Hating Pages--please help me get over this

[flyersgl]

I am still a recent Mac convert, mostly happy, but I am really getting annoyed with Pages. I hope my issues can be resolved by changing some settings, but I can't find the way to do it.

I have been trying use my Mac more regularly at home, even for work purposes, where MS Office rules. I have been emailing stuff back and forth across the platforms and I can live with the few extra minutes of tweaking formats to make it all work. But there are three things in Pages that are making me crazy:

1. every time I hit "save" it reverts to a file name of "untitled"--how do I get it to recognize that the name I gave the file 15 minutes ago is still what I want to call it?

2. each time I have to check the box to tell it to save it as a ".doc" file--can I make that a default setting?

3. Even if I have just saved something and made no changes, if I try to exit, it asks me to save it again--can I stop that?

Maybe this is one of those things where I am just too used to the Microsoft way, but these things are really killing my desire to make Pages work for me...

Any help would be much appreciated...

 

[spencerwalker]

Word format is not a "save" format, it is a "save as copy" format

If you save files in the native ".pages" format, then Pages considers the file to have been saved. Otherwise, it considers the file to have simply been exported to a "foreign" format, such as for sending a copy to a Windows user. As a result, all of your problems have the same underlying problem. It is perhaps annoying that it works this way, given that Pages can in fact read and write Word format.

 

[MisterMe]

...

Maybe this is one of those things where I am just too used to the Microsoft way, but these things are really killing my desire to make Pages work for me...

This has nothing to do with "the Microsoft way." Microsoft has a reasonably competent version of Word available for the Mac. It is Word 2008. There are also other apps whose primary function [for most users] is to ape Word such as OpenOffice.org and its Java-based cousin, NeoOffice. FWIW, both OOo and NO are free. But, I digress. You have chosen to try to force Pages into the role of a Word replacement. It is not suited for this role. Apple provides the ability to read and write Word documents in Pages as a convenience to its users; not to save them from Microsoft. If most of your work is with Word documents, then you should use Word or an app like OpenOffice.org that is better suited to the task.

 

[flyersgl]

Thanks for both replies. The simple explanation of the underlying logic makes sense to me, even if I don't like the behavior.

I had MS Office on my Macbook and it constantly froze and crashed, plus I felt like the interface was so different, it was like a new software program. I guess I will try Neo Office or Open Office.

 

[maflynn]

Another vote for open office. I've tried and used iWork but found it lacking in a number of ways so much so, I've stopped using it, and went with open office.

I liked hour iWork's numbers produced some very nice looking spreadsheets, but interacting with it and trying to input formulas that I've used in excel failed, so much so I've dumped it.