Some Power Users Are Unhappy With Lost Features in the New iWork

[TheGdog]

Except that half of the pro users don't get it. Some love it, some hate it. Talk about serving to (all) pro's. And with Avid's PT11, the performance gain of AU's are gone so lots of pro's are going to switch now.

I disagree, PT11 is a disaster. And AVID doesn't give a dump about their customers. We have a protools machine at work for our Venue sound console. They have screwed us over several times. Apple isn't perfect, but logic is the future platform for us. PT has nothing on logic in the power department.

Anyway, back on topic. The bottom line here is that Apple hurt people using iWork for demanding tasks, in order to have cross compatibility. The only real issue here is that apple didn't communicate with its current users about what would happen to their documents. If so most of these issues could have been avoided.

I have 0 doubt Apple will add features as time goes on. And for those who use iWork for tasks that don't work with '13, use 09. Just don't open your documents in the new one.

 

[TheGdog]

search and replace for text including a tab or carriage return, and select and modify noncontiguous text,

Wait! How does search and replace affect the mobile user base? I am starting to question my own belief that Apple made this changes to better work with mobile.
Search and replace doesn't affect mobile at all. You can do it on a mac, but not iPad. Either way doesn't change how a document looks or is edited on an iPad.

 

[Night Spring]

Reporting back... it doesn't work.

I did this AND did a Get Info and changed it from there and both keep listing Pages 5.0 as the default.

Okay, not good.
Wonder why they did it like that... *sigh*

Wait! How does search and replace affect the mobile user base? I am starting to question my own belief that Apple made this changes to better work with mobile.
Search and replace doesn't affect mobile at all. You can do it on a mac, but not iPad. Either way doesn't change how a document looks or is edited on an iPad.

I don't think Apple went and deleted code from the existing apps, I think they rewrote it from scratch, and they just didn't get around to writing code to search and replace tabs and line breaks. Hope they add that back, it's a useful function to have on mobile devices, too.

 

[jerirat]

After reading all the problems with the new version of Pages I made copies of several different types of documents I've created in earlier versions of Pages. The only one that opened with no changes was a simple 2 page letter.

Novels, layouts, and grad school papers were trashed to varying degrees.

I was planning on picking up an iPad Air for the tighter Pages integration but now I'll be waiting to see if Apple improves the new Pages app. It would've been my first iPad.

I've deleted the new Pages and will continue using Pages 09 until something better appears.

 

[APPLENEWBIE]

This new Pages will cost my business a lot of time and money!

Ok, I'm hating it.

Loss of the vertical ruler, which I use daily.
Loss of the floating inspector pallet, which I use daily.
Inability to view comments serially in a sidebar (apparently). i only see a small box indicating the location of a comment.
No way to automatically indent text after a series of bullets/numbers.
No search in comments.
No automatic capitalize at beginning of sentence.
And many others....

WORST OF ALL: it appears that if I open a 4.3 pages document in Pages 5, when it closes it it automatically saves it as a Pages 5 document, so that it can only be opened in Pages 5! I have several older Mac computers in my office that will never have mavericks, and will never have Pages 5! What now, Apple?

I have roughly 5,000 pages documents in my business. I will now have to go through a training process to show employees how to recover the 4.3 version, which will take time. I will likely have to go to another word processor, perhaps MS Office for mac, which I previously tried and disliked intensely. More expense and training! And, this will make me think twice about upgrading my existing older macs. Also, I will have to figure out way to (hopefully) batch convert all these files to a new format.

I cannot use Pages 9! Thanks a lot, Apple. Dumbing down a productive app used by thousands of businesses is just unacceptable.

Many of the changes look as if they were done to get parity with iPad apps. Parity going the WRONG DIRECTION!

Who is in charge at Apple??? Those that do real work there must use MS Office or something with power... Unbelievable....

