Pages 5 features checklist

I'd like to offer a hearty and warm congratulation to all who posted their rating/review on the Mac App Store. Pages is now down to a solid two stars and dropping fast.

Luckily I only opened a few documents in the new Pages. Saved these back to 09. Deleted Pages 5. Moved Pages 4 from iWork folder into Applications.. Now all back to normal. Did the same with Numbers. Of course this is only temporary as looks like Apple will discontinue support for Pages 4 in future, so now looking for replacement. Any suggestions or is it back to Word?

@jSimon0202

Yours are all good questions. I don't think anyone but Apple (and maybe not even them) knows the anwsers for sure, but based on past and current observations, I'll put in my 2 cents worth of guesses:

I'm willing to wait a bit before trying to migrate back to Word. I don't want to wait around too long and suddenly find Pages 4.3 inoperable in a new OS update.

I'm not aware of any time Apple has broken compatibility permanently for legacy software with a minor OS update. That means, worst-case scenario, you have about a year before the next big update to OSX throghout which time you can definitely expect 4.3 to keep functioning. You also have a couple months after the next version of OSX is announced and previewed in beta, before it is actually released, to find out / read about any compatability issues and make a switch before the update hits.

Another point of reference, Apple has still maintained compatibility for Final Cut Pro 7, despite the initially extremely unpopular FCP X being released and the subjuect of all subsequent updates.

Am I foolish for hoping for a "New Coke/Coke Classic" ending?

There are obviously a few of us unhappy with the change. Is that number large enough to make Apple even flinch and reconsider or am I sitting on the "mistreated and pouting train" - as the "its a new day train" is leaving the station?

That's an extremely unlikely / pretty much not going to happen scenario. One part of Apple's core principles is ruthlessly discarding old ways of doing things and moving on to the next thing, with no sentimentality towards what was done / used in the past. I've never seen Apple take a step back from the direction they've chosen because of public outcry. They have before abandoned the last step forward in favor of a different step forward (e.g. Mobile Me to iCloud), but never have I seen them revert to an older way of doing something. Just look at Apple Maps: that was a hugely embarrasing stumble, but they did not at any point take back the app, restore Google Maps as default, etc.

Again, a good model is the Final Cut Pro rollout which was almost identical to the recent iWork update: broken compatibility with previous projects, majorly stripped down interface, loads of missing features, no updates for the previous version of FCP for the users who still loved and used that version, rock bottom average reviews in the app store (1 1/2 stars average at one point, I think). Over the last year and a half, they have been adding back many of the missing features as well as new / different features, but all done within the context of the new way of approaching editing introduced in FCP X. So now FCP X has most of the critically important, previously missing features from FCP 7 supported, plus some different features added. But it is missing a lot of smaller features and niche capabilities that many people used and loved in FCP 7 and may never get those back. Many people have left FCP for other products over this time, but currently, the majority of users, even pro users, are fans of the current version of FCP X and in general perhaps even prefer it to FCP 7 (based on the 4 star average reviews). However, a significant number of people have moved on, or are still not happy.

This is what I consider the most likely outcome for iWork after 1-2 years of updates as well.

Any chance they will break off Pages 4.3 under a new name as mac based software for the specialist not the ios masses?

Some people speculate that there is a chance that Apple will introduce a "Pro" version of Pages / iWork, similar to the how they have iPhoto and Aperture, iMovie and Final Cut Pro, or Garage Band and Logic. This pro version of iWork would still not be based on Pages 4.3, but may give Apple more room to add niche capabilities, in-depth features, etc. I would guess that this has a 50% - 50% chance of happening. But I doubt it would come out in less than a year from now, since it almost certainly would be built on the same, compatible file format as iWork and the same basic application foundation. Since the new iWork is still pretty bare bones and buggy, I would be very surprised if a polished pro version could be built on top of that in less than a year.

Do we think there is a chance Apple will make a statement about future direction for those of us who need a robust, Mac based, word processor and DTP?

Unfortunately, not really. The most I believe we can expect is again, something similar to the statements about Fincal Cut Pro X, which could basically be summed up as: "We have heard the complaints from users, and we are working hard to address them in future updates as quickly as we can". But in terms of pre-announcing a pro alternative product, or going into any specifics about which features will or won't be restored, past experience indiciates this is so unlikely as to be almost certainly never going to happen.

