Mojave & Pages '09

Only the Pages product team knows if, or when a future Pages product will provide Mail merge, or any other new feature. Apple retired Pages '09 five years ago, and the absence of Mail merge in follow-on versions of Pages sends a clear message of intent. Apple will not be deliberately taking measures to fix Pages '09 under Mojave. Dead stays dead.

Here are your options:

1. Run an unencumbered Pages '09 v4.3 in an OS X Mountain Lion, or Mavericks Virtual Machine — if your Mac has 8GB RAM, and sufficient host processor, and SSD storage underneath to support it. These two operating systems because Pages '09 v4.3 features begin to disappear (e.g. hyphenation), or behave weirdly on Yosemite or later.

   The free Parallels Desktop Lite will convert the OS X .dmg installers to an .iso and install OS X as a guest operating system. So far, I have done this with El Capitan.

2. Repurpose an older Mac that can run Mountain Lion or Mavericks expressly for Pages '09 v4.3 usage.
3. Use option 1 or 2 to export your existing Pages '09 documents to PDF and .doc using Pages '09 v4.3. Then on a machine running Mojave preferably, or the previous two operating system releases, run Office 2019 for Mac, or Office 2016 for Mac, and use Word to perform Mail merge. Or the free LibreOffice Writer, or any of the current principal Mac word processing applications that support Mail merge.

The iWork '09 suite of applications were retired in Fall 2013. That was supposed to be a wake-up call, and anyone continuing to use these retired applications afterward on future operating system releases — were simply doing so on borrowed time. As 32-bit applications, they will not work at all on the Fall 2019 macOS 10.15 which will be 64-bit applications only — so break now, or not work later this year. Time to move on, or maintain a standalone older version of OS X (e.g. Mountain Lion) solely for iWork '09 usage.

Apple does not revisit retired applications to fix what is broken, nor do they compromise future changes to the operating system to keep retired products operational.

Eventually, my iMac is going to get Mojave, and I am in the process of:

1. Upgrading the RAM to 16GB or more to support [2]
2. Use the free Parallels Desktop Lite Virtual machine and let it use the full Mountain Lion installer I have saved to create a ML guest operating system where the iWork '09 applications can work without limitation.

I am taking this approach as I prefer to keep the most current security and Safari available on the boot operating system. Not doing so, can have potentially worse consequences than not using Pages '09.

Unless a reinstallation from the iWork '09 DVD, and subsequent update with the iWork 9.3 updater cures the problem, then Pages '09 is dead with Mojave. There is no other fix.

There is Nisus Writer/Pro and Mellel. The free LibreOffice Suite is intended to be an MS Office clone, and probably has the best Word document support outside of Microsoft itself. LibreOffice Writer can open some Pages '09 documents. There is a learning curve to all of these.

Well that just now sucked. I tried to print a letter from my template after having just updated to Mojave & nope! No can open. So instead I simply hand-wrote the address on the envelope! Wow. 😟

On the other hand, I just discovered I can open that template online through Pages in iCloud: Sign in to iCloud - Apple

If you want it back where is it if it isn't in your Applications?

Pages '09 will not work in Mojave, only in High Sierra.

I was a beta tester for Mojave, and this problem has been there since the beginning. I wrote to Apple about it with every new beta version, so there's little hope, I fear.

Is Nisus Writer any good? I'm testing it...

Martin S Taylor

The current version Pages v7.2 can open Pages '06, '08, '09, v5, v6, and v7 documents, as well as Word and RTF documents. Pages '09 on High Sierra or earlier (it is broke on Mojave) can open AppleWorks v6 word processing documents, Word .doc/x, RTF, and Pages '08/'09 documents. It cannot directly open the new document formats found in v5 thru v7, without those being explicitly exported as Pages '09 format documents.

Tried LibreOffice?

Your Pages '09 client proposals can be opened in Pages v7.2, but any features unique to Pages '09 will be dropped. Any attempt to edit the document will result in a prompt to convert the document to Pages v7.2 document format — at which time it ceases to be a Pages '09 document.

I too like Pages '09 because of it's merge capability with contacts. This is the last straw for me. No more reliance on Apple software because they will someday decide to no longer support it. They always have. The new version of Pages does not support all that was great about Pages '09. McWrite Pro had more merge capabilities than either. I am moving to MS Office. I don't really like it, but it will always be there and older version features are always supported. Long term commitment to your customers is important. I have a long list of Apple applications I can no longer use. I guess I am a slow learner.

I used Pages for letters, quotations, packing lists, mailing labels, invoices, account statements, white papers, manuals, all sorts of professional documents. I liked it because it has great document layout capability and easily merges with my contacts. Pages is useless to me without the merge capability. This probably means that I may have to have multiple contact lists now.

Yes I am exactly the same. I just tested os Mojave on my daughters computer and checked if pages 09 works. It is as you say. I LOVE Pages 09 and am very sad with the decline in functionality in the later versions. I don't want to upload any OS which will stop pages 09 from working. :-(

I do have the same problem with high sierra.

If i get this right. If you have older documents made with pages you cannot open them anymore with the new version? I seem to be out of my mind because i do not get this no matter how hard i try.

I have some older but quite important docs and cannot open them either with pages 9.3 nor with the new version? Can anybody help me here? I just don't get it.

I have OSX13.6 with the news pages. I have important older pages docs and i cannot open them anymore - not matter what? I don't get it...