 

[2stepbay]

I cannot use Pages 9! Thanks a lot, Apple. Dumbing down a productive app used by thousands of businesses is just unacceptable.Many of the changes look as if they were done to get parity with iPad apps. Parity going the WRONG DIRECTION! Who is in charge at Apple??? Those that do real work there must use MS Office or something with power... Unbelievable....

You have basically summarized 22 pages here of comments. Yes, Apple has lost touch with its user base all in the name of progress.

 

[Tlingit]

I'm afraid that you missed my point. I was responding to someone who was basically saying that iWork was the engine of the computer. Given the fact that, at least based on rough bench marks, an iPad 2 has enough raw processing power to run iWork '09, that analogy is simply false. The reason for stripping down of the features in iWork has nothing to do with the "horsepower" of the platform.

No, I got your point, I just don't agree with it.

Who cares what the "reason" is for stripping down iWork? The point is it happened, and while that may not a big deal for some, for others it is a hardship that is not at all comparable to a broken car radio.

For example, if your 150 page dissertation was just toasted by Pages 5.0, and you are up against a deadline and now have to redo research and writing, you would feel like you are trying to cross the finish line in a car with a broken engine, not a broken stereo.

No one runs his or her business on the theoretical processing power of an iPad 2. Results pay the bills, not horsepower, and Apple's ambush amputation of iWork features has left some of us impaired.

That said, I think I'm wasting my time here.

It's nice that so many people are unharmed by the iWork upgrade, but it's also kinda weird how many of them feel like they know more about how people use iWorks than the people themselves do.

Of course I'm not talking about you, Snowy_River, I'm commenting on the discussion thread.

 

[Tlingit]

... I have roughly 5,000 pages documents in my business. I will now have to go through a training process to show employees how to recover the 4.3 version, which will take time. I will likely have to go to another word processor, perhaps MS Office for mac, which I previously tried and disliked intensely. More expense and training! And, this will make me think twice about upgrading my existing older macs. Also, I will have to figure out way to (hopefully) batch convert all these files to a new format.

I cannot use Pages 9! Thanks a lot, Apple. Dumbing down a productive app used by thousands of businesses is just unacceptable.

Yep. That's what I've been saying too. My business has just been screwed over by my trust and confidence in Apple, and boy are my Microsoft friends are gloating about it.

It's like Apple, Google, Adobe, Yahoo and Microsoft are having a contest right now to see who can be the most arrogant and out of touch with their customers.

I don't see a path now for my business except to make that painful move back to Microsoft Office. That's training, batch file conversion, productivity loss and probable loss of document integrity, but at least I'll be back in step with the rest of the world.

Right now the current version for MS Office for Mac is 2011.

My plan for now is to keep using iWork 09 until the next MS Office for Mac is out, then I'm moving back to Office.

Apple can make iWork compatible with an i-Etch-a-Sketch for all I care, I'm not getting burned like this again.

 

[69650]

I'm reading that they've removed selected row sorting from Numbers. That would make it completely unusable for me which means I'll have to head back to good old MS Office again. Very sad day.

Dumbing down the OSX version to match the iOS version is the wrong way to go, they should have upgraded the iOS version to match the OSX version.

 

[Snowy_River]

No, I got your point, I just don't agree with it.

Who cares what the "reason" is for stripping down iWork? The point is it happened, and while that may not a big deal for some, for others it is a hardship that is not at all comparable to a broken car radio.

For example, if your 150 page dissertation was just toasted by Pages 5.0, and you are up against a deadline and now have to redo research and writing, you would feel like you are trying to cross the finish line in a car with a broken engine, not a broken stereo.

No one runs his or her business on the theoretical processing power of an iPad 2. Results pay the bills, not horsepower, and Apple's ambush amputation of iWork features has left some of us impaired.

That said, I think I'm wasting my time here.

It's nice that so many people are unharmed by the iWork upgrade, but it's also kinda weird how many of them feel like they know more about how people use iWorks than the people themselves do.

