Set .doc as Default File Type

No, obviously you cannot set MS Office to default save as a Pages document. MS Office dominates the working world. MS has no need to compete with Pages.

The point is that Pages is marketed as competing with MS Word -- at least that's how it was pitched to me last week at the Apple Store when I purchased my new MacBook Pro. MS Word is without a doubt the leading word processing program in the world, used by the majority of corporations, government entities, and employers. If Apple wants to directly compete with it, it should recognize the fact that Apple users need to work in a MS dominated world.

I don't particularly like MS and hoped I could do all my word processing in Pages. Based upon the representation made to me at the Apple Store, I fully expected that when I opened a word document with Word and continually worked on that document that all I would have to do is press Command-S to continually save my work on that document. But no, you have to constantly open up the Save As pane and check the box indicating you want to save your document as a Word doc. What a hassle! Apple, as innovative as it is, should have implemented the very simple but valuable feature of default saving as a Word doc.

Such a feature was especially important for me, as I work with Word documents every day at work and need to read and transmit documents in Word format. I bought iWork hoping I could avoid buying and installing a new version of MS Office on my new MacBook Pro -- I am not a MS fan. Unfortunately, the simple fact that Pages does not allow me to default save as Word document was a deal breaker. I was was forced to immediately go out and purchase the competing MS Office 2008 for Mac.

Pages is a fabulous program, and I will definitely use it to create documents meant for personal and home use. It integrates beautifully with the iLife programs and the graphics capability are wonderful. But there is +no way+ I can use Pages as a productivity tool for serious work that is meant to be used and shared in a world which uses and is dominated by MS Word.

torinogiorgio

torinogiorgio wrote:
No, obviously you cannot set MS Office to default save as a Pages document. MS Office dominates the working world. MS has no need to compete with Pages.

The point is that Pages is marketed as competing with MS Word -- at least that's how it was pitched to me last week at the Apple Store when I purchased my new MacBook Pro.

Once again, vendors where not saying what Apple write.
iWork is not here to compete against Office.
The weight of this "usine à gaz" is so big that no one may compete against it.
It's just a way to "work different".
As such a tool, it gives a level of compatibility with the odd beast (not a typo) but is not designed to mimic it.
If you want to default to Office formats, use Office.

I feel free to write that after posting here, in this thread, a script allowing every user to get what you describe:

fully expected that when I opened a word document with Word and continually worked on that document that all I would have to do is press Command-S to continually save my work on that document.

But of course to get it, being able to read is a pre-requisite. 😉

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE samedi 20 juin 2009 22:22:04)

torinogiorgio,

I can vouch that the pitch you got from the Apple employees also occurs here at several locations, so I assume it is not some errant behavior by a few rogue Apple employees.

They are obviously receiving training to say that. What Yvan is pointing at is the plausible denial of Apple's fine print which is usually phrased to suggest one thing but on closer examination contains an out clause.

That said, it is unrealistic to believe that Pages is a clone of MsWord, and a lesson to not believe everything you hear. Despite the earnest certainty of how they say it.

Apple is a large commercially successful corporation which has found its niche in marketing to people who would like it to be, as it presents itself, some kind of beneficent social movement.

I can tell you from 25 years experience, some of that with close commercial contact, that is not true.

Peter

PeterBreis0807 wrote:

They are obviously receiving training to say that. What Yvan is pointing at is the plausible denial of Apple's fine print which is usually phrased to suggest one thing but on closer examination contains an out clause.

It's really funny.
I never saw a vendor behaving differently.
They write carefully studied sentences which adult customers are supposed to be able to decipher.
I often gave examples.

"You may open Office documents" means that "you may open some Office documents and that the resemblance to the original will not be perfect."

"You may open AppleWorks WP documents" means that "you may open some AppleWorks WP documents and that the resemblance to the original will not be perfect."

I'm perfectly aware of that and if customers don't know that, it's that Ralph Nader worked for years with no results.

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE samedi 20 juin 2009 22:49:28)

When the customer asks pointed questions of Apple employees ("Geniuses"?) that the customer has to work with people who all use MsOffice, "Will iWork be a complete replacement?" and the Apple employees say "Absolutely!", where is the fine print?

