Anybody permanently switch from Word to Pages?

[zen]

I'm curious because I'm about to get a 20" iMac and have been wondering about Pages as a proper, fulltime Word replacement. I do nothing fancy in word except for basic formatting and word/character counting - this has to be easy to access and see at all times.

There are probably several threads about this on here, but I'm asking because the Pages demo did a few weird things on my 12" PowerBook. Specifically, if I used certain document templates and tried to edit titles and headings, the document view would jump to the bottom of the page. At 1024 x 768 this was a problem, as I couldn't see what I was typing. Every key stroke dropped the top of the document out of the window.

I tried this on a demo 20" at an Apple Store, using the same templates, and noticed that while the page view didn't really change (the screen was big enough to see the whole page), the vertical scrollbar jumped from the top to the bottom.

If Pages has weird little bugs like this, does it make it extremely annoying to use, or does it not matter? I'll have a BIG screen soon, so perhaps it's not a big deal.

Unless Apple fixed it in an update?

It's just that with my brand new iMac I'm keen to ditch the bloatware that is Office, and Pages seems like a good start.

 

[briansolomon]

Definitely. My buddy loves Pages. It's definitely a much better value but it does take a little getting used to to be as proficient as you might have been in Word if you've been using it for years.

Brian

 

[devman]

Yes. I went via OpenOffice to Mellel to Pages.

Word is a product with a VERY large number of features. Pages in no way attempts to do all of them. So, if your must-have Word features are some of the ones Pages doesn't cater for - then you won't like it (of course).

From what you've described, you should be fine with Pages. I use it a lot and I find the latest version quite nice.

 

[xtn]

I used MS Word, then NeoOffice (which I still sometimes use and love), but pretty much anything I need done can be done with Pages, and usually very simply. It will take some time getting use to it, but once you learn Pages its so much simpler to use. Some of the keyboard commands don't cross-over from MS Word so you might have to re-learn certain commands if you're into that kind of thing. Overall, I highly recommend Pages for anything creative or document related. Just look at how many templates they have for you to choose from!

 

[Guy Incognito]

I'm writing my dissertation in Pages. I prefer it to Word, for the most part. I'll probably format the final manuscript in Framemaker, though, since Pages doesn't support cross-references, multi-file tables of contents, etc.

 

[ph0rk]

at least with my 80-page masters thesis, the office 2004 version of word is less sluggish than the iwork '08 pages (after the file was saved as a pages file and reopened). There are a great many images and tables.

With a 220 page pure-text document, they felt similarly sluggish (all cases on a 1.8ghz G5, but hell its only text).

I'd consider working in separate chapters and sewing them together later, and/or writing in plain text and playing with formatting when you are finished - whichever app you use.