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Microsoft Word vs. Pages. I am disappointed with Pages.

S

seasurfer

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Dec 12, 2007
705
133
I thought of getting rid of Microsoft products on my new iMac and MBP. So I bought iWork 08. I was happy initially as it is more compatible with OS X looks. It looks easy to use as well. Nevertheless, I was so disappointed with it after using it for a few days.

1. Pages are not really compatible with Office created doc files. The layout may change. Some changes are so great that your whole layout change.

2. Pages files are big...way way bigger than .doc files.

3. .Pages is not a file. It is a folder with your stuff inside. You will have trouble uploading it to emails. This means that you can't share it even with someone using a mac. You have to convert it into .doc to send. This is the biggest disappointment.

4. Pages boot time is not fast. It is only a little bit faster than Office 2004. Office 2007 in Vista is way faster when it comes to booting.

5. It has too little functions compare to Office Word.

6. It does not support .docx, you can only read it but not write it.

That is all for now.
 
IJ Reilly

IJ Reilly

macrumors P6
Jul 16, 2002
17,909
1,496
Palookaville
1. Pages is not Word. If you need 100% compatibility with Word, you must use Word.

2. Not really, unless they include graphics.

3. Not so. You can e-mail a Pages file to another Pages user.

4. I couldn't really say, but I rarely quite Pages after I launch it.

5. Which ones? Please be specific.

6. This is a good point. Apple needs to support docx.
 
clevin

clevin

macrumors G3
Aug 6, 2006
9,095
1
if you need to share you product, M$ Office obviously has advantages in compatibility department.

and yes, M$ Office IS, in most industry, standard. iWork really should NOT be regarded as a replacement unless you are working in a small circle (a small company, a home business, a self-supporting-no-3rd-party-cooperation-needed profession, etc)

Other than that, I can only say keynote is better than powerpoint, while other components of iwork isn't up to the the level of M$ Office.
 
killmoms

killmoms

macrumors 68040
Jun 23, 2003
3,752
55
Durham, NC
Pages definitely does all I need from a word processor. Then again, I don't have to share documents with people, so compatibility isn't a big deal for me. Mail merge is about the most complicated thing I need in a word processor, and Pages lets me do it. Plus it has much better page-layout capabilities than Word, for when I need to do some customizing of layout (but not so much that I want to use InDesign).

As for e-mailing Pages documents, sure you can. Just attach it. Mail does the requisite work for you. If you're having trouble, you could always ZIP it and attach it that way.

In any case, if compatibility is important, just wait for Office 2008 for Mac to be released. I'm sure it'll be out Any Day Now™ (the same technology that brought us Windows Vista).
 
IJ Reilly

IJ Reilly

macrumors P6
Jul 16, 2002
17,909
1,496
Palookaville
clevin said:
if you need to share you product, M$ Office obviously has advantages in compatibility department.

and yes, M$ Office IS, in most industry, standard. iWork really should NOT be regarded as a replacement unless you are working in a small circle (a small company, a home business, a self-supporting-no-3rd-party-cooperation-needed profession, etc)

Other than that, I can only say keynote is better than powerpoint, while other components of iwork isn't up to the the level of M$ Office.
Click to expand...

This is 100% opinion and 0% factual. In reality, the only reason the vast majority of people would need Office is if they (1) frequently collaborate on documents, as distinguished from "sharing" documents, or (2) are heavy-duty Excel user.
 
nsbio

nsbio

macrumors 6502a
Aug 8, 2006
634
0
NC
Pages is also much more sluggish than Word. It may not be as obvious on high-end machines, but on my G4 PB the difference in responsiveness of Word and Pages is very perceptible, and Pages loses.

When several other programs running in the background, Word is still perfectly usable but Pages becomes impossible to type in.
 
H

henry.oswald

macrumors member
Jul 14, 2007
58
0
some time it works with word sometimes it doesn't, but then again mac word isn't 100% compatible with mac word! (i.e. images in text)

Pages doesn't even have auto save which seems like a very basic feature too me!
 
S

Slumbercub

macrumors regular
Jul 12, 2006
194
1
Gloucester, England
I will take Pages' ease of use and fantastic presentation of documentation (far superior to anything you can do in Word) over the expensive cash cow from Microsoft anyday. 400 bucks, erm, no thanks!

Try NeoOffice if you want something more Office-like, it's free. :)
 
Killyp

Killyp

macrumors 68040
Jun 14, 2006
3,859
7
Are you running Tiger or Leopard? Pages does take a while to load under Tiger, but is a lot quicker for me in Leopard.
 
T

Techguy172

macrumors 68000
Feb 2, 2007
1,782
0
Ontario Canada
Office is nice for just simple projects that don't involve layout Now I know apple is touting that pages is more standard use Friendly but it still doesn't seem so I'm still considering getting office '08 Simply because I loved office 2007 on PC it was wonderful to work in I loved the interface of it and I don't really like the Pages interface so much (Maybe I'm not used to it yet?) but either way an office '08 could find it's way to my door step.
 
