Pages as replacement for Word ?

I don't think that Pages is meant as a replacement for Microsoft Office or Word. If I were you I would go back to using Microsoft Word. I might be wrong, but I would say that Pages is more of a creative style document editor and less of a office productivity word processor.

Jan,

With all due respect to the previous poster, I've found Pages to be an excellent replacement for Word, and so do many, many other people in this discussion group. You mention that your documents are mostly text, so there's no reason Pages can't handle those Word documents. I've had great success getting Word docs from colleagues, editing them in Pages, then sending them back.

If you don't want to use Word any more, it's easy to open any Word doc in Pages. In the Finder, just highlight the doc, do a command-I (Get Info), change the Open With to Pages, and then click the Change All button. Now when you double-click on a Word file, it will automatically open in Pages. If you don't want all Word docs to open in Pages, don't click the Change All button.

Unfortunately, it's not as easy to go in the other direction. As of version 2.0.1 of Pages, when you do a Save of a document, it will save it as a Pages doc, and there's nothing you can do to change that. There is no Preference that will address this issue. In order to save a doc as a Word file, you have to Export it, and you have to do that each time you want to save it. It's silly. It's a hassle. But there it is.

-Dennis

Since buying my first Mac, I have never had any need for any Microsoft applications, and iWork ‘05 has easily replaced Word, PowerPoint and Publisher for me. I understand where you are coming from in terms of the hassle of having to constantly convert file formats between computers. However, for the few Microsoft Office files I have to deal with, I find NeoOffice (free) very nippy for opening, editing and saving all the common Microsoft Office files. The downside being that NeoOffice isn’t currently Intel compatible, although its ‘mother’ office suite ‘OpenOffice’ is, but requires X11 which can be a bit of a hinderance in terms of performance.

I have been using NeoOffice for years as a replacement for MSOffice. I find it an excellent, AND FREE, replacement.

I frequently have to rewrite / review minutes, charters and legal docs and receive all of these in .DOC format. Since I do not wish to buy a $700 word processing program, I looked for a free and compatible alternative to MSWord that still has the "show and hide changes" feature.

I've never been dissappointed.

G Lacy

I think you are right that it would work as a replacement for some people, myself included. Reading the post though It seemed a simpler solution for the user to continue using Microsoft Word since it's an easier fit in the users workflow, especially if the user already owns the software. I don't see Pages getting any of the changes the user would like to see until the next version.

From my own limited experience with Pages~Word interaction:

A. As you've seen, it's totally painless and transparent on the incoming end. Word documents open, quickly and simply and with most formatting retained. That's a plus which you don't even need if you work primarily with the text bodies.

B. You don't want or need to save it in Word or any other format as you're working on it. The intermediate saves are just for you and your WIP, so you will/should just be using the standard Save dialogue and saving in/as Pages.

C. You do have to export the finished product but, really, that's nothing more than a Save dialogue with a few extra mouse clicks and I just don't find it to be all that onerous.

D. If you do, I suspect that the whole exporting process could easily be automated via either an AppleScript or Automator.

E. In the meantime, there's nothing at all wrong with your idea of providing alternative formats for saving, perhaps as part of a re-designed "Save As ... " selection. Make sure you forward your ideas and suggestions via the Pages Feedback link.

Jan,

Pages can't replace Word, but it compliments my toolbox very well. Here are a few reasons why it can't replace Word on my computer:

1) The requirement of converting and exporting will never go away. Not being able to save Word docs natively is a hassle.

2) Pages is slow on my Mac Mini, which only has the minimum display memory (32 meg) but far surpasses all other requirements. The typing lags annoyingly with zoomed views over 125% or with larger documents. The latest updates have failed to fix this.

3) Pages simply cannot open some Word documents. It consistently unexpectedly quits with certain Word documents people have sent me.

4) There are a number of tiny features or conveniences Word offers me but that Pages lacks: a superior auto-correct, WYSIWYG font menu, the ability to password protect a file, the option to match destination formatting when pasting, excellent speed, easy compatibility with standard Avery labels, proper mail merge, the ability to view 3 or more pages across my monitor... Pages can do comments, but cannot do Track Changes, which is a feature I need sometimes...

Word 2004 with the latest update (11.2.3) is extremely stable (on my system) and is a very fine word processor. (Word X was horrid.)

I used Pages 1 almost exclusively in lieu of Word for a year but returned to Word when Pages 2 came out because of poor display performance and feature wishes that never happened. I deliberated a LOT because I generally want to move away from Microsoft. I appreciate the insights of other expert Pages users on here such as Peggy, FrankBe or DennisG and you'll find a lot of support for Pages in these forums, naturally.

Fortunately for me it doesn't have to be "either/or" and maybe for you it doesn’t either. Since I still have Word I will continue to use it. I have a total of 9 Pages files remaining on my computer because Pages does a truly superior job at placing graphics. I would never choose Word over Pages for designing cards or a brochure. Pages makes excellent publications but, for me, is far from being a Word replacement.

I wasn't too happy with Neo Office. After several strange quits I gave up on the program. Open Office, the updated version is much more stable for me.

Pages is really a hard app to pin down. I would define it as its own entity:
A Word Processor with excellent layout capabilities. As far as replacing Office it is missing:

A Spreadsheet app.
More flexible mail merge.
Custom bullets
Greater customizability of Word in many areas

It is not a Word-killer but is certainly enough for most of us. Its layout capabilities are much more intuitive and fun to use than either Word or Publisher and includes some advanced features such as transparency, found in pro-level apps.

Pages is excellent at opening Word apps. I am sending files back and forth to a Word for Windows user.

