change-tracking compatibility of iWork with Office

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change-tracking compatibility of iWork with Office

I just got a warning when I opened a Word document that had tracked changes. Is there a list of exactly what kinds of changes are not being tracked between the two? A general list of all incompatibilities would also help. I'm using Pages 5.6.2 and Numbers 3.6.2.

I have worked with iWork (mostly Pages and Numbers) in the past few months and so far I'm OK with the features it provides and with Office compatibility. I'm hoping this will not be a reason to abandon it and go back to MS.

Thanks,

Dex

P. S. This is the warning I got when opening:

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X El Capitan (10.11.6)

Posted on Nov 12, 2017 6:52 AM

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Answer 1

Nov 12, 2017 11:31 AM in response to Dex5

No version of Pages, past or present, is a Word clone. Pages v5 through current v6 releases only provide support for a subset of Windows Word 2013. You cannot override application design. Same drill for Numbers and Excel.

The act of opening, or exporting a Word document is a translation process to/from Pages own internal document architecture, and it is telling you what is not supported, or what defensive measures it took in the warning dialog.

Your best Word compatibility is in Office 2016 for Mac (staying current with its updates), and opening, editing, tracking, and saving Word documents in their native document architecture. This is always my recommendation when performing document interchange with other MS Word (Mac/Win) users, and especially where it is a corporate standard.

Apple does not provide a list of MS Word incompatibilities for Pages, but to some extent, the Numbers Help may discuss some Excel functions that are not implemented.

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Answer 2

Nov 12, 2017 1:36 PM in response to Dex5

Pages 5.6.2 is rather old now, some of those features have been reinstated in the current version Pages 6.3.1.

Petr

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