Is moving to Word the best and most reliable option for those of us who loved Pages? Other software I am not aware of?

Since I have alsways had rather simple needs for Pages, I'm not a good one to comment on alternatives for the more advanced features. But I will say again that I think using Pages 4.3 will be safe and stable for at least the next year, and that might give you time to evaluate how many missing features are restored in Pages 5.0 and the trajectory of those updates. If after a year, those have been unsatisfactory, you should have plenty of warning before OSX is no longer compatible with Pages 4.3 since major updates go through a beta period. Of course, this is just guesswork based on past observation. Anything could change, and you should consider all perspectives before making a decision.

Two stars, you say! Good, down from three stars yesterday! And that's for all versions, not just 5.0.

Thank you Mythmatic! I greatly appreciate the feedback.

My wife, a best-selling novelist, came to me in angry tears last week to recover her latest manuscript and re-import it into Word after Pages 5 consumed all her bookmarks and left her with no way to navigate and edit a book-length manuscript that she was just completing after two year's effort. I was saved from the same fate only because I use Scrivener which is just a tad too - no, wildly - unintuitive for her to be comfortable with.

Adding to her - and my - dismay was that she had learned to love Pages 4. In features, intuitive interface and attractive aesthetics it was the perfect tool for her to compose a novel. And no, just reverting her to iWork '09 wasn't an answer. That Apple had given no real warning of all the changes and refused to even hint at how long it would support iWork '09 in future OS revisions and had already abruptly stopped supporting it in Pages 5 and had a proprietary document format that other programs couldn't convert scared her that she could wake up one morning to the discovery that all her manuscripts had become inaccessible with little or no warning from Apple, perhaps literally overnight through an automatic software update.

So I spent an evening relearning Word and Excel and discovered a little to my surprise that now that I'm more mad at Apple than I am disdainful of Microsoft - or now that the reality distortion field really has collapsed - that Office is a pretty amazing product. Ugly, not intuitive, but my goodness does it do wonderful things. Just the sidebar capability of using outline view, mass search displays, and comments as well as bookmarks to maneuver through long documents is a wonder. And the ability to construct a real outline and then fill it in to create a full work is invaluable.

An alarming aspect of all this is that with the abandonment of Bento and the intentional destruction of the professional capabilities in iWork in the past few months and with the failure of a really fully featured personal finance program to emerge for OS X, I realized today after transitioning back to Word and Excel that the only actual applications I use now from Apple are Safari, iTunes and the OS, while my wife doesn't even use Safari, but Chrome! And the plurality of what we do use is still from Microsoft or is third-party software that must be Windowed in VM Ware.

It’s an odd discovery in a household that has 12 Apple devices humming away in it - but as beautiful as the Apple ecology is, it really doesn’t directly serve the needs of a professional writer, or, I suspect, with the abandonment of iWork ’09, of most small businesses, much more enterprises. And despite Apple’s huge success in the past 5 years, the direct and third party support for real work outside the shaky example of the video editing realm seems to be becoming thinner and almost exclusively third-party.

Indeed, the desktop OS looks like it's becoming a sort of server or support base for a consumer entertainment-and-high-school-essay ecology directed mostly at small-screen devices. And given the severe downgrading of Pages it’s even a little hard to see who will be happy using it at the college level - writing a longer, annotated paper in it will be a chore.

What I’m - partly sarcastically - curious to see is who on Earth really uses Pages on the iPad (or iPhone!) to do anything at all. Will anyone really, really, really use its graphic capabilities to assemble colorful, but of necessity actually simple, garden club posters?

That sounds like a scenario that a person would willingly follow only if they had to make a financial choice between a real computer and an iPad, but couldn’t afford both. But the iPad is a premium product in a marketplace brimming with cheaper choices. So who is this imaginary person Apple thinks will prefer a Pages application crippled to work on an iPad? Even if Apple moves rapidly now to create displays and input strategies to essentially dock 64-bit iPhones into desktop functionality - why abandon real desktop capabilities in the meantime?

And why did Apple intentionally preserve iWork ’09 but make it so very difficult to lock documents to ’09? And why not warn people? And having preserved '09, why send repeated upgrade messages whenever I open an '09 application and if I try to remove the new applications and just use '09, why force down automatic upgrades back to 5 unless I disable all background upgrading in the App Store settings?

