Apple vs Microsoft - Pages vs Word

If you are writing documents with anything other than basic formatting and you need compatibility with other Word users, I can tell you from personal experience that Pages will not cut it. If, however, compatibiltity is not a concern then Pages is probably a better choice for OS X.

thejadedmonkey said:

If you need a glorified Notepad, pages.

If you plan on writing a novel or using "advanced" features, Word.

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I wrote a 200+ page book with over 100 illustrations, designed it, and created the camera-ready artwork for the printer... in Pages.

Good luck trying that with Word.

what happened to OpenOffice, now at v4.0?

zerozoneice said:

what happened to OpenOffice, now at v4.0?

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Agreed! I've got OpenOffice installed on both Macs and the one PC back home. The file compatibility is good, the native PDF a help if you're on a PC, and the fact that the whole suite is FREE means it's the simplest decision...

Pages costs less than a decent meal out, so I would try that first.

If you find that it is not enough, then you will have to purchase the full Office for Mac suite as you can't buy Word by itself. If you have to collaborate with other Word users, though I would not recommend Pages. Yes Pages does Word conversion, but unless your documents are very simple you may get conversion differences.

James Craner said:

Pages costs less than a decent meal out, so I would try that first.

If you find that it is not enough, then you will have to purchase the full Office for Mac suite as you can't buy Word by itself. If you have to collaborate with other Word users, though I would not recommend Pages. Yes Pages does Word conversion, but unless your documents are very simple you may get conversion differences.

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well that's the problem...you can't "try" it first.
my suggestion is openoffice -> pages -> ms office

I use both Pages and Word. Pages when typing in English and Word for typing Arabic documents. I would use Pages solely but unfortunately iWork doesn't support Arabic. Arabic words in Pages are disconnected.


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I used to switch back and forth between Word and Pages but recently I just use Pages. A decade or so ago people were more picky about how Word documents formatted. Now that there are different versions of Word there is no telling how a document will appear so if I open and edit a .doc file in Pages and export it as .doc no one ever complains. Pretty much the same is true for Excel and Numbers. I no longer make the effort to file up Excel. I just edit in Numbers and send it back. No one ever complains. Pretty amazing.

This past week I just made a spread sheet with about a thousand rows and fifty or so columns. Worked great. One issue I have with Numbers is that it doesn't chart well with large arrays. I deal with spectra containing 1024 channels. For that I use DeltaGraph. Really great for charting.

I do all my complex layouts in Pages. I even gave up using InDesign.

Word might have some really great features for professional writers. However, unless you've had training in those features you'll never find them.

I would love to use Pages but I'm the only one in the office with a Mac ... I constantly write reports in collaboration with the rest of the team so unfortunately I have to use Word.... in fact we use Powerpoint to produce our reports