B

bit density

macrumors 6502
Mar 5, 2004
398
2
Seattle
Wrong comparison

Pages is a feature rich, light weight word processor. It will satisfy many peoples needs, but is by no means Word.

This is like saying, but I can do white balance, therefor Iphoto is == Photoshop, or GarageBand == Logic cuz they both do music.

There are some very good articles from back in the day about what made a good word processor. Try http://www.byte.com/chaosmanor/, but there are others.

It is actually pretty difficult to do it well and correctly, but there has been a lot of noise that the features in light weight word processors are enough. They aren't. Not for serious word processing.
 
S

Schnebar

macrumors 6502
May 15, 2006
372
1
California
Pages is great for me.

I am a high school student and whenever we have reports or big essays, I use the built in templets and it amazes people.

Just having a cover sheet and having colored headers makes it look so much nicer.

And it takes no extra effort.

Then when I need to make a presentation I can use keynote and people love it. The only problem with that is that the school computers are so old that it was almost impossible to show it.

It did not work well converted into powerpoint. The computer could not play it as a quicktime. I ended up having to show it in pdf slides but it still looked good with the graphs and stuff.
 
clevin

clevin

macrumors G3
Aug 6, 2006
9,095
1
IJ Reilly said:
In two cases I've heard about now. Shocking. Due to what cause, I wonder.
Click to expand...
due probably to that you don't get enough information about vista? Since Im sure you know enough about OSX.

oh no, you are not accusing other people lying, are you? :)
IJ Reilly said:
This is 100% opinion and 0% factual. In reality, the only reason the vast majority of people would need Office is if they (1) frequently collaborate on documents, as distinguished from "sharing" documents, or (2) are heavy-duty Excel user.
Click to expand...

?? which part is not a fact? that most users use M$ office, not iwork? that M$ Office is most industries' standard? that M$ office has advantages in compatibility department? that M$ Excel is better than numbers? that word is better than pages? that keynote is better than powerpoint?
 
IJ Reilly

IJ Reilly

macrumors P6
Jul 16, 2002
17,909
1,496
Palookaville
bit density said:
Pages is a feature rich, light weight word processor. It will satisfy many peoples needs, but is by no means Word.
Click to expand...

Many of us consider this to be a Good Thing™. (Even without knowing your definition of "light weight.")

clevin said:
?? which part is not a fact? that most users use M$ office, not iwork? that M$ Office is most industries' standard? that M$ office has advantages in compatibility department? that M$ Excel is better than numbers? that word is better than pages? that keynote is better than powerpoint?
Click to expand...

The entire business about Word being an "industry standard" and Pages only being useful if you don't have to "share" documents or work without "cooperation," and especially the one you just added claiming that Word is "better" than Pages. These are all opinions, and not necessarily reflective of reality as it is experienced by others.

Of course Word is going to be more compatible Word than anything else.
 
S

smacsteve

macrumors newbie
Apr 3, 2006
27
1
Minneapolis, MN.
My take on Pages

Pages is a great app if you want to make a brochure or something of the kind and not have the need to exchange files with the PC users on a regular basis, but if you need to do that... Office is the safer bet.
 
Macky-Mac

Macky-Mac

macrumors 68040
May 18, 2004
3,501
2,549
clevin said:
if you need to share you product, M$ Office obviously has advantages in compatibility department.
.....
Click to expand...

well, what is "sharing"??? If you mean "send it to them so they can read it" then there's no need to use MS Office since a Pages document be sent in PDF format if somehow the formatting is critical.

If "sharing" means they're going to work on it, make changes and send it back to you for futher revision, then MS Office would indeed be useful.
 
clevin

clevin

macrumors G3
Aug 6, 2006
9,095
1
IJ Reilly said:
The entire business about Word being an "industry standard" and Pages only being useful if you don't have to "share" documents or work without "cooperation," and especially the one you just added claiming that Word is "better" than Pages. These are all opinions, and not necessarily reflective of reality as it is experienced by others.

Of course Word is going to be more compatible Word than anything else.
Click to expand...
well, I aren't gonna argue with you on that, and Im glad you make your opinions clear. Users will decide for themselves if those are facts, or opinions.

better or not
standard or not

users know.

PS. I realize you didn't object to
"most people use M$ Office, not iwork"
"excel is better than numbers"

any objection?
Macky-Mac said:
well, what is "sharing"??? If you mean "send it to them so they can read it" then there's no need to use MS Office since a Pages document be sent in PDF format if somehow the formatting is critical.

If "sharing" means they're going to work on it, make changes and send it back to you for futher revision, then MS Office would indeed be useful.
Click to expand...

Im glad you can find a way around to do something, but I think most people just want to do it in one step, rather than find a "work around".

Of course, even if I claim that to be a fact, you can call that "opinion" as well
 
Macky-Mac

Macky-Mac

macrumors 68040
May 18, 2004
3,501
2,549
clevin said:
....
Im glad you can find a way around to do something, but I think most people just want to do it in one step, rather than find a "work around".