Of course I'm not talking about you, Snowy_River, I'm commenting on the discussion thread.

Well, we could flush out the analogy, if we wanted to. If you're a traveling businessman who was depending on being able to listen to a report while on a trip, only to find that the stereo in your new car didn't support the disc...

Or, we could adjust the analogy. Instead of the stereo, we could liken it to the tires. A flat tire due to lack of quality would definitely impair you with getting across the finish line.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but if you're working on a 150 page dissertation and you don't have a back up of the dissertation, full copies of all of your data, etc., only partyour loss from the Pages upgrade can really be blamed on pages. Computers crash, hard drives fail, files get corrupted, etc. In such a "mission critical" project, only a fool wouldn't have a back up that is no more than a few days old. Now, would it suck to lose those few days of work? Absolutely. Could it mean that your fighting hard to meet your deadline? Quite likely. Could all of that be blamed on Pages? Sure. But if you have to redo research and anything more than the last couple of days of writing, then that's on you. (Not to mention the fact that someone figured out that you can undo the editing changes made by opening a document through the "revert to" menu command. Neat trick. Should be easier to do, though.)

Also, I do agree. There are some real pricks on this thread. I'm as upset as anyone about this update, though I'm not about to jump ship away from iWork '09. So long as it works, I'll keep using it, with the hope that Apple gets their collective heads out of their collective derrières and fix the updates so that they are properly capable again.

This situation definitely does suck, but to my way of looking at things, it's not the end of the world. Heck, it's not even the end of the usefulness of iWork ('09, that is).

I'm reading that they've removed selected row sorting from Numbers. That would make it completely unusable for me which means I'll have to head back to good old MS Office again. Very sad day.

Dumbing down the OSX version to match the iOS version is the wrong way to go, they should have upgraded the iOS version to match the OSX version.

If that's true, then that's just crazy. Selected row sorting is part of the previous version of Numbers for iOS. So why would it be removed? That's not a case of dumbing down the OS X version to match the iOS version. That sounds more like an actual bug.

 

[TheGdog]

Its starting to seem like they just forgot a bunch of stuff. Lets hope we get some updates here soon.

 

[unplugme71]

Yup. Been a nerd since the ZX-81, I know the value of a proper backup strategy.

Doesn't mean I'm not disgusted at the totally arrogance they've shown in this. For every user who does have a backup there will be many more who just had their work ruined, and Apple just didn't give a toss about them.

----------



How's this for starters:

REMOVED:
Select non-contiguous text
Outline view
Customizable Toolbar
135 templates
Capture pages/sections
Drag reorganize pages
Duplicate pages
Delete page
Manage Pages
Subscript/superscript buttons
Select all instances of a Style
Retain zoom level of document
Facing pages
Layout Breaks
Layout Margins
Endnotes
Media Inspector links to iPhoto library on external drive
Media Inspector links to Aperture Library
Alignment Guides
Styles Drawer
Merge Fields
Drag and Drop VCards
Default Start Up page
Vertical Ruler
Style Function key shortcuts
Bookmarks and Links
Images within Tables
Import Styles
Clean Import of older .pages formatting
User Guide
Search Sidebar
Open Type features
Textbox linking
Background Object selectable
Storyboards
Text to Tables
Tables to Text
Tables in Headers/Footers
Export to .txt or .rtf
Multiple Comments view
T.O.C. clean numbering
Selective formating in Character Styles
Insert File Name
Search in Media Browser
Bullet points in comments
Search comments
Two up view
Paste and keep style
Accented characters in Footer
Mail Merge
Mask with shapes other than rectangle
Find & Replace special characters eg paragraph returns
… and more!

Read more at http://macdailynews.com/2013/10/24/apples-pages-5-0-an-unmitigated-disaster/#OVr2Y2J34T4I571r.99

Yikes that list is long!

