Thinking of switching to iWork/Pages, have some questions..
Hello..
I am a longtime Office user from my PC days, and am looking at purchasing either iWork or Office 2008 and I have some questions.
I've downloaded both the trial for iWork and for Office 2008 and am (literally) playing w/ both right now to get a feel for how they work. Office is like a new-old glove and iWork feels radically different and much more simplistic.
a) I do a lot of word processing (lecture notes and reports) and I like the way Pages handles graphics along w/ text; it sort of reminds me of Pagemaker. When I save a document in Pages, I notice that I can also export the file to Word and PDF (nice!). When I save a document in Pages, I notice the file sizes are on average a little higher than those in Word 2008 in DOCX format. For instance, I created a file in Pages and just put one single sentence at the top, saved it, and it came out around 50k; I did the same in Word, and noticed it came out around 12k. My concern is if I start blowing out 20-30pg documents, it seems that the Pages format is a little more bloated than DOCX. I noticed the same thing in Numbers too. Any input on this?
This may belong in the Numbers forum but I'll ask anyway. I opened a 25k 1 page .XLS file in Numbers and it looked fine, so I decided to save it in the numbers file format. The size of the file ballooned to 500k under the Numbers format.
b) I cannot for the life of me find an autosave feature in Pages, Keynote, or Numbers--is it non-existent or am I just blind? 😟
c) How well does Proofreader stack up against the Grammar Checker in Office? I've been playing w/ Proofreader and it seems to work ok as far as I can tell, but I haven't really used it at length to make a full assessment.
d) One thing I've done a LOT of in Word is mail merge (esp. for envelopes). I have yet to play w/ Mail Merge in Pages, so I'm curious if you have used mail merge in Pages and if you have any input on it.
Thanks, in advance, for your input. I'm just torn right now between either switching completely over to iWork, or to just go with Office (which is my old tried/true suite).
JG
I am a longtime Office user from my PC days, and am looking at purchasing either iWork or Office 2008 and I have some questions.
I've downloaded both the trial for iWork and for Office 2008 and am (literally) playing w/ both right now to get a feel for how they work. Office is like a new-old glove and iWork feels radically different and much more simplistic.
a) I do a lot of word processing (lecture notes and reports) and I like the way Pages handles graphics along w/ text; it sort of reminds me of Pagemaker. When I save a document in Pages, I notice that I can also export the file to Word and PDF (nice!). When I save a document in Pages, I notice the file sizes are on average a little higher than those in Word 2008 in DOCX format. For instance, I created a file in Pages and just put one single sentence at the top, saved it, and it came out around 50k; I did the same in Word, and noticed it came out around 12k. My concern is if I start blowing out 20-30pg documents, it seems that the Pages format is a little more bloated than DOCX. I noticed the same thing in Numbers too. Any input on this?
This may belong in the Numbers forum but I'll ask anyway. I opened a 25k 1 page .XLS file in Numbers and it looked fine, so I decided to save it in the numbers file format. The size of the file ballooned to 500k under the Numbers format.
b) I cannot for the life of me find an autosave feature in Pages, Keynote, or Numbers--is it non-existent or am I just blind? 😟
c) How well does Proofreader stack up against the Grammar Checker in Office? I've been playing w/ Proofreader and it seems to work ok as far as I can tell, but I haven't really used it at length to make a full assessment.
d) One thing I've done a LOT of in Word is mail merge (esp. for envelopes). I have yet to play w/ Mail Merge in Pages, so I'm curious if you have used mail merge in Pages and if you have any input on it.
Thanks, in advance, for your input. I'm just torn right now between either switching completely over to iWork, or to just go with Office (which is my old tried/true suite).
JG
BlackBook 2.4Ghz, iPhone 3G 16GB (Black), 20" iMac 2.66Ghz, Mac OS X (10.5.3), Xbox 360 Nintendo Wii