Of course, even if I claim that to be a fact, you can call that "opinion" as well
Click to expand...

now now, no need to get bitter when somebody offers an opinion that differs from yours!

If somebody puts a lot of effort into "formatting" with Word and then sends it across platforms to another Word user, they're still going to be facing some problems with the format not coming thru perfectly because the PC and Mac versions of Word aren't actually 100% compatible anyway.
 
GreatDrok

GreatDrok

macrumors 6502a
May 1, 2006
561
22
New Zealand
Macky-Mac said:
now now, no need to get bitter when somebody offers an opinion that differs from yours!

If somebody puts a lot of effort into "formatting" with Word and then sends it across platforms to another Word user, they're still going to be facing some problems with the format not coming thru perfectly because the PC and Mac versions of Word aren't actually 100% compatible anyway.
Click to expand...

Exactly. I have Office:mac under Leopard and Office 2K under Windows XP (when MS isn't accusing me of being a filthy software pirate due to bugs in WGA as happened today) and have tired of worrying about formatting when going back and forth. I just send the stuff as a .doc or whatever and let them make whatever changes they want until it is done and then I fix the formatting on my Mac. In particular, fonts are a real problem. I recently did a project proposal and had a really nice template which looked excellent on my Mac but on the Windows version it was horrible because it was using fonts that Windows doesn't have.

Worse though, in Word it looked fine but when I printed it there was a blank page which I couldn't get rid of. There was no extra page break or anything, it just stuck an extra page in so I had to copy and paste all the text into another doc and that got rid of it. This is the problem with Office. It claims to be WYSIWYG but isn't. The binary format doesn't record everything needed to render the doc exactly and this is why MSOOXML format (docx) includes stupid 'do it like Word95 did' markup. Simply daft.

If presentation must be preserved use PDF. If you want to collaborate, just accept that formatting will get minced even going between Office on Windows (2K->2K3 is nasty for example) let alone Office:mac. At least with iWork I know that it will print exactly the way it looks on the screen.

I just use whatever suits. I like iWork as it is more logical than Office but I use Office when forced to work with others but still have to fix formatting at some point or other so I just don't worry about it. Office users spend too much time worrying about how something looks rather than what the document contains. That is the major problem with graphical word processors and one reason I did my PhD thesis in LaTeX. No way I would have used Word for that.
 
S

seasurfer

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Dec 12, 2007
705
133
Wow...I didn't expect it to be so crowded here. I just wanted to vent my anger for wasting 79 dollars.

1. I have a lot of documents written under MS Office Word 2003, some of them are my projects which I am still doing. When I open it under Pages 08, it just doesn't display my layout correctly, in one instant, the layout is totally lost, the display was horrible that it is impossible for me to work with Pages, I don't want to waste my time rearranging that big file.

2. I need to send my files to my colleagues very often. Even for those using mac, I just couldn't send the whole file under .pages. It is a folder, how am I going to send a whole folder? Gmail or Yahoo or my school mail just doesn't have this function. I don't use Mail, as I don't have the habit of downloading my mails into my computer. If I have to zip it, it is just wasting my time only. That in itself is very not user friendly, which in very un-mac. This is something that even if you are a mac fan, I think you should recognize it.

3. Most people don't use mac, therefore I have to convert it into .doc, this is one of the thing that I am very satisfied with Pages 08. However, .doc is not native to Pages 08.

4. Even tough I have a big HD and space does not matter me. I just don't understand why Pages 08 is saving in a bigger files. Things that can be saved in 20KB in doc, may turn out to be 60KB in Pages 08. Therefore it is way bigger than .doc.

5. I hate Pages 08 more when I wanted to copy a paragraph from a webpage, this is the event that make it give up on Pages. I copied a paragraph and it pasted exactly like how the webpage shows, but this is not what I want, I want to have the option to choose to just display its text without those design and links. Pages just don't give me this easy options like MS Office 2004. I know it could be done somewhere in the setting, but I wasted 1 hour and I still couldn't figure out where it is, this itself is very unfriendly.

6. The only thing I like about Pages is it that it is more compatible with Mac OS X Leopard. I takes up less memory and it is smoother. Which is why I bought it initially, but there is not much practicality at this time to me. I will reconsider using it again in the future.
 
T

Techguy172

macrumors 68000
Feb 2, 2007
1,782
0
Ontario Canada
IJ Reilly said:
Many of us consider this to be a Good Thing™. (Even without knowing your definition of "light weight.")



The entire business about Word being an "industry standard" and Pages only being useful if you don't have to "share" documents or work without "cooperation," and especially the one you just added claiming that Word is "better" than Pages. These are all opinions, and not necessarily reflective of reality as it is experienced by others.

Of course Word is going to be more compatible Word than anything else.
Click to expand...

Uh, Yeah Word is industry standard walk into any office and I guarantee you that you will see Word many times. Word is better for Professionals Period!
 
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