Pages Doc. Giving Me Trouble?

[chelseasayshi]

So, I've posted about Pages before because I'm really new to it and working out the kinks, so here we go. I bought Pages so that I could save my documents to the Cloud so that my school docs would be safe. I was under the impression (from the internet and a friend who uses Pages and the cloud) that it would be really simple to upload it to the cloud as pages then download it somewhere else as a Word doc, but that's proving difficult. When I go to iCloud, it has a Download button, but PDF and Word are grayed out, and only Pages is available. The computer I'm trying to open it on only has Word and is a Dell, not a Mac. Is there something I'm doing wrong, or was I given bad information?

Also of note: I have a few Word documents in my cloud, as well, and they open on the Dell in Word just fine.

Any help is appreciated!!! Thank you!

 

[curmudgeon32]

Just tried it myself, and I get the same result. No idea why the PDF and Word options are even there if they're greyed out.

Looks like when you're working on your document in Pages initally, you can go to File > Export and save it to iCloud as a PDF or Word doc. That shows up separately when browsing your iCloud documents through a browser, and of course you have to do that export every single time. There is a way to hack Pages so that it will keep its save focus to a .doc document without having to export every time. Not sure how well it works with iCloud, though.

If you need cross-platform compatibility, I'm afraid iCloud/Pages is a pretty bad solution. I'd go with Google Drive maybe? Also, I'd really recommend Dropbox over iCloud. It's a whole lot more intuitive to deal with, and much better for sharing and being able to access your stuff on other platforms besides OS X.