softwater wrote:
DChord568 wrote:
I hardly need to point out that Word (part of MSOffice) fails to meet these criteria. Assuming its Libreoffice equivalent is built more or less the same way, it would fail as well.
Well, yes, you do actually, because that's a matter of opinion. Personally, I don't find Pages any simpler (or harder) to use than Word. Try removing all formatting, for example, from imported text, in Pages, or changing the dictionary language. The first is almost impossible without one of Yvan's scripts, and the second is awkward at best.
Some things in Pages are more difficult to achieve than they are in Word, and vice versa. Ultimately, Word is a far more complex program than Pages, in that you can do more with it, but that need not bother you if you don't want to use those features.
What is that you can do in Pages that you can't do in Word?
The short answer to this question is "Get work done without the application getting in the way of what you want to do."
To be sure, much of this is personal preference, but as someone who used WriteNow up until the moment Apple finally did away with the Classic architecture, I'm used to a lean word processing program that does the work that I routinely do.
It has long been my contention that 95% of Word users never use the majority of its features. The two examples you give, in fact, are pretty esoteric tasks that one would hardly be called upon to do on a routine basis. (If I had to do the former, I would Export the document as Plain Text and then reopen it.)
The longer answer to your question above is that Word's interface is butt-ugly and overloaded with choices that again, one rarely has to make in the course of routine word processing. I like Pages' Inspector; it's very clean and gets me exactly where I want to go.
I would also single out Pages' implementation of Tables as superior. To be honest, I almost never work in Word; if I receive a Word document I have to work on, I bring it into Pages, do the work, and then Export it again. The time it takes to do this is more than worth it. I bring this up because just now I did open Word 2008 (the latest version I have). I see the Tables feature has been improved from the previous version I'm more familiar with (which was truly awful). But it still doesn't compare with the overall ease of use I find in Pages.
I could go on, but I'll end by citing another poster's example of doing simple page layout (i.e., integrating graphics with text). I can't imagine doing in Word the things I’m easily able to do in this realm with Pages.
The bottom line is I shouldn't have to imagine it. I'm very happy with Pages, and as I've said, I use it every day of my working life. I would normally be an early adapter of Lion, but the forced Auto Save/Versioning has absolutely caused me to stick with Snow Leopard here at work. As I've also said, the prospect of teaching my far less-savvy co-workers (not to mention my Type A boss, who has zero patience for anything) what they now have to do to accomplish a simple Save As fills me with terror.
So the final answer to your question of "What can you do in Pages that you can't do in Word?" is "work easier, more efficiently, and in the way I've become accustomed to working for the past several years." I hold out hope, as you do, that Apple will eventually see the light and give us the option to disable Auto Save/Versions in iWork. If that doesn't happen, I'll stick with Snow Leopard for as long as I can, then I suppose switch to MarinerWrite or some other alternative. Word would be my very last choice.