I know! It's somewhere in the Read me file, inside the box, after purchase, or inside the 425mb download.

As any astute person +who has already seen+ it, would know.

But not apparently the unastute Apple employees, who seem to know less than every Apple customer is supposed to.

I never take what a vendor say as the truth.
When I enter a shop, I know what I want because I studied the products available from numerous sources.
They are printed ones called "magazines".
They are online ones such as the Apple web site.
You may check, there is no silly sentence like "Absolutely, iWork is a complete replacement?".

I never ask a vendor "is this product able to do this or that"?
I just ask: "is this product available and which is your price for it"
When a vendor try to explain that this product is not the one I need and that he may send me an other one which is exactly what I need, I leave it instantaneously (when I am in a good humour because if I am out of trim, I'm perfectly able to tell him "son of a b..ch).

I repeat, customers are supposed to be adults. Aren't they allowed to vote ?

As you seems to think that downloading the trial version is silly, may I say that it's a huge service which we would be foolish to drop.
I never buy a product without using the trial version during its full period of life.
And when I want to help someone about a program which I don't own, I apply trickery to be able to use the trial for a new period. Only Adobe products are seriously protected against this practice.

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE samedi 20 juin 2009 23:21:00)

My! (Chin on hands, eyes wide) You're wonderful Yvan!

KOENIG Yvan wrote:
I never take what a vendor say as the truth.

Let's get this clear for posterity Yvan.

Are you saying the Apple employees are consciously lying?

Or that they simply believe what they have been told?

Something the customer is not supposed to do?

Also have the Apple employees read the "obvious-to-everyone" clause in the Read me file?

If they have not, why not? Is it not their job to know this?

If they have read this and they know what it says why are they contradicting this in statements to customers?

If they are doing this at not one but many stores, how is this escaping the notice of Apple management?

Is Apple management unaware of the "obvious-to-everyone" clause in the Read me file?

Is Apple management unaware of what their employees are saying?

If they are not, why not? I am and so are their customers.

If they are, why are they persisting with a sales pitch that is not true?

A lot of questions, but I am sure you have all the answers Yvan as you fully inform yourself on all these matters.

Are you fool or are you playing the fool ?

I never wrote about a read me file but about the License which every user is urged to read during the install process.

I don't know if vendors read it or don't.
As far as I know most of them never use the product which they are selling.

Some of them states that AppleWorks can't be used on recent machines, which is perfectly wrong.

No Apple printed documents states how this old program behaves on these recent machines.
Those vendor are responding something simply because most of the time they refuse to recognize that they are ignoring the true response.

The job of a vendor is not to tell the truth but to sell products.
They do their best to sell these products.
Some are fair enough to don't cross the yellow line between the incomplete truth (the one used in the printed documents) and the real lie. Proving that somebody said a lie is difficult if the exchange is not recorded so they play with the limits.

It's not specific to Apple vendors.

Every vendor do that.

For sure, the management know that and live with that.

I am unable to do and when I discovered that a vendor was playing the game this way in my pottery workshop, he was fire in the hour and I never replaced him. It was in 1976 and from this date thru 2003/12/31 there was no vendor in the shop, only my wife or me and we didn't lie.

I wrote here many times that customer is a full time job.
We must learn the rules: the vendor is not here to tell the truth, he is here to sell the products which he has on the shelves.

When blue cars are available but red ones aren't, you may be sure that blue car have many qualities but the day they will be missing, curiously, the red cars will get those qualities.

To be vendor requires to be cynical, being customer requires to be skeptical.

Have you ever look at printed materials about housing ?
You will never read that this house is what we call in French a "trou à rats". You will read that this house "a ** caractère".
Some days ago, my daughter was making shopping for a new dress. She was often said "this dress is perfectly in the newest fashion" which, from her point of view means "she is perfectly awful".

When the first MP3 machines appeared their sound was described as "quite perfect" and I claimed in forum that it wasn't music but just "noise". I received responses which where near to insults.

Now that delivered machines offer a 'better' level of quality which I translate as "not so awful reproduction" it's the new level which is "quite perfect" and the other become an horror.

Look at the didital camera market.

