application you like to have an autotext-feature.
Look at Versiontracker.com for user reviews, or google the products.
Happy evaluating, have a nice weekend.
Joerg
P.S.: Oh ... and forget Word, if you can. It's not worth to waste your time and productivity with this so called "industrial strength software".
