Outline View missing in Pages 5.0

Just figured it out. That was not intuitive. Its a double click on the bullet if you are wondering.

That is how you open/close things in Finder, so I guess it is a "Mac method".

Peter

I have been a PC user for a long time. I recently switched to Apple... love a lot of what the OS does...but some of the Apple stuff is just horribly inferior to the PC / Google / Microsoft world..

Word for Mac is SO FAR AHEAD of Pages it's not even funny.

I really like how easy it is to save basic docs to the cloud via pages then access it via my ipad... neat.

but I use outlining for a LOT of what I do at work. I am a trial attorney, and many witness statements / questions I plan to ask in court - I summarize them in outline format. Word does that nicey. the pages app appears to have NO real outlining feature.

that is really pathetic. that is a basic word processor feature...

as much as I love some of what apple does.. at times what they offer is "pretty" but functionally inferior. as much as I love some of what the icloud does.. I find myself still using Word on my imac and using google drive / gmail / and google calendar for my day to day stuff....

ical *****

the built in calendar in the iphone *****

now pages appears to suck...

c'mon apple. you market pretty stuff..now make yoru software match up to your hype...

Tell Apple. Here we are all just users. http://www.apple.com/feedback/pages.html

Review/Rate Pages 5 in the App Store.

Peter

btw Pages '09 (the previous version) has Outlining.

I still prefer to use Open Office for producing long documents.

The Outlining feature is semi-functional.

Perhaps there are other tricks that we have not yet figured out.

- The Outline view would be nice.

- A means to raise and lower sections would be nice.

Cut and paste works as a go around, especially if you double click on the numbers to select both them and the text.

Has anyone else figured out any other tricks?

I sent my thoughts to Apple on this, but they do not have a good track record of taking my brilliant suggestions on board.

This is a real screw up by Apple, and being a deduction from the existing features I can only suppose that they decided it did not get enough use to justify updating it. Perhaps pro users do not fit the profile of the market they want to address, but most of the features and therefore code used by the Outline tools are there, and always were. I have used some of the techniques described here in the past rather than the outline view.

But by doing this they have gifted business to Word and Omni, and at great cost to me and others no doubt based on comments here.

I dislike Word, a bloated piece of rubbish that is vastly overpriced. I would rather Apple forked Pages with a Pro version and charged a lot more for it than this. Tying together apps from hear and there and ending up with a kludge that almost works is a total pain and a recipe for mistakes and errors in translation.

Very disappointed, and likely to move away from Pages. If Pages had been rewritten to include tools to play better with an outliner so it was bidirectional without loss of information it would be fine. This is just stupid.

OK friends of outlining, here is a little report after upgrading to Yosemite, and Page 5.5/2.5 (iOS).

The good news is that Pages 4.2 (Pages '09) still works, as far as I can tell. I can open my old outlines and still work with them.

The bad news is Pages 5.5 still does not support Outline Mode.

Page 5.5 will still coexist on the Mac, and open 4.2 docs with a polite dialog that says outline mode is not supported.

One nice thing that happened a while ago was that iCloud would store 4.2 docs, and if you tried to open them with iOS Pages (the new one, which I unfortunately got stuck "upgrading" to), it would offer to make a new copy and let you read that in Pages iOS. Thus your original 4.2 doc on iCloud would not be corrupted to the new Pages. However, this functionality is lost in Yosemite, probably as Apple seems to be trying to maintain iCloud while bringing on iCloudDrive. iCloud docs are not longer retrievable in iOS, it seems. If you resave your 4.2 doc on the Mac to iCloudDrive, it is is not findable by iOSPages2.5. Apple pretty much forces you to upgrade to the new version of iOSPages when you "upgrade" to iCloudDrive, which you must do for the cloud features of Yosemite to work.

The wild thing is, all the templates of 5.5 are available in 2.5. In other words, you can do some pretty amazing layout things on an iPhone. As long as you don't want to outline, or read your outlined documents.

I still love outlining, and consider this lack, this killing, of outlining a giant step backward for Apple, the major thing that makes me want to give up on the whole environment. The fact that they offered it is what allowed me to get off Office, after 20 years.

To be clear, the minimum I want is to be able to create an outline on the Mac, and read the result when I am out and about. By outlining I do not mean something that looks like a type-written outline, but something where you can grab any part (header and following content) and move it around in the document. This includes being able to expand and contract text. It is a creativity tool, not a formatting tool.

I've given up on Word's clunky Outline and Omni-outliner which doesn't go anywhere. If you're serious about taking your writing from outline to publishable, whether it is an essay, a novel or a screenplay, don't fiddle about, get Scrivener http://www.literatureandlatte.com. It is designed for writers, not secretaries and when you're finished, you can compile it for any format you need, even Final Draft.

Likewise. I'll never move to Pages 5 unless Outline View is restored.

Not a perfect solution, but ever use Outline mode in Keynote?

If you started a list in Pages, you can copy and paste into the Outline View of Keynote. Or just switch to outline and start writing.

Double-click on the mini slide graphic to fold

Drag, move the slide icon or bullet point up of down for ordering. Left or right for indenting.

Tab indents.

Seems a decent solution that works for me.

I agree, outlining should be included in Apple Pages. I'm a sw dev and I think they sacrificed that feature for iCloud compatibility, I can understand the reasoning behind that. What we can do is to make some noise to get it included in Pages 6! Let's make some noise!

How do you come to the conclusion that Outlining has anything to do with iCloud?

It is just some programming.

Given well over 100 missing features and still lots of bugs in Pages 5 since its launch 15 months ago, good luck with getting Apple to do anything with an App they are now giving away.

Peter

Hi Peter, well, it's not about "some programming", it's got to do with releasing a complex software product on a new platform, serving millions of users, providing backwards compatibility and managing project complexities. 🙂 The iCloud (web based pages editing) has got eventually be javascript and as such the Objective-C based source code for Pages Outlining cannot be transported one-to-one. There are plenty of things you can't do in web based Pages that you can in desktop pages. My guess is that they just offed all the features that were quite difficult to pull of with javascript and didn't matter to most pages users, i.e. a tradeoff. That's how I would have done it. 🙂

Does anyone know if Apple plans on bringing the outline feature back in a future release? Inquiring minds want to know.