Kurt

I concur 100% at least as of now. Although I am semi-new to the Mac world of products. Pages is a great program in and of itself. But, it has yet to answer my call of a true replacement for Word. Particularly for many of the exact reasons mentioned above.

If someone has come up with a way to create a list of mailing labels by drag-and-drop method, out of Address book - I would greatly appreciate any thoughts.

Thanx,

-Al-

MBP Mac OS X (10.4.6)

Al,

I have recently switched from MS Word to Pages and within the last couple of days have been looking over the user guide for Pages (yes, I know it's 250 pages long). But there is a great section in there about mail merge and using drag and drop from the address book for labels and envelopes. I set up two envelope templates and used drag and drop from the Address Book and exclaimed, "Golly Gee Whiz - this is GREAT!" I've messed with mail merge in MS Word and, in my opinion, Pages is far simpler and intuitive to use. So, check out the User Guide Chapter 10.

Art

I've been trying to use Pages more and more, moving away from Word as much as I can. For strictly word processing, I find either one is fine, but I know all of Word's quirks and I'm just learning Pages' quirks.

Some of the features you mention are missing from Pages, like password protection. As for 3 pages at a time viewing, I can see 4 pages at a time on my monitor if I make 'em small enough, but only 2 pages across. Do you mean 3 pages across? My monitor is not big enough to be able to do that anyway.

But you mentioned that there was no way to paste and match the destination formatting. What about the "Paste and Match Style" command on the Edit menu. For me it does exactly what you're talking about.

If I'm going to need to use track changes, I'll go to Word. I almost never use autocorrect, and it's usually the first thing I turn off, or at least uncheck all the defaults, because I tend to find it extremely annoying.

Overall, I find that Pages is excellent for a lot of things, but does miss a few of Word's features. Pages templates model are a heck of a lot easier to use functionally than Word's, and I now have a bunch of templates I use all the time. Also, I find that Pages' integration with the address book is very nice.

Mark

Pages solves a huge Word problem, which makes me love the program -- lists. I don't know how many hours I've wasted toying with Word's lists. They easily get whacked out, showing the wrong numbers, get misaligned, etc. Pages' lists just seem to work.

With that said, I still use Word a ton because of two reasons:
1. Compatibility issues--I'm now a teacher (after being a web developer for a design firm for 7 years) and constantly have to send documents to students, etc. and I find it takes more time to make PDFs than to just attach the Word doc to an email.
2. The annoying printer problems--Pages refuses to automatically select my last printer used when I select "Print..." Instead, it seems to always show the default printer even though I have selected "Last Printer Used" in the Print & Fax Preferences in System Preferences. On top of that, it views every print as a change to the document and therefore asks whether I want to save the document changes when I close the newly printed file. That's annoying because I suddenly have to ask myself (especially when I have multiple documents open), "Did I make any unwanted, temporary changes to this document?"

I hope they'll solve these problems in the future. I'd love to use it full-time.

Jan I really think you should look at TextEdit which comes standard with all new Macs.

At first appearance it may look like a simple text editor but it is far far more than that. For a start it can read and save in .rtf and Word formats. It has an amazing amount of formating ability, some unfortunately not immediately accessable, but 98% of what you want is there.

For you doing Polish translation work it would be ideally simple and clean as well as very attractive on screen. You get all the power of Apple's Unicode, type and character selection, plus dictionaries/thesaurus etc.

OSX gives excellent universal support to applications like TextEdit through things called services which provide extra functionality like dictionaries or text clean up routines. I don't know how well Polish is supported as far as dictionaries etc. It will pay to look around places like VersionTracker.com for "Services".

Should you want more in the way of Word processing I can recommend Mellel which also has a great variety of dictionaries.

If Polish isn't immediately supported in Mac dictionaries, you may be able to transfer the contents of your MsWord dictionary. Most dictionaries are simply text files in a particular format. Find out what your source format is and copy it, if possible, to your target format. BBedit which is an extremely powerful Mac TextEditor could help here.

With that said, I still use Word a ton because of two
reasons:
1. Compatibility issues--I'm now a teacher (after
being a web developer for a design firm for 7 years)
and constantly have to send documents to students,
etc. and I find it takes more time to make PDFs than
to just attach the Word doc to an email.
2. The annoying printer problems--Pages refuses to
automatically select my last printer used when I
select "Print..." Instead, it seems to always show
the default printer even though I have selected "Last
Printer Used" in the Print & Fax Preferences in
System Preferences. On top of that, it views every
print as a change to the document and therefore asks
whether I want to save the document changes when I
close the newly printed file. That's annoying because
I suddenly have to ask myself (especially when I have
multiple documents open), "Did I make any unwanted,
temporary changes to this document?"

I hope they'll solve these problems in the future.
I'd love to use it full-time.

I am also a teacher. I have Word on my system and I do not find it that big of a deal to save as .pdf and then attach. I would save the Word doc first anyway. Second, if you use WebCT it prefers either HTML (which I grant you Word does better than Pages, or .pdf). I have stopped bothering with HTML and found that using .pdf works fine with students and Pages does that just fine. Moral: Having to save to .pdf has not been that big of an issue for me. Cheers!

Do you mean 3 pages across?

Yes, thanks. That's what I meant. I have one of Apple's 23" cinema displays and it's a shame to not be able to take advantage of it in Pages as I can with Word. It's very nice occasionally on longer documents to quickly scan through, viewing a larger number of pages across and down the screen. This is good for getting an overview of chapters, a quick glance at the layout of graphics, etc.

I liked Pages so much at first and find it to be a very elegant program! Seems all my concerns with Pages are about things I occasionaly use or find mildy inconventient. But they all add up.