Can't link text boxes anymore

One of the most bone-headed things I've seen Apple do (and I go back to a 2+).

Has anyone seen anyting in the way of a reply from anyone Apple associated?

Sheesh!

Apple has not promised anything on this.

Rate/review Pages 5 in the App Store is the best way of driving home the message.

Peter

Is there a way to use normal document flow in your own template in pages 5.2?

Sylvia

At the time of writing this there are over 11,000 complaints about this. If there are that many complaints how many people are annoyed about this? Apple you really need to reinstate this feature.

We are all just end-users like yourself here. To have Apple "hear" you you need to leave feedback for the Pages team using the link in the Pages menu and review & rate the new versions in the Mac App Store.

Apple what possesses you to wreck perfectly good software with awful omissions like this. Without the ability to link text boxes, Pages becomes useless to me. We will have to change our entire document collection to gDocs or Word now. It is really hard to express how angry I am at you right now. This change is almost as bad as the equally bad "Duplicate" instead of "Save as..." innovation.

Do you not actually use the software you create?

Many hours of re-work ahead of me now...

Alex,

Apple isn't here, and not reading this volunteer, user-to-user support community. Feedback on Pages v5 here.

If Apple used Pages internally, (my understanding is they use Office for Mac 2011) it would be a different product that what they have dumped on us as Pages v5.

Many individuals and businesses have finally ascertained that Apple is no longer serious about word processing, typography on the Mac, or document interoperability. It is a costly measure to migrate from Pages to Word document formats, yet the benefit is freedom of choice in word processing solutions, whether Office for Mac 2011 update 14.4.5, or the free, non-subscription LIbreOffice, or the forthcoming 2015 release of Serif's Affinity Publisher for Mac.

Same issue with the NON-linkable text boxes.

Trying to do a columned spreadsheet for a work project and found I could no longer link the boxes...

So now, when I have to add an additional item into the list, i have to cut the bottom item from one column,

and paste it to the top of the next, and follow through across the page. After several of these fixes,

and realizing I have MANY more to go, I decided to download an older version of the program.

Get with the program Apple... "If it AIN'T broke, DON'T fix it !!!"

I'm stunned that Apple STILL has not fixed this issue after all of this time. This was such a critical benefit to pages as a software tool, and Apple just decided to abandon it ... for what reason?

Who knows? They took out over 100 features as well and little has changed in 18 months so it is all rather moot.

Just rate/review Pages 5.5.2 in the Apple Store.

Peter

Seems that this question was answered some time ago (Oct 17, 2014 5:03 AM) here: How do you "un-unite" objects

While not directly asking the question, it does answer it. Here are some steps to help someone out.

To test this, try these steps

1. Create a document
2. Create two text boxes positioned anywhere on the page.
3. Paste some text that over flows the text box. You should see a [+] sign at the bottom of the text box.
4. Select both of the boxes. You should see the outline of each box appear when they are selected. I like to hold down the shift key while clicking on each box.
5. Open the "Format" panel by clicking the Format button (a paint brush) on the top right hand side of menu bar.
6. Click the "Arrange" tab
7. Click the "Unite" button at the bottom of that panel under the Group option.

Pros:

• The two are now linked
• Text flows from one box to the next

Cons: (One giant invisible bounding box is created around both text boxes which has some side affects)

• You CANNOT un-Unite them. Anyone have a solution for this?
• Individually resizing is difficult once united. You can re-shape them using 'Shapes and Lines' -> 'Make Editable'.
• The text boxes cannot be individually moved once united -- they are frozen in place.

21 months after Pages came out and you offer the same "United Shape as as substitution for linking".

Text flows within the shape, not between the boxes.

A united shape is not linking for a long list of reasons cited here and elsewhere.

Just use Pages '09 and get on with the job. You can not turn a sow's ear into a silk purse by sprinkling it with bit of glitter.

Peter

I totally agree. It's an awful feature the way it was done.

I didn't see any references (or I missed it) in this thread so I thought I'd at least post it up.

Cheers,

Bill

You are right Bill, it isn't in this thread but was put up as a solution in many others early on.

But really it doesn't work, you can't control the text, it only fills the shape from left to right, top to bottom and can't cross pages.

Apple clearly has tossed it in the bin, like so many other great features.

Pages used to be a very useful App, now it is a shadow of its former self, really incompatible and no place to keep your work if you value it all.

Peter

It's frustrating, but I just use the old Pages for my docs with text boxes, which is most of the time, and the new Pages—with it's irritating interface—for other documents.

erhggg