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macgabe

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Dec 29, 2012
341
296
Just bought Pages for my new iMac and was disappointed to see it was an 09 version! Functionality is really way too basic for my purposes, so I'll have to get Office for my new computer after all. But just wondering, before I do, if there were any rumours about a new Pages version?
 

maflynn

macrumors Haswell
May 3, 2009
73,373
43,264
Nope, no rumors - Apple has been letting iWork whither on the vine for ages. :(
 

DJLC

macrumors 6502a
Jul 17, 2005
958
401
North Carolina
An unnamed friend of mine recently started on the iWork team at Apple...

He's not dumb enough to tell me anything specific, but I'm sure they didn't hire him to twiddle his thumbs behind a desk.
 
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macgabe

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Dec 29, 2012
341
296
Well that actually makes me feel a little better. I would have been really cheesed off if one had come out next month! Bizarre that they even called it Pages 09 - they must have been intending to update more often if they included the date in the name, but then made other plans. Maybe as you say they're working on one now.

From what I can gather there should be new version of Office this year, at least for Windows. The current one is discounted and includes an upgrade to the new version when it comes out, but I can't work out from the small print if the upgrade will cover 3 installations like the old Family and Home (or Student?) one. It'll be called Office 360 I think.
 

Mackilroy

macrumors 68040
Jun 29, 2006
3,899
522
Don't forget to look at the date it was last updated--in the case of Pages, December 4, 2012. Hopefully they're working on some big improvements, though, and not just minor updates to keep the programs compatible.
 

osx-addict

macrumors newbie
Jan 8, 2013
28
0
We've gone thru the same issues -- we've tried a number of Mac word processors -- Marine Write, AbiWord, Nisus Writer, OpenOffice, NEO Office, and others that escape my memory at the moment but have settled on Pages.. I refuse to put MS Office on my Mac just to get the word processor.. You might consider open office if you want something that looks pretty much like Word and behaves the same. If we want to do spreadsheets and are familiar with Excel then OpenOffice/NEO Office might be for you..

If you want something a bit different you might look into Mellel as it has some interesting features..
 
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macgabe

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Dec 29, 2012
341
296
Thanks yes I did try OpenOffice first, I've also got it on an old netbook and it's not bad - definitely OK for occasional use. But I'm a part-time translator and there are a bunch of features that are really important to me, which I've become very used to in Word. All the subtle things Word does with drag and drop, spacing, capitalisation, fonts, search and replace, paste formatting, multi-lingual auto-correct etc. Especially since all clients texts arrive in docx and have to go back in docx (or doc).

So, as I found today, if I export a document from Pages (may be the same in OpenOffice) to .doc to then open it on my old computer in Word and make final adjustments and convert it to docx, I lose superscript ordinals. That's a deal-breaker in itself, which lost me a good half hour. But there were countless other things. I turned auto-capitalisation on in Pages but it capitalised after a.m. and i.e. so I had to turn it off.

Earlier today, when I tried to centre a title in OpenOffice it centred the whole text, which is what got me to hit the App Store for Pages in the first place (it was the same in Pages) - it was like going back to 1995. I really should have just got Office straightaway with the new iMac (I actually need Excel too) - I was just peeved at having to get another copy just before the new version came out, as my installation limit has been exceeded, so started looking at alternatives to tide me over. I've got my old iMac still sitting next to the new one while I transfer everything, but I love the new one so much already, it really grates when I have to start clacking away at the old keyboard.
 

Cougarcat

macrumors 604
Sep 19, 2003
7,766
2,553
An unnamed friend of mine recently started on the iWork team at Apple...

He's not dumb enough to tell me anything specific since I'm a huge gossip, but I'm sure they didn't hire him to twiddle his thumbs behind a desk.

Probably to work on the iOS versions ...
 

Zauberer

macrumors regular
Oct 7, 2010
112
2
My guess is that Apple intends to get away from the iWork "2009" convention and simply release iWork apps and periodically update them so you just have Pages, not "Pages 2009." They're pretty much at that stage already, but the updates are underwhelming.
 

James_C

macrumors 68030
Sep 13, 2002
2,814
1,818
Bristol, UK
Just bought Pages for my new iMac and was disappointed to see it was an 09 version! Functionality is really way too basic for my purposes, so I'll have to get Office for my new computer after all. But just wondering, before I do, if there were any rumours about a new Pages version?

Pages is a pretty good word processor and I tend to use it more at home than I use Word. Pages is better than Word for creating short graphic rich documents, as it handles graphic objects a lot better. Word is better for creating long documents with better support for footnotes and endnote capability (you have to choose one or the other in Pages) , complex Table of Content handling including automatic updating and Bookmarks. Pages also lacks a citation manager, which can be found in Word.

However if your are creating long complex documents you might like to take a look at Scrivener, which is highly rated by authors.
 
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