Whe Apple delivered QuickTake it was perfect.
When xxx delivered a two megapixels machine it becomes the perfect system.
When xyz delivered a three megapixels machine it becomes the perfect one and others where sent to the trash of history.
At this time the machines in the 24x36 ranges claim 15 MegaPixels and the race is not finished.
What was good yesterdays becomes bad today to make place to new products.

There is no company trying to be useful. They try to sell most of there products.
This is true for Microsoft, it is true to Volsvagen, it's true for my baker, for my butcher and of course it's true for Apple.

Move down from your cloud. We aren't is a perfect world in which everybody is beautiful and fair.
We are in a world of wolves and we must take care that no one is biting our hands.
If I am so often on forums, it's because I dislike the true world. Here, we have nothing to sell. We just give what we know. The only difference between us is the volume of our knowledge and the way we distribute it.

As you may see, your rants got a result: insomnia which was far from me since months strikes again.

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE dimanche 21 juin 2009 02:42:43)

As usual Yvan I rely on you to show us who is the fool.

Your +"obvious information"+ has moved from the tenuously visible Read Me file into the, only-visible-when-you-install, Licence.

How many layers deep into discovery are we now? This obvious declaration!

It would seem also from your last post that you believe Apple either lies to its customers or ******** its employees lying to its customers. This seems to be at odds with your constant assertion to believe Apple statements and accept them as the final word on all things Apple.

The problem with accepting as natural and acceptable, misstatements and lies is once it begins where does it end?

Which do you believe and which do you not believe? Especially when you look a representative of Apple in the eye and ask a direct and unambiguous question and receive a direct and unambiguous answer.

You also seem to have difficulties with simultaneously berating me for doubting Apple and now lecturing me to be a +"full time", "skeptical" customer.+

Which is it? I don't know what to do! So much good advice for this foolish one. 😉

Peter

As far as I know most of them never use the product which they are selling.

This is correct. Management and marketing does not as a rule know how to use the product it is managing and marketing.

Some are fair enough to don't cross the yellow line between the incomplete truth (the one used in the printed documents) and the real lie.

This is correct. The documentation does not spell out the product paradigm and then spell out the degree to which the product deviates from the paradigm.

Move down from your cloud. We aren't is a perfect world in which everybody is beautiful and fair. We are in a world of wolves and we must take care that no one is biting our hands.

This is correct. The trouble with the position posted by Yvan is that Yvan persistently posts that fundamental flaws in software product are not important and so a software publisher should be left to sell fundamentally flawed product.

With best wishes,

Henrik Holmegaard
would-be technical writer

Henrik Holmegaard wrote:
This is correct. The trouble with the position posted by Yvan is that Yvan persistently posts that fundamental flaws in software product are not important and so a software publisher should be left to sell fundamentally flawed product.

No trouble at all.

A software publisher is free to publish what it decide to do as far as it doesn't hurt customers.

Customers are free to buy or to drop the proposed products.

Of course customers are also free to disagree with your definition of a "fundamentally flawed product".

I think that there is a huge design flaw in Numbers but it's not the same kind of flaw than your obsessive one. Who is right ? Neither you nor me are able to respond seriously to this question.

What would be a fundamental flaw for a product targetting professional users is perfectly acceptable when the target is not this one.
Most of the users doesn't need a tool able to search in a PDF.
Most of them doesn't need a CMYK color model.
Most of them doesn't need a fast spreadsheet but an easy to use one.

The software market is not a monolithic but a segmented one.

Apple offer two set of softwares:
the "wide market" one named iApps
and the professional one named proApps.

iWork is one of the iApps.
As Apple guys aren't fool, they don't spent bucks to compete in the pro Market for such a product.

If you don't understand that, you are out of range.

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE dimanche 21 juin 2009 15:17:01)

PeterBreis0807 wrote:
As usual Yvan I rely on you to show us who is the fool.

Your +"obvious information"+ has moved from the tenuously visible Read Me file into the, only-visible-when-you-install, Licence.

Re-read what I wrote.
I never wrote about "Read-me" but about "License".
I wrote several times that we are urged to read it during the install process.