 

[imanidiot]

This is hardly an original thought, but Pages 5 is the most destructive "upgrade" of a formerly wonderful piece of software I have ever experienced. I reinstalled 4.1 but have already experienced problems with files being crippled because they are saved as Pages 5 files, and can't be opened in Pages 4.1 because suddenly something is missing (the error message reads "The required index.xml file is missing."). I can open them in Pages 5, but the formatting is screwed-up. As is Pages 5, and Apple's heavy-handed approach. This is really a flawed and even arrogant move, IMHO.

Apple knows what you need better than you do. Like hell they do.

 

[rboy505]

The inability to export to RTF is kinda big. I wouldn't consider it a power user feature, it is a nice option when working with cross platform applications.

RTF is a standard, one that Apple has used high in the chain for ages. Not being able to export to RTF is a forehead slapping dealkiller.

 

[The Captain]

This is perhaps Apple's greatest blunder in a decade….

It's bad, but it's not FCP X bad. No to be as bad this release would need to have been missing all the old features along with the inability to even open old documents. A new workflow that follows a "new paradigm" in english that apple has decided you needed, so that now in Pages all sentences will be called "word bundles" and will start from the right, the number "9" has been replaced with the "⸘" symbol, and the "old boring" space used to separate words has been replaced with an underscore. That would have been as bad.

My whole problem with what Apple has been doing lately is what I now call the "tweening of Apple". It seems that all the design decisions are based around the question "can a disinterested 13 year old use it on a bus"? The only problem is my business doesn't employ any 13 year olds.

 

[IJ Reilly]

It's bad, but it's not FCP X bad. No to be as bad this release would need to have been missing all the old features along with the inability to even open old documents. A new workflow that follows a "new paradigm" in english that apple has decided you needed, so that now in Pages all sentences will be called "word bundles" and will start from the right, the number "9" has been replaced with the "⸘" symbol, and the "old boring" space used to separate words has been replaced with an underscore. That would have been as bad.

My whole problem with what Apple has been doing lately is what I now call the "tweening of Apple". It seems that all the design decisions are based around the question "can a disinterested 13 year old use it on a bus"? The only problem is my business doesn't employ any 13 year olds.

Not to turn this into a contest (a blunderthon?) but having your documents destroyed the moment you click on them is pretty incomparably miserable. A lot of comments have been made about Apple "dumbing down," but I think this misses the point. They are prioritizing mobile, because that's where the growth is today. That much I think we all understand and to a degree accept. What's harder to accept is being forced to go backwards, and unwittingly at that.

 

[2stepbay]

It's nice that so many people are unharmed by the iWork upgrade, but it's also kinda weird how many of them feel like they know more about how people use iWorks than the people themselves do.

Well said.

 

[The Captain]

Not to turn this into a contest (a blunderthon?) but having your documents destroyed the moment you click on them is pretty incomparably miserable. A lot of comments have been made about Apple "dumbing down," but I think this misses the point. They are prioritizing mobile, because that's where the growth is today. That much I think we all understand and to a degree accept. What's harder to accept is being forced to go backwards, and unwittingly at that.

Blunderthon! I love it.

 

[RiK]

I hope that everyone contributing to this thread has left an appropriate review on the app store...

Not to mention sending reports to Apple. I'm making a point of sending every individual missing feature as a separate report. Let's make sure they're *really* aware of the gravity of the situation eh?

 

[Tlingit]

Well, we could flush out the analogy, if we wanted to. If you're a traveling businessman who was depending on being able to listen to a report while on a trip, only to find that the stereo in your new car didn't support the disc...

