Pages or Word

[macness]

I use a macbook pro and do light word processing ( resumes, cover letters, etc..) which one should I use. If I use pages I can still send my documents as word documents right? I'm already using numbers over excel and it just seems so much more user friendly, especially if your doing more basic tasks (budgeting, weight loss, etc...)

 

[mfram]

The only reason I would use Word is if it's vital to have absolute compatibility with others using Word, like in a business setting. Otherwise, I see no reason to use Word.

 

[Pentad]

I use a macbook pro...

You need to ask yourself if you will be exchanging documents with anyone? If the answer is yes, then you might consider Office for the Mac. Out of your list, you mentioned resumes. If you are sending resumes and they need to be in Word format, that might cause trouble. I know, Pages can save in Word format but depending on what you are doing, it is not always 100%.

Numbers is nice but it too is not Excel and does not support many features in Excel.

If you aren't exchanging data with someone on Windows, you should be fine.


Cheers!

-P

 

[marcperrot]

I've been using Pages since I switched to Mac and I don't see myself ever going back. I've noticed Pages' .doc saves have been getting better over the past couple years and I rarely have any issues anymore.

 

[TC400]

I'm sorry this is going to hurt some big apple fans lol.
I tried pages and imo I could't pass the iWorks UI after using office for years thats what I like and know I ordered office for mac from bb still no word on when that order will get here but I think you may be better off with Office over pages.

 

[Rhinoevans]

Microsoft Office is the GOLD standard!

 

[Blondie :)]

Agreeing with everyone else here. Based on your usage, it seems like you'll be sending quite a few of these documents to others. If that's the case, then you'll definitely want office for mac. This is due to the fact that even though pages and numbers can save in the same file format, the files themselves may be read a little differently across software packages. Since almost everyone uses office (based on a majority of windows users and mac users I know) I would recommend office.

 

[emori]

As a former Windows user I could not get used to Pages.

Word on Mac is not as good as the Windows version, but still more "comfortable" than Pages for sure. You won't need to relearn everything, if that's your case.

Also, it's the standard that everyone uses.

 

[el-John-o]

Using parallels, you can run Word for Windows just fine. I do so in 'coherence' mode. It's costly, but, if you already own a copy of Office for Windows, it really doesn't end up costing you much of anything. (vs buying Office for Mac) It will also let you run lots of other Windows applications. Using coherence mode, applications open up as if they were Mac apps.

I love pages, personally. It's simple, quick, less bloated. It's more powerful than a basic text editor, but not as insane as word. It's also more friendly when adding graphics and such like that. Using Microsoft Word feels like driving a tractor trailer. It can do a lot, and it has a lot of power. But it's also big, slow, fairly unwieldy, requires a bit of knowledge and skill to truly use it, AND, you are pretty locked in to what you can do (formatting is very difficult if you want to do anything 'different'). Pages it a bit more like a sedan. It won't do the load the tractor trailer can do, but it'll handle your commute. It'll do so more cheaply, more easily, quicker, and more comfortably. Just decide which one you need.

To compound what others have said, if you need compatibility with other Office users, don't rely on Pages export to .doc/.docx functions. It may fail to transfer formatting when you need it most.

Also, consider OpenOffice (OpenOffice.org). It's a free, open source alternative, and it's very good. Again, same caveats. Less features than Word, and perhaps less user friendly than pages, but it IS free, and if you don't need compatibility with other users it's fantastic. Lots of schools and universities are adopting it actually, it's free, the students no longer have to purchase expensive software on top of expensive books, and it can save a TON of money for the school (each and every computer in a school needs to purchase a license! Though Microsoft does do some volume discounts for educational institutions)

 

[Badrottie]

I have used Office for Windows for years until I switched to MBP, I find myself struggled with Office for Mac 2008

 

[tillsbury]

Using parallels, you can run Word for Windows just fine. I do so in 'coherence' mode. It's costly, but, if you already own a copy of Office for Windows, it really doesn't end up costing you much of anything.

VirtualBox is free and does the same thing.

But for the OP, I'd suggest giving Pages a go to start with. It's simple and clean, and does most things you'd want. As far as sending letters is concerned, you obviously want to send most of them in PDF format, not Pages or Word. Only when you're collaborating will you need to send a word format document, and you can do this. Some really complex documents will barf a bit, but usually not significantly unless your job is co-editing complex Word documents.

 

[SDAVE]

Word.

Pages is good so is Keynote, but Word is definitely the standard for pretty much every type of business.

Also don't send resumes in .docx, send it as a PDF. Even though Windows can't display PDF natively, most Windows computers come bundled with Acrobat Reader anyway and services like Gmail will display it without any issues.

 

[Ploki]

I just switched to Pages from Word.

Crappy programming and implementation on OS X. Also Ribbon is totally counter-intuitive for OS X.

Excel is a different story, Numbers doesn't even come close.

Keynote is better than Powerpoint.

That is all.

 

[Abazigal]

I am using office as I picked it up cheap under the home use programme. I do use keynote as it syncs with my ipad more readily though.

 

[jojoba]

I have both. I really like Pages, but I always use Word if I need to exchange docs with people who work in Windows environments, so I don't need to worry about formatting issues.

 

[el-John-o]

VirtualBox is free and does the same thing.

But for the OP, I'd suggest giving Pages a go to start with. It's simple and clean, and does most things you'd want. As far as sending letters is concerned, you obviously want to send most of them in PDF format, not Pages or Word. Only when you're collaborating will you need to send a word format document, and you can do this. Some really complex documents will barf a bit, but usually not significantly unless your job is co-editing complex Word documents.