My first post about that stated:

Re: Previous versions of Pages can't read current Pages format?
Posted: Jun 19, 2009 4:48 AM in response to: PeterBreis0807
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PeterBreis0807 wrote:
Which would be the only way someone who has limited contact with Apple would chance upon it, as this Easter Egg has remained unannounced to my knowledge. The first I heard of it myself was when it was mention in these forums only a few days ago.

I'm just one of the fools which take care _to read the license_ of the product which they are using.

This license states:

2. Permitted License Uses and Restrictions.
A. Trial License. If you are using the trial version of the Apple Software, this License allows you to install and use the Apple Software on a single Apple-labeled computer for the sole purpose of evaluating the Apple Software. The trial version of the Apple Software expires thirty (30) days after the date you first launch the Apple Software. Upon the trial expiration, you may continue to open files in the trial version of the Apple Software, but you will not be able to save, print or exportfiles.

No need to have special access to Apple to know that.

Just behave as an adult customer 😉

*You responded:*

+Re: Previous versions of Pages can't read current Pages format?+
+Posted: Jun 19, 2009 5:13 AM in response to: KOENIG Yvan +
+Click to reply to this topic Reply email Email+

+So where did you find this fine piece of gumpf?+

+Before, or after the download?+

+Please give a complete path to locating the file, as well as exact location of the text within the file along with the how, what and where that you knew to look for it.+

+How much effort is it reasonable to ask to simply read a file?+

I responded:

Re: Previous versions of Pages can't read current Pages format?
Posted: Jun 19, 2009 6:36 AM in response to: PeterBreis0807
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(1) The license is displayed during every install and update process and we are urged to read it before proceeding.

(2) As far as I know, in every Apple software sold by Apple (iWork, iLife, proApps), the license is available thru the menu

theApp > About theApp > License Agreement



(3) _the really curious users_ may find it in the application's package:

Macintosh HD:Applications:iWork '09:Pages.app:Contents:Resources:License.pdf

_But, I know, reading the license during the install process is too tiring._

So, most of the users are ignoring their rights and their obligations.
The result is that they ask on the forum if they may use the bought license on several machines.
Remember, you don't buy an application but a license to use it.

An other result is a well known user contesting the terms of the family license which he had not read. I apologize: I have a quite good memory 😉

So, please, the next time you will install or update an application, even if it is a freeware, a shareware or a ********* one, _read the license._

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE vendredi 19 juin 2009 15:36:56)

You responded:

+Re: Previous versions of Pages can't read current Pages format?+
+Posted: Jun 19, 2009 3:10 PM in response to: KOENIG Yvan +
+ Click to reply to this topic Reply email Email+

+As usual Yvan you are so determined to get to the correct conclusion you don't get that you have to:+

+1. Know there is a trial version available+

+2. Know that it is useful+

+3. Know where to obtain it+

+4. Download a 452Mb file (at which point most people would be saying "No! thank you.")+

+5. Know to look+

+6. Hunt through the legal gumpf to find it+

+Nobody would call that easy except you.+

+…and it is dead useless to someone who has received a file they can not open.+

+Still it makes a great excuse.+

The OP is using Pages '09.
So he installed it.
So, it was urged to read the license during the process.
This one states:


I'm not asking you to do complex or intricate tasks.

Doing our customer job gave us the needed information:

the free trial version may be used on the long time as a iWork documents viewer.

You missed it, it's not a crime. But don't rant that it's an hidden feature.

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE dimanche 21 juin 2009 15:32:32)

Yvan you are confusing your threads.

The O.P. you were referring to was in an entirely different post and as I repeatedly pointed out to you there, but you keep refusing to acknowledge, the problem was with the recipient who did not have the necessary software. A recipient who is highly unlikely to stumble upon the dubious legal clauses you keep referring to.

How many times can I bold the word?

I am tired of going over that one over and over again.

The point where we diverged in this thread was at torinogiorgio's post.

I have personally witnessed what he has witnessed over several different stores, many times.

Which speaks louder? The direct face to face communication with Apple staff, along with the advertising and marketing, or a deeply buried escape clause *only visible if you know where to look* in the software after you have committed to it?

An escape clause which would very likely be pronounced invalid under the laws of my and many other countries.

Peter

btw Apple does not have an escape clause covering the bad PDFX-3 files Pages produces, and it took a lot of persistence to get final acknowledgement of the problem here in these forums.