Or, we could adjust the analogy. Instead of the stereo, we could liken it to the tires. A flat tire due to lack of quality would definitely impair you with getting across the finish line.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but if you're working on a 150 page dissertation and you don't have a back up of the dissertation, full copies of all of your data, etc., only partyour loss from the Pages upgrade can really be blamed on pages. Computers crash, hard drives fail, files get corrupted, etc. In such a "mission critical" project, only a fool wouldn't have a back up that is no more than a few days old. Now, would it suck to lose those few days of work? Absolutely. Could it mean that your fighting hard to meet your deadline? Quite likely. Could all of that be blamed on Pages? Sure. But if you have to redo research and anything more than the last couple of days of writing, then that's on you. (Not to mention the fact that someone figured out that you can undo the editing changes made by opening a document through the "revert to" menu command. Neat trick. Should be easier to do, though.)

Also, I do agree. There are some real pricks on this thread. I'm as upset as anyone about this update, though I'm not about to jump ship away from iWork '09. So long as it works, I'll keep using it, with the hope that Apple gets their collective heads out of their collective derrières and fix the updates so that they are properly capable again.

This situation definitely does suck, but to my way of looking at things, it's not the end of the world. Heck, it's not even the end of the usefulness of iWork ('09, that is).

Laughing. I enjoyed this post, especially since I did worry you might be able to hear the "tone" I had as I wrote mine. Yes, I was whinging quite a bit, but I'm a friendly.

BTW, that dissertation example I gave... I was referring to an earlier person's post about his (or her) dissertation, that wasn't my personal experience.

As for my personal experience, because I only upgraded 1 of 15 computers, and only opened a few documents, I'm in pretty good shape.

The problem isn't the destruction of my legacy files, the problem is I now know my office suite is 3+ years behind where I need it to be.

For example, I love the html export of the new Keynote. Problem is, I can't use the new Keynote because of its amputated features. Before I could make due on the very stale iWork 09, but now that I've seen its successor and it is a step backwards, it will be a good 2 years before iWork has the functionality it did in 2009. I think I've got to move on.

I've got old CDs with archived files in various formats: WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, Quattro Pro, Ami Pro... the one constant over that time has been Microsoft. Maybe it's time to give up on supporting the very able underdogs and join the herd for good.

Moo!

 

[Tlingit]

iWork 09 has become iDon'tWorkAsWell 13, but it is the ambush file conversion and lock-in that makes the loss of features so galling.

Were it not for the file conversion we could have worked around the loss of features problem by going back and forth between the old and new versions of iWork. Instead, Apple engineered the software to lock us in and force us to use their dumbed down version going forward.

That manipulation has to be deliberate, right?

Way back in the 1980s WordStar, Word and WordPerfect could open older files without destroying them, and let you save files to either the older or newer file format.

Why is that suddenly now beyond Apple's ability to program into Pages?

 

[imanidiot]

iWork 09 has become iDon'tWorkAsWell 13, but it is the ambush file conversion and lock-in that makes the loss of features so galling.

Were it not for the file conversion we could have worked around the loss of features problem by going back and forth between the old and new versions of iWork. Instead, Apple engineered the software to lock us in and force us to use their dumbed down version going forward.

That manipulation has to be deliberate, right?

Way back in the 1980s WordStar, Word and WordPerfect could open older files without destroying them, and let you save files to either the older or newer file format.

Why is that suddenly now beyond Apple's ability to program into Pages?

Wordstar was my first word processing program when I purchased my first computer in 1985. It's looking a lot better than Pages 5, after all this time. I'm not going to try to express my rage at Apple, or whomever within Apple is responsible for this travesty. But I have a feeling that, at some point, everybody's Golden Boy, Jon Ive, signed off on it. Which is not encouraging, given the power he's been given. Apple=Maoist? Apple=fascism? Apple as the opposite of the paradigm-changing "1984" commercial? We have met the enemy, and he is us. This has happened before, historically and culturally, it has happened before. Hubris leads to...nemesis. Tim Cook beware...

 

[AllergyDoc]

...Ami Pro... /QUOTE]

You triggered a flashback!

I liked Ami Pro.

 

[Snowy_River]

Laughing. I enjoyed this post, especially since I did worry you might be able to hear the "tone" I had as I wrote mine. Yes, I was whinging quite a bit, but I'm a friendly.