All this is unduly coercive - and also sounds a little as though Apple realized it would face and lose a class action suit if it crippled access to last week’s iWork documents so preserved the programs as a legal kludge that had little real support in the software.

Apple was one revision of iWorks and Bento, and perhaps one really good substitute for Quicken, away from having a fully featured multi-level ecology. Why it would choose to exclusively develop for only one end of the market and not both when it’s selling only high-end hardware is puzzling. And no, adding features back in a year from now isn’t an answer - it’s broken too much faith and proven too unreliable with people who actually use the software to make a living to earn back confidence after so severe a hiatus, even if that’s all it is - which I doubt. Or as my wife put it, she'll never trust Apple with one of her manuscripts again - the shock and fear of seeing what happened to her book before I recovered the draft was just too horrible.

An odd strategy and a badly executed one. If I were a market analyst, I’d be directly questioning Apple on why it’s adopted this strategy. In some unpleasant ways it reminds me of Sony twenty years ago. But then perhaps analysts are asking these questions, which is why Apple stock has become stagnant - for all the present success, it may look to the really cold-blooded like a bubble being too inflexibly developed on too narrow a base to support it.

It doesn’t bode well for personal computing that Microsoft with Windows 8 is making some of the same mistakes in trying to deal with small-screen devices but in a sort of complementary image of Apple: Apple is preserving a beautifully functional OS but destroying its applications while Microsoft has turned to a hideous OS but at least has preserved its application functionality - so far.

Anyway, so it’s back to MS Office. Ugly, but honest and not as coercive of the customer base. And my wife can still open manuscripts she created years ago.

Sad, sad, sad.

I agree with everything - almost - that Lackland has so eloquently expressed. I too am a professional writer, and I have used the page layout features in Pages 09 to build three successful commercially published books, all over 600 pages in length, and containing between 1200 and 1400 photos each. So I guess I could be termed a professional writer.

Like Lackland's wife, my heart jumped into my mouth the first time I opened one of my layout chapters (which included headers, text box linking, linked page numbering and other features that have been disabled in the new version). What an unfathomable mess!

Fortunately, I had backed up everything in Time Machine, so I immediately restored the files I had opened and I trashed Pages 5. Everything is back to a wonderfully powerful normality once again.

And so my point is that Pages 4.3 is so good, or almost so good, that I would not revert to Word as so many have suggested they are doing. Why would I give up the brilliant app that Pages 4.3 is? I feel secure that I won't have any nasty surprises because I have disabled automatic software updates and I am keeping a backup. For me, that provides enough security and confidence to be able to continue using Pages 4.3

My dream is that after a (hopefully very short) face-saving period of time, Apple will announce a new pro set of iWorks apps, based on the 09 set, that builds on the brilliance of iWorks 09, takes it to new heights with new pro features, and guarantees a future pathway for this wonderful software.

Like so many others, I will never be doing any serious editing on an iPad or iPhone, and I don't need to collaborate, but I do need features such as text box linking and all the other so-called "pro" features of Pages 4.3. That is why I bought a 27" iMac - it was not to be limited only to things I can do on an iPad.

What I am taking about here is my livelihood, not some whimsical bloody-minded preference.

Back to word…

I spent about 10 hours migrating some of my templates to word.

Now that I'm nearly ready to create all my future documents in Word 2011, there's no reason for me to use Pages anymore. I bet on the wrong horse. Sad but true. Even if apple announced a new Pages: Can I trust it will be there for, let's say another ten years?

I used pages to create educational worksheets. 5-10 new documents every week… This documents often stay, once used, on my harddrive for about three years until I need them again. After this period I need to optimize these documents again. So I can't deal with software that is "obsolete" from one year to another. I don't like Microsoft but I'm pretty sure they won't abandon word.

I've got Game Consoles to play and don't neet Pages 5.0 ;-)

Hundreds of my pretty complex documents are still in .pages-Format. I'll painfully convert them step-by-step until apple will abandon Pages 4.3 (and they will - I'm pretty sure).

Wow, you could not have put my thoughts down more acurately. Have been with Apple since OS9 after throwing my Windows 98 computer in the garbage.

Have loved everything Apple did. Have always bought the latest Macs, iPhone and iPads and dowloaded the newest updates.

