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Anyone else having issues w/ Pages?

M

mkubal

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 22, 2002
557
0
Tampa
I'm am having so many problems with Pages. Here are a few:

1. Breaks take up space which in turn moves everything around in the document.

2. Section breaks have to be placed at the beginning of a page to keep a footer from showing up in the previous page. Unfortunately this makes it look like your margins have shifted down when printing the page.

3. Layout break and page break seem to do absolutely nothing that I can tell (other than take up space of course). I could be wrong.

4. My document has suddenly shown up in "facing pages" mode. Lucky for me facing pages is deselected so there's nothing I can do about it.

5. The current document I'm working in has decided that I will no longer be able to insert a text box anywhere. The only way to do it is copy, paste and edit the first one it let me make. Super!

6. Moving objects around is a pain. Pages basically drops it in the general area you want it, but it puts it precisely where it pleases. This can be over ridden by holding the command key while dragging/dropping, but then it no longer gives you alignment lines.

Ok, I'll leave at that.

I can't believe that this program is harder to use than Word. I expected so much better. Sure word has its quirks, but at least you're able to do what you want after a bit of a struggle.

Maybe I'm asking too much of this program, but it seems like my needs are fairly basic.

Anyone else having problems?

Matt
 
Pages is pretty bad. I stop using it after about 10 minutes. It's frustrating to use, since the layout is counter-intuitive and pages overflow onto a new page and you are limited in how you wrap graphics around text. Perhaps v2?
 
We can only hope.

What's unfortunate is that I never use keynote. So being that Pages is also now useless to me, I just wasted 80 American.

On a side note, if topics like this have already been posted a hundred times then I'm sorry. I honestly couldn't find any in a search.

Matt
 
Hey, thanks for the heads' up. I was thinking about buying pages, but only if it was a better overall word processor than MS Word. Right now I use NeoOffice for writing, but MS word for formatting my completed documents. (I use NeoOffice because fonts render cleaner, and because it doesn't have the annoying lag between when I type words and when they actually show up on screen.)

I was hoping maybe Pages would be the one app that did it all. Sigh.
 
I was hoping it would do it all as well. I was pissed at Word for tending to be a pain in the ass. But honestly, Word is a breeze compared to pages.

It seems to me that this should have been released as a beta (or alpha for that matter). It wouldn't be as bad if Apple had said you can buy Keynote 2 for $80 and you'll get a beta of Pages included. Of course then I wouldn't have bought it, but geez, so many problems.
 
mkubal said:
I was hoping it would do it all as well. I was pissed at Word for tending to be a pain in the ass. But honestly, Word is a breeze compared to pages.

It seems to me that this should have been released as a beta (or alpha for that matter). It wouldn't be as bad if Apple had said you can buy Keynote 2 for $80 and you'll get a beta of Pages included. Of course then I wouldn't have bought it, but geez, so many problems.
Click to expand...

Well, hopefully they'll release bug fixes as necessary, and eventually you'll have a working app for your money.
 
Fix my pages, please.

Has anyone been able to enter a text object? I would like to add a figure description below an inserted tif image. A text box that acts separately from the text which I could just enter below would work fantastic. However, under objects text is never a highlighted option. Any ideas? It is really pissing me off.
 
Sorry my bad.

10 more minutes passed and I figured out a way to do it. Please tell me I am retarded and there is a more intuitive way to do it. Here is how I figured out how to do it and get the text object to highlight now.

1. Insert Table

2. Reduce number of rows and columns from 4 rows and 3 columns to 2 rows and 1 column and then uncheck header row.

(Now you have a text box but with an unwanted border)

3. Next switch to object inspector and change stroke to none

(Low and behold a text box)

Now why couldn't I just go up to the objects menu and select text?
 
I'd let you borrow my text box via cut and paste, but that would be impossible. Or maybe I could send you the file and you could cut and paste from there. Better yet I'll set up a torrent so every can cut and paste from my robust text box feature. I wouldn't want everyone else to go without seeing as how I'm hogging the only text box.

I know I'm whining big time. Sorry.
 
Two Up page display fix.

At the bottom left of the document window, You should see a percentage - click on this and select "One Up" to not get 2 pages across on the display.
 
Bear said:
At the bottom left of the document window, You should see a percentage - click on this and select "One Up" to not get 2 pages across on the display.
Click to expand...

You sir, are a genius. Thank you.

Of course it's still useless, but that little mystery has been solved.

Matt
 
Here are two general workarounds to some of the issues from above an in general:

1. Text box problem. Once you've already made some sort of design from the objects thing on the toolbar, just select that existing object (or any other) and the "text" option will no longer be greyed out on the objects selector.