True, but it consistently performs much slower than every other option. It's also significantly cheaper!

I do some gaming and run some heavier windows apps too so the few bucks to get the fastest currently available virtualization software was worth it for me. If Word was the only application though, VB would probably be more than adequate.

http://www.itworld.com/virtualizati...n-smackdown-parallels-vs-vmware-vs-virtualbox

 

[tillsbury]

True, but it consistently performs much slower than every other option. It's also significantly cheaper!

I do some gaming and run some heavier windows apps too so the few bucks to get the fastest currently available virtualization software was worth it for me. If Word was the only application though, VB would probably be more than adequate.

http://www.itworld.com/virtualizati...n-smackdown-parallels-vs-vmware-vs-virtualbox

But if you read that "review", you'll see that the reviewer hasn't even used Parallels before, and is seriously mistaken in everything he says about VirtualBox, and doesn't mention speed at all (although the comments below it confirm that VB outperforms the other two, which is my experience too). The only thing VB can't do that Parallels can is run the Bootcamp partition virtually, which is neat, but since Parallels' website wouldn't even let me pay for it I don't rate the support much, again confirmed by other comments.

None of the virtualisation systems will let you run 3d games in a window on a mac, of course, the performance just isn't there. If you want to do this you need Bootcamp. For most other apps, though, virtualisation is fine.

 

[el-John-o]

But if you read that "review", you'll see that the reviewer hasn't even used Parallels before, and is seriously mistaken in everything he says about VirtualBox, and doesn't mention speed at all (although the comments below it confirm that VB outperforms the other two, which is my experience too). The only thing VB can't do that Parallels can is run the Bootcamp partition virtually, which is neat, but since Parallels' website wouldn't even let me pay for it I don't rate the support much, again confirmed by other comments.

None of the virtualisation systems will let you run 3d games in a window on a mac, of course, the performance just isn't there. If you want to do this you need Bootcamp. For most other apps, though, virtualisation is fine.

Oh, whadya know, I must have linked the wrong thing. The one I had read before did several benchmarks, various 3D games, tasks in applications like photoshop and office, file copy and hard disk benchmarks within the VM, etc. etc. I've read several where, in actual benchmark tests, VirtualBox rates consistently slower than Parallels or VMWare. (I'm not knockin' it, I love VirtualBox and do use it on other machines, but it is what it is).

For office tasks, VirtualBox is the way to go. Why pay for something you don't need. But, that's just one of several sources that have shown that VMWare Fusion and Parallels run applications much much faster than VirtualBox. If that matters to the user (and they are willing to pay for it), it's worth mentioning.

FWIW, I'm able to run PC games inside Parallels just fine. Runs just as well as you'd expect an HD4000 laptop to run. I had two issues with VirtualBox. One, was it performed poorly in some games and 'heavier' apps. Now, granted, a virtual machine is not the ideal situation to be doing that stuff. But, I really wanted to avoid boot camp, so being able to is a plus. Second, the unity mode wasn't near as nice as coherence, and I had some issues setting it up. The biggest issue, was it never seemed to like to behave when I switched between my 2560x1440 display, and my onboard MacBook Pro display. Parallels isn't bothered at all by it. An experienced user could probably fix both of those things, save money, and chuckle at me over here paying for Parallels. But, for me, with the education pricing, it was worth the seamlessness, performance, and ease of setup and the fact that it worked with all of my 'stuff' quite well.

 

[thejadedmonkey]

Office. Pages is a joke.

 

[IJ Reilly]

Another vote for Pages with OpenOffice as a (free) fallback. I've been using Pages since version 1.0 and have rarely needed the fallback. I have never understood the logic of using software just because most other people do. By that reasoning we should not using a Mac either.

Pages will be a bit of a learning curve for Word veterans, but well worth the effort. Once you get good at templates and styles you will wonder why you ever tried to wrestle with big and clumsy Word.

----------

Office. Pages is a joke.

I wrote and published a hardcover book using nothing but Pages. So I guess that's hilarious.

 

[thejadedmonkey]

I wrote and published a hardcover book using nothing but Pages. So I guess that's hilarious.

And I can make websites using nothing but Notepad and Paint in Windows 95. It doesn't mean I'd want to though.

 

[IJ Reilly]

And I can make websites using nothing but Notepad and Paint in Windows 95. It doesn't mean I'd want to though.

What a silly response, which only reveals how little you know about an app you dismiss without any rationale or justification whatsoever.

 

[RafaelCastro]

I have used windows for many years, I am certified in all Office products and recently change to Mac.
I must say that I prefer pages.

 

[MCAsan]

It is a business decision. For the very low cost, try pages. If it works for you, you have saved money compared to word. If pages does not work for you, return it to apple and get word.


Personally I had years of grief with the windows version of word doing blue screens in the middle of contracts and technical documents. These days I stick with pages.

 

[malch]

There is a fairly major Word file corruption issue that can happen with big Word files (in my case it was a file with embedded images), that has to do with Word's Auto-Recover system, and perhaps a conflict with Time Machine... not sure of all the details, but I had a major crash a week or so ago: couldn't even boot up so eventually had to take my MacBook Pro in to an Apple Repair place. The guy got it going, but told me to replace the hard drive.
I got the machine home, made a backup, and then (because it was continuing to operate and with my backup I felt safe to keep using it) searched the internet for info about a problem like the one I'd just had. Found something finally. Eleven pages long, and counting:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3504333?start=0&tstart=0

I'm not trying to scare you away from Word, which I prefer to Pages, partly because it's so commonly used. But beware that there's an issue, that seems to be with really big Word files. Maybe it'll be fixed with the next OS update.
Regards,
malch