Pages 5 features checklist

PeterBreis0807 wrote:

More to the point is that, like most people who make excuses for Apple's moves, and think "the changes have their merits", it turns out they never used the thing in the first place.

Thanks for letting us know so we can weight your input accordingly. 😝

Why did I not really embrace Pages (and Numbers) all those years? Because all those years I was making excuses for Apple? That doesn't make any sense.

I did not embrace it because I had what you might call a gut feeling which I thought should have been somewhat obvious and universal. In that I considered it more likely that InDesign would be around in a form that fulfills my layout needs than Pages. I had thought the same about Powerpoint and Keynote, but Keynote was better enough that even if the then current version was its last one, it would still be worth it for me to use at that moment.

But if it makes you happy, yes, I think it ***** that Pages 5 has lost so many features, and yes, Apple screwed up this release in a big way, and yes, Apple's behaviour in regard to the Pages 4.x feature set is disappointing. But if such disappointments turned into bitterness towards Apple, I would have set my expectations too high. As long as I can prepare myself to some degree, I don't see the point of getting angry about things I cannot change.

When you right click an incorrect word (or any word for that matter) it shows the default OSX menu, which lacks many features including corrections. You must first highlight the word, then right-click it to get the pages menu.

PeterBreis0807 wrote:

Sekoya wrote:

Kenneth Collins1 wrote:

It's like removing a refrigerator and replacing it with a slick, modern, efficient dishwasher. Now everyone is rightly up in arms about how they are going to wash their dishes in a refrigerator.

They did not remove the refridgerator, they just moved it out of its prime spot and into a corner.

…behind the dishwasher which grabs your food and turns it into inedible sludge.

Fortunately we can still put the dishwasher back into the box it came in and keep using the refridgerator for the time being.

Kenneth Collins1 wrote:

I can't disagree with that. However, if you make software, put features in it, and sell it, your customers are going to use those features. Strange, but true. If you've done a good job, a lot of people will come to depend upon those features. Also odd, but also true. Like you, I also expected a new version to add things I didn't think of, but I never in my wildest nightmares imagined that Apple would remove almost the entire feature set. It used to be an easy-to-use tool to create great loooking documents of modest complexity, but now it is a tool for someone else to do something else somewhere else, and I'm left out in the cold.

After iOS 7, and this, I'm going to be very, very careful before I commit to Apple's software. I can't afford to invest a lot of time and effort only to have Apple whimsically pull the rug out from under me.

My main problem is that I need Pages 4.3's features. I genuinely do. I wanted to buy a new iMac this fall, but now I can't, because I can't install my most important software on it. I have to find another word processor and migrate all my documents to it before I can even think of buying an iMac. That's going to take a long time.

I'm pretty sure Migration Assistant will copy Pages 4.3 (or rather the whole iWork folder) over to any new Mac (the worst it would do is to place it into a 'incompatible software' folder). And I am not aware of any even only slightly major feature that was lost in the transitition from iOS 6 to iOS 7.

And I am sure you remember Steve's quote, that one should be very careful about adding any feature because taking away a feature is very difficult. And my general point is that it appears to me that Apple had not done a good enough job to win a lot of people over to iWork for the vast bulk of their layout/office needs. Where part of that job is to make people have trust into the at least the medium term viability of the application. Everybody that needed to work collaboratively (not concurrently) on Office documents with non Mac users experienced a lot of friction (incidentally, iWorks for iCloud might help a lot to reduce that friction). I think iWorks never reached enough critical mass among Mac users to become essential for Apple (in that it was considered a core functionality that fully maintaining was necessary at any reasonable cost).

We use iWork, and Pages in particular, in our business. We have 11 employees and generate dozens of different documents a day -- mostly from templates.

Before iWork we used AppleWorks. We switched to AppleWorks in 1998. Why? Because it did what we needed for a reasonable price. Keynote was great when it came out and we embraced it while still using AW6. We do some presentations but it isn't a daily thing.

When it was clear that AW was dead we carefully evaluated the options. Nisus Writer/Pro was going through the transition to OSX and the RTF format limits the program. It lacks some of the layout and list style flexibility that we wanted. Mellel, at the time, did not handle list styles particularly well, and although it is an intriguing app it lacked some polish. Mariner Write similarly just wasn't there.