2. Movement problem. Almost by default you'd think you'd be able to move things around freely (like the keynote demo made it look like...) not so. The easiest way to do whatever you want with the objects is to go into inspector and choose the wrap tab, then select "Fixed on page" and then uncheck the "Object causes word wrap" eventually pages just automatically starts selecting the fixed on page option but tends to always do word wrapping. Such a pain.

That's saved me some time. I worked laboriously self-teaching myself this program and have encountered soooo many problems. It feels rushed, counter-inituitive and I hate to say it but really "freeware-ish" compared to Word. My favorite bug so far has been one time when I got an "Unable to save" message while finishing up a project. I had to copy & paste everything to a new Pages document to get it to save...I too wil probably rarely use keynote, which is a shame because it really is a fantastic program in its second iteration--things just work the way you want them to (for the most part).
 
my girlfriend (who's not really a mac expert) didn't have much trouble making a pretty nice looking newsletter (from a template) in a couple hours with pages. however, i've seen been doing some simple text stuff and have run into typing for a few words without it showing up... a lag i haven't seen in quite a while in word processing..

it seems just ok for now (depending what you need it for i guess) but what is better to me is the promise of improvements in the future.
 
mkubal said:
5. The current document I'm working in has decided that I will no longer be able to insert a text box anywhere. The only way to do it is copy, paste and edit the first one it let me make. Super!

6. Moving objects around is a pain. Pages basically drops it in the general area you want it, but it puts it precisely where it pleases. This can be over ridden by holding the command key while dragging/dropping, but then it no longer gives you alignment lines.
Matt
Click to expand...

Inserting text boxes and moving objects in Pages can actually be done quite easily. To make a new text box, just click the outer frame of the page and then go to Objects --> Text. To make an image float, drag it to the outer frame and you will be able to position the image wherever you want.
 
macteens.com has a pretty good review with some basic pointers on it. I was initially confused as well, but once you understand a few things it comes together really quickly. I am now using Pages full-time (when i use a word processor that is).
 
Text Boxes

Seems kind of strange that you have to click outside the document area to get it to come up. Thanks for the tip.
 
Does anyone else here think that a site that was somewhat dedicated to Pages with Tips, Tutorials, and Templates would be a cool idea? I have been thinking about it a bit lately, but don't want to put in that much effort if nobody will find it useful. Basically i kind of envision something like dotmac.info, a secondary site targetted at a particular product. It just seems that there is not a lot known about Pages and no place to really learn it yet. Sorry to hijack the thread, but this thread was what got me thinking this in the first place.
 
Sounds like a very good idea to me. And maybe include Keynote 2 as well. My Keynote 2 for example, hangs at random within the first two minutes and I haven't been able to find any solution yet.
 
kgarner said:
Does anyone else here think that a site that was somewhat dedicated to Pages with Tips, Tutorials, and Templates would be a cool idea? I have been thinking about it a bit lately, but don't want to put in that much effort if nobody will find it useful. Basically i kind of envision something like dotmac.info, a secondary site targetted at a particular product. It just seems that there is not a lot known about Pages and no place to really learn it yet. Sorry to hijack the thread, but this thread was what got me thinking this in the first place.
Click to expand...

GO for it, I am sure there are many people here who are willing to support your and the information will be very handy for all who want to use Pages and have an idea of the learning curve when switching. :)

Heck I will even support you on this one. Gimme a link to your site when you have completed it. :)
 
I think Pages is a good start, a v.1 at best.

But I like the thinking behind Pages, and think it will be usable at 1.1. My hope is that with 2.0, Apple builds on the foundation and it has the features and usability to replace Word.

I agree with the recent article in PC Magazine which had nice things to say about Pages. While they too acknowledged it had all of the attributes of a v1.0 product, they said it showed the first fresh thinking put to a word processor in some time. MSWord keeps adding corporate and server features--mostly for lock-in--and Pages seems to have re-thought things from a user perspective.

The last version of Keynote was very much this way. A lot of great thinking and a break-through product, but it had a lot of quirks. Version 2 adds a lot of key features, smoothes the edges, and makes it a solid Powerpoint replacement. And I am sure version 3 of Keynote will end all comparisons and pull away from the pack.

Pages will go through the same cycle.

My only hope is Apple gets on an annual update cycle for iWork Waiting two years for a Keynote update was insane. But if we get annual updates, and Apple adds a solid spreadsheet, and we should be able to dump MS Office for good.
 
mkubal said:
We can only hope.

What's unfortunate is that I never use keynote. So being that Pages is also now useless to me, I just wasted 80 American.

On a side note, if topics like this have already been posted a hundred times then I'm sorry. I honestly couldn't find any in a search.

Matt
Click to expand...

You could always sell it to me :)

Rob
 
miloblithe said:
My problem with Pages is the crashing. C'mon 1.1...
Click to expand...

Could be a font issue...

Corrupted fonts can also cause other apps like Office 2004 & Quark 6 to throw a hissy-fit.
 
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