pages not working in catalina

Hi, trickey33.

Sorry to hear you're having this problem with your iMac and Pages.

As I understand the situation, you now have a current version of Pages installed on the Mac. This was recently downloaded form the App Store. But you still cannot open old Pages documents that have been transferred from the old iMac.

Your question: "How can I transfer old pages data to new mac so I can carry on using pages on new mac?"

If you're referring to the appliation, you cannot use the old Pages application at all on the new iMac. There is no work around for that. You must use the current version that you have recently downloaded from the App Store.

Does Pages not appear to launch and run properly on the new iMac?

Can you create new documents with it on the new machine?

If the question is how to transfer the documents from the old iMac to the new, you could use an external disk drive and simply copy the old docs onto that then connect the drive to the new iMac and get to work.

OR you could connect the two computers and use Target Disk mode on the old machine. For this you would need a thunderbolt to firewire adapter and a firewire cable.

Ref: Transfer files between two Mac computers using target disk mode - Apple Support

On a newly purchased Mac, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are pre-installed, but inactive. You must first launch the Mac App Store application in your Dock, sign-in to the Mac App Store with your Apple ID, and then click on your user name in the lower left corner of the Mac App Store. That will open a new screen which is effectively the old Purchases tab prior to Catalina, and there you can choose to activate the current Pages, Numbers, and Keynote.

Once the first paragraph is done, you should be able to use these applications normally, without defaulting to their iCloud equivalents. Pages v8.2.1 (current as of 2020-03-19, can open Pages '06, '08, '09, Word .doc/x, and RTF documents. There is a caveat that some features in the Pages 'YY versions are not implemented in Pages v8.2.1 and documents using templates based on those unsupported features may not open in the new Pages.

There are dedicated support communities for Pages, Numbers, and Keynote for Mac that are available to you.

There are also online support (and user guides) available for Pages, Numbers, and Keynote.

The first paragraph of my last post is Apple's standard procedure for activating Pages, Numbers, and Keynote preinstallations on new Macs. Since that apparently did not work for you, I suggest you take advantage of your free, 90 days of phone support, and contact Apple Support and let them work with you on this Pages activation issue.