Having converted my whole family to Apple over the years, save my son who solidly stuck to Windows (said he needed it for work) Now I am asking him what to do. I love my Appe Mac but if I have to install Microsoft Word then I feel betrayed.

I am old enough to remember IBM, Sony and the fist Betamax video tapes, also when Microsoft was top dog. Is Apple going the same way?

Regarding your 15th point, the alignment guides aren't gone, they just need to be activated. You can do this by checking both boxes under Preferences>Rulers>Alignment Guides.

Nonethelss, thanks for compiling this list. I've always been a big fan of Pages but the number of missing features in this version really surprised me. I hope they fix this soon.

kantatleehk wrote:

Regarding your 15th point, the alignment guides aren't gone, they just need to be activated. You can do this by checking both boxes under Preferences>Rulers>Alignment Guides.

Object alignment guides are there, as you mentioned. Document alignment guides, made by pulling out from the vertical and horizontal rulers, are gone.

Pages 5.0 is pure garbage. But I'm not in love with MS Word or other apps (they're not as intuitive and easy to use as Pages 4.3) so I'll try to use version 4.3 for as long as I can or (if Apple decides to update the new version with all the useful things they left out).

"As long as I can" means that, even after Apple abandons version 4.3, I'll install Mountain Lion (or Mavericks) in a virtual machine like VMware or Parallels and I'll still be able to use the old - but useful - version.

I too am a professional writer and published author. I use pages every single day for my livelihood. But I also do serious writing and editing on my iPad. I love it's convenience and portability. I don't use any complex formatting or text boxes or graphics, but I do use a massive amount of footnotes and foreign characters for my technical writing.

I have also had horrible experiences in the recent past with iCloud deleting my documents. I don't trust iCloud as it mysteriously destroyed three months worth of my work last year. (Apple couldn't explain it but they took responsibility for it and gave me a $300 gift certificate.)

I have not tried the new Pages but I am in absolute fear of what's going to happen next. Will my footnotes and foreign words be editable in the new version? Will it cause another iCloud disaster when I upgrade to Mavericks? Will there be conflicts with iCloud if I still use the old Pages? And now my iPad is constantly telling me to update its version of Pages. I am refusing to do so obviously. And if I buy a new iPad I won't have the old version!

I already think the old pages in iOS is abysmal. It's truly a joke compared to alternative wordprocessor apps available for the iPad that are far more powerful and elegant for writers, they're just not available on the Mac.

I transitioned from MS Word to Pages about six years ago and never looked back. But now I'm seriously thinking the only possible solution for for my professional needs --and my peace of mind, is to move back to Microsoft office. At least I know they won't pull the rug out from under me and try to wreck my livelihood.

As a professional Tv and film editor I have learned from FCPX.

If you are a professional that needs to use professional tools, then Apple is not the company whose software to use.

Their hardware is nice, and certainly good.

But after living through the release of Final Cut Pro I would never trust Apple with software that I depend on for work.

People here have spoken about wanting to know what is happening, or what the future holds; but that is not the Apple way.

And it is exactly this lack of information, and future road map that does not serve buisness.

I love Apple products for Home, and family use.

They are simple to use, and don't tend to be as difficult to maintain.

But (in my eyes, and from my experience time and again) Apple no longer appears to want to support, or work for buisness users.

I'm not saying you can't use their devices or software for buisness (many do and that is great), but you will have little to no customer support, and no future proofing.

You will never know if they plan to update any time, or if they will just drop features, or whole products with no notice.

There is always a risk with software, but most companies will have cistomer support who can give reassurence and know future roadmaps.

I am sorry many have learned this the hard way.

As it has been said with all the other EOL, or huge software changes with Apple "you can still use the old software for now".

My advice is use this time to find an alternative from a company that communicates and has a clear vision of the future.

Sadly if you lost data because iWork 5.0 reformatted the document, then sadly this would be a good time to check back ups, or build a back up system.

Hirschkorn wrote:

"As long as I can" means that, even after Apple abandons version 4.3, I'll install Mountain Lion (or Mavericks) in a virtual machine like VMware or Parallels and I'll still be able to use the old - but useful - version.

Or as I have done for AppleWorks, I've kept another Mac running Snow Leopard that I can access via screen sharing for those times I need to use it. I also have an older PPC iMac running Tiger for running Classic apps.