BTW, that dissertation example I gave... I was referring to an earlier person's post about his (or her) dissertation, that wasn't my personal experience.

As for my personal experience, because I only upgraded 1 of 15 computers, and only opened a few documents, I'm in pretty good shape.

The problem isn't the destruction of my legacy files, the problem is I now know my office suite is 3+ years behind where I need it to be.

For example, I love the html export of the new Keynote. Problem is, I can't use the new Keynote because of its amputated features. Before I could make due on the very stale iWork 09, but now that I've seen its successor and it is a step backwards, it will be a good 2 years before iWork has the functionality it did in 2009. I think I've got to move on.

I've got old CDs with archived files in various formats: WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, Quattro Pro, Ami Pro... the one constant over that time has been Microsoft. Maybe it's time to give up on supporting the very able underdogs and join the herd for good.

Moo!

Oh yes, I can see your point. I have files that date back in a variety of formats, myself. Mostly, mine are old AppleWorks/ClarisWorks, or RTF (gee, if only I could protect my current Pages documents by exporting to RTF…that's a core feature that no one would ever dream of dropping, right?). The RTF files are there because I had a number of documents that I wanted to future-proof. It's great to know that they are, too.

I also have quite a few documents that go back to the original versions of Pages. Looking at the feature sets, one can see that dropping of functionality isn't unique. Sometimes there are arguments for it. I think it was the '08 to '09 transition that saw Pages drop HTML export (seeing as how you mentioned that in Keynote). It was around the time that Apple was getting iWeb put together, so the argument was that they were providing a proper website building tool, so Pages shouldn't be used that way any more. And... now where's iWeb? (Almost non-functional in the latest OS versions…)

Myself, I can't see going back to Word for the majority of what I use Pages for (page layout). If Pages ever really starts to fail (like iWeb?), then I'll have to look to the more standard tools, like InDesign (groan, that means dealing with Adobe...). My presentation needs are few and far between, so I could probably make do with the new Keynote just fine. My spreadsheet needs are most often pretty basic, too, so, again, I could probably do just fine with the new Numbers. In the rare case of needing more powerful spreadsheet tools, I have always looked to MS Excel, which is about the only program that I have ever really liked using by MS.

So, I guess I'll wish you luck with your conversion process. Wish me luck on my holding on tooth and nail. And maybe we can both wish Apple luck on getting their heads on straight and taking care of their customers.

 

[Night Spring]

I totally feel for existing Pages users who find functionality they depend on suddenly gone. And I think Apple should have done a better job of preserving documents created with the old version, and I find it very odd that the old version of Pages can't be set as the default program to open .pages files.

But today, I decided to give the new Pages a whirl, and opened a document I was editing. As I was working on it, I wanted the opinion of a colleague, so on a whim I sent her a sharing link to my Pages document by email. She clicked on the link from her Windows machine, it opened up in the web browser, and we were off editing the document together. She was just so very impressed by how easy it was to collaborate on it. We weren't doing any fancy formatting, just basically sharing the text and exchanging ideas, typing in our suggested changes in two different colors so we could easily tell who had typed what.

I know Google docs have had this collaboration feature for a while, and I think Microsoft Office has this feature also if you pay for the subscription? Anyway, I never thought of using Microsoft because I don't want to pay, and Google docs just seemed... I don't know, too much work to set up. With Apple, I didn't have to do any setup -- I had just updated Pages because it was already on my MacBook Air, and my colleague didn't have to do anything other than click the link I sent. My colleague plans to buy an iPad Air on Nov 1st -- she was planning on buying one anyway -- but now she's excited to try this from her new iPad. Our workflow just got significantly enhanced, and I expect we will be collaborating more often and more in depth because of this new feature.

I know to people who lost the features they depend on, it seems as if Apple is doing everything wrong. But after today, I feel they are doing at least some things right.