Pages with Office 2003/2004 text editing?

[LiterallySimon]

Hi,

do you think Apple will provide an option for native Office text editing (rather than "export") in Pages? I'm asking this because MS has made the specifications of the pre-xml formats available:

http://www.microsoft.com/interop/docs/OfficeBinaryFormats.mspx

 

[MisterMe]

Hi,

do you think Apple will provide an option for native Office text editing (rather than "export") in Pages? ...

You import a document in one of a number of formats. You edit till your heart's content. Then, you export in Word format. You then have a document that any Word user can use or edit. What more do you want?

 

[kuwisdelu]

I don't know if Pages can handle all of Word's special text formatting or if the Word format could handle all of Page's desktop publishing abilities. My guess is the reason you can't save natively in Word (or rtf) format is because they want to make sure what you see is what you get, as far as formatting goes, and don't want you to lose the Pages' formatting when you save natively, but it's a given you may lose some when 'exporting'.

Not a perfect explanation, but it's my theory.

 

[LiterallySimon]

You import a document in one of a number of formats. You edit till your heart's content. Then, you export in Word format. You then have a document that any Word user can use or edit. What more do you want?

Unfortunately that often doesn't work as smooth as it should do - that's at least my experience. The formatting doesn't look the way it should (and does with .pages).

I don't know if Pages can handle all of Word's special text formatting or if the Word format could handle all of Page's desktop publishing abilities. My guess is the reason you can't save natively in Word (or rtf) format is because they want to make sure what you see is what you get, as far as formatting goes, and don't want you to lose the Pages' formatting when you save natively, but it's a given you may lose some when 'exporting'.

Not a perfect explanation, but it's my theory.

I think you are right but there should be a way to make this an option when creating a new file or opening .doc. I just don't know if they want to...