I love Pages and use it most of the time. The only thing that keeps me in MSOffice Word is he great notebook layout they have. I especially like the tabbed sections to quickly organize and retrieve notes. The tabbing feature is great. Will we ever be able to find this layout in Pages?
Microsoft and Apple have taken very different word processing development paths. Unless Apple simply decides to give up, and concede to MS Word, it is highly doubtful you will see Word's tab feature added to Pages in our lifetime.
I suspected that Apple would not include the tabbed notebook features as I was searching and saw other requests for it dating back to 2006, The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning, and does not stop until you get to the office.
Robert Frost
It will work ok in the office with the right dark coffee. 😉
The free LibreOffice has great power in each of its integrated applications. Since it is engineered to replace MS Office, you may find what you are looking for in that solution. Their UI design team have really lost their minds with the most recent v4.4 version, but the underlying functionality remains.
If you are particular about a Mac UI experience, and do not have any need to open older documents, then NeoOffice offers an OpenOffice based solution with proper Mac UI. It is in the OS X App Store for $30USD.
Notebook layout in Pages