Pages took a big step back from AW6 in terms of handling styles, but it added some great features, like the whole Sections Pages thing and placeholder text. No WP app handles list styles as well as AW5 did.

The reality is there aren't many viable options out there for business use on the Mac. If you only do word processing you have a few choices. If you do spreadsheets and presentations you basically have MS Office, iWork or one of the OpenOffice variants. MS Office, in my opinion, is poorly designed, overpriced bloatware. I haven't liked Word since 5.1a.

OpenOffice, LIbreOffice, and NeoOffice are all viable, but they are the epitome of bloatware by committee - they have everything and the kitchen sink. Plus, the interfaces are not good. They are all designed to mimic MS Office,,, and if you don't care for MS Office much... well...

Pages, Numbers, and Keynote exist partly because they have to. We used to have WriteNow, WordPerfect, MacWrite Pro, and FullWrite Pro -- just to name a few. It is sad that Pages in late 2013 is a less capable word processing application in many respects than MacWrite Pro was 20 years ago. 20!

Is it unreasonable that businesses like ours decided to standardize on iWork? Why not? Keynote has always been more intuitive to me than PowerPoint. Numbers did just enough. Pages had this tremendous templating support... I have played with the new Keynote just enough to know that it killed smart builds and has borked many of my presentations. That ***** but I can work around it I think. Numbers is probably fine as we really did not use it for anything too complicated. Pages, though, is our workhorse -- and there is no way we can upgrade as we depend too much on the features that have been killed.

So the iOS and iCloud versions are completely useless to us if we can't upgrade to the deskop version. Pages 4.3 is dead. At some point something OS related is going to break it and it will not be fixed. The big question for us is whether Apple is going to fix Pages 5 at some point... or whether we should ditch Pages entirely and go to something that while not perfect is better than Pages 5. Nisus, for our needs, was not better than Pages 4.3 -- but it is certainly much better than Pages 5. The only killer feature left in Pages as far as I am concerned is placeholder text in templates... and I can live without that, especially since templates can no longer really be shared off a server in a central location.

Apple really screwed up on this one.

Sekoya is being troll and his platitudes are not engaging honest discussion as to what we who have spent years relying on this product are supposed to do now.

For me, this is not just some 'fool's paradise'. This is not just a matter of a whimsical over expectation of a $20/free product. I have spent years of writing and research using Pages. I switched to Mac to get rid of Word which was a nightmare and crashing all the time. I bought an iPad to edit and view my documents away from the computer. I was not going to upgrade to Mavericks because everything was working, but yesterday Pages upgraded on my iPad, and everytime I opened up a document it reformated it. I felt I had to move to Mavericks to save compatibility. I relied on a specific workflow - now it's a disaster.

Personally, I have removed Pages 5.0 and reverted all my documents to 4.3. I spent $400 on an iPad that no longer is useful for one of the main things I bought it for - and I can't go back.

Yesterday I was a Mac 'fanboy' - today they will have to re-earn my trust. I joined this discussion to help me through this problem. Sekoya derailed it. He also derailed an honest movement to pressure Apple to do the right thing. This is my 'reality'. I've had enough of cavalier attitudes for one day.

I have gone to the App Store, gave pages 1 star and vented. I ask that others do the same.

PS - I would also suggest going to System Preferences/ App Store and dissabling 'automatically install app updates' or you find yourself in this same mess tomorrow.

Excellent suggestion, Kenneth. Is there a way to get Pages 4.x back!!??

BRILLIANT!

Austin Sloat wrote:

We use iWork, and Pages in particular, in our business. We have 11 employees and generate dozens of different documents a day -- mostly from templates.

Apple really screwed up on this one.

Yup, and does this surprise you?

Press Contacts:

Ryan James

Apple

ryanj@apple.com

(408) 862-5585

Lacey Haines

Apple

lhaines@apple.com

(408) 862-0985

Let these asshats know that the product is crap and not nearly as neat as they have written it up to be.

Uh, yeah. Pages has been around for 8 years - and each new version was a step forward until now. I know Apple does not have a great history of feature or product continuity. I've been Apple-only since 1988 -- so I've been there and done that...

The reality remains that if you aren't into sending dollars to Redmond options are limited.

BTW, I have licenses to Mellel, Nisus Writer and Mariner Write. I have LibreOffice installed. I've never been a fan of KoolAid. I liked AppleWorks better than Pages... but Pages 4.3 did many things very well.