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

Pages has been a slight disappointment for me but the more I use it, the more I like it.

I just finished using it for a long, research product and it was a terrible pain at first but the more research I did with some of the ways to do things, the easier I got. Problem is, I didn't really find anything in Pages that made me think it was easier or better than Word.
 
A lot of people criticise Office 2008 and I have tried Pages, but I always find myself going back to Word. When I start typing a report I just want to get straight to work. I tried starting with Pages but it was just taking way to long to figure out how to do basic stuff like Styles and setting the header and footer on the first page to be different and stuff like that.

When work is involved I just want to get the job done with the tool I know best and Word is a program I have used for years. I really like what Microsoft has done with the Aero thing. I can have contents pages, bibliographies and all that stuff professionally done in seconds. Office has really moved on and now is a lot less bland.

I'm sure you could do the same with Pages and with the time I could probably learn it. I found the transition from Windows to OS X really easy, but I just can't say the same thing about Word to Pages. I have nothing against Microsoft and will use their products if they make great products. Love or hate Microsoft, Office has been one of their better products.

Now here's to hoping they add Harvard Referencing into their Citation tool. Why they didn't add the most used Referencing system in the world still baffles me. For now though I guess I will just use the other one, convert to Static Text and do a quick edit to Harvard.
 
seasurfer said:
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.
Click to expand...

"Paste and match style", in the Edit menu, below ordinary Paste.
 
Ludde said:
"Paste and match style", in the Edit menu, below ordinary Paste.
Click to expand...

Which, incidentally, is the way it works across most Apple apps (it works in Mail too, for example). There's even a keyboard shortcut for it.

Funny, doing this in the default configuration of Pages is even easier than in Word, which requires going to Paste as... and selecting Unformatted Text to get the same effect. (Depending on where you're copying from.)
 
"Paste and Match Styles" itself becomes unnecessary if you learn how to set up styles properly in Pages. This is easy, at lot easier in Pages than in Word -- but sadly many people migrating from Word are so fundamentally unfamiliar with the concept of styles that they never even try to learn how this function is handled in Pages. This is the source of much of my prejudice against Microsoft's software design philosophy -- they screw up fundamental stuff so badly that a majority of users essentially forget that the computer is meant to be a useful tool. They've almost single-handedly turned the word processor back into a typewriter. It wasn't easy, but they managed it!
 
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