I have a Pages document that I wish to export to plain text. I open the Export dialog, select plain text, then save to my desktop. The file is empty. I can export to PDF successfully, but not to plain text. I've tried this on two different Mac with the same result.
MacBook Pro (2017 – 2020)
There is nothing in your original post about a table. Pages does not export tables to plain text. It doesn't even have built-in features for converting tables to text and the obverse in place — like MS Word or LibreOffice Writer possess.
What you can do. Select all of the table rows and columns in Pages and then copy/paste into a blank plain text (format menu : Make Plain Text) TextEdit document. Or the same paste event into any plain text editor such as BBEdit.
Pages underlying design principal was to be a consumer application without all of the bells and whistles of modern word processing applications like MS Word. Has absolutely nothing to do with quality control on your not being able to export table contents to plain text.
If your table is small, you can select the table contents, copy to the clipboard, insert a Text box, and then paste into that Text box to receive tabular text data.
There is nothing in your original post about a table. Pages does not export tables to plain text. It doesn't even have built-in features for converting tables to text and the obverse in place — like MS Word or LibreOffice Writer possess.
What you can do. Select all of the table rows and columns in Pages and then copy/paste into a blank plain text (format menu : Make Plain Text) TextEdit document. Or the same paste event into any plain text editor such as BBEdit.
Pages underlying design principal was to be a consumer application without all of the bells and whistles of modern word processing applications like MS Word. Has absolutely nothing to do with quality control on your not being able to export table contents to plain text.
If your table is small, you can select the table contents, copy to the clipboard, insert a Text box, and then paste into that Text box to receive tabular text data.
Thank for the response VikingOSX.
Personally I don’t consider it “bells & whistles” to export a table; but be that as it may, the export dialog should contain a note stating this limitation of the export function. They shouldn’t surprise users. (And, yes, I copied & pasted the table into BBEdit.)
The document I wished to convert to text was a table — a single table. As a test, I created a document that didn’t include a table. That document exported properly. I then added text lines above and below the table in the original document. When I exported it to Simple Text, only those new lines were exported.
It appears Pages can’t export tables.
I guess the Apple programmers never tested that function. Doesn’t speak well of their quality control.
Your document should contain text and optionally images. I just exported a four page document to plain text without any issues on macOS Sonoma 14.4.1 and Pages v14.0. Repeated that with a Word document opened in Pages with same success.
It took Apple 11 years to re-introduce non-contiguous text selection in Pages v14.0. You expect too much for the product team to put warning caveats in the Export panel. That might take awhile longer…
Pages: Export to Plain Text (MacBook Pro & Sonoma 14.4.1)
