[Homer S.]

Hi, does anyone knows wich will be better for doing simple things(not so pro sheets)?

[Big Mac]

It isn't difficult to figure out what what kind of word processor you need. If you need the best possible compatibility with MS Word, you should buy Word. If you want a crap load of features and feature bloat (features that aren't really useful but make the program seem more impressive) get Word. If those two things aren't important to you, then there are a variety of word processors that will work for you. In addition to Pages, there are established third party word processors such as Mariner Software's Write. Pages appears to be user friendly and capable, and it appears that Pages and Keynote are forming the basis of the AppleWorks replacement. That means it's here to stay. However, few (if any) of us have had the opportunity to try it yet, which means you may want to wait awhile to hear some opinions on it before purchasing iWork.

[phillryu]

Go for Pages, you won't regret it. The ONLY thing MS Office offers atm are spreadsheets through Excel, but that's probably coming soon for iWorks. And in terms of word processing, lists, tables, charts, image wrapping, headers, footers, they're all in Pages. It's pretty difficult to think up a useful feature that's not.

[Chuckit]

Does Pages include Word's awesome ArbitrarilyScrewUpListFormatting2005 feature? I don't think I could get by without that.

[juanvaldes]

Originally posted by Chuckit:
Does Pages include Word's awesome ArbitrarilyScrewUpListFormatting2005 feature? I don't think I could get by without that.

Not yet....

[Sophus]

Originally posted by juanvaldes:
Not yet....

Too bad, I will miss it at my next deadline

[mitchell_pgh]

I think the two applications are still VERY different.

I'm unfortunately locked in to word because of work and the need to be cross platform. Word is necessary. Sure you could say "but Pages offers Word import" try telling that to your boss when the formatting of a document is hosed at the 11th hour on a critical project.

Pages is geared for home users that don't need or want to spend $400 purchasing MS Office.

I would also say, Pages is designed for people that want more then a word processor. They want Quark/InDesign light. Something where they can get their images and text together with easy to use templates.

[parsec_kadets]

Originally posted by mitchell_pgh:
I'm unfortunately locked in to word because of work and the need to be cross platform. Word is necessary. Sure you could say "but Pages offers Word import" try telling that to your boss when the formatting of a document is hosed at the 11th hour on a critical project.

So are you saying that Word doesn't randomly hose formatting?

I've been playing with it for the last couple hours, and I have to say that for the price I'm impressed. I am finding that it does operate differently than Word. For example, I decided to give my resume the once over in pages. In Word I have it setup so my skills are listed as a two column, bulleted list. In Word you can just make your list, select it all, and then tell it to split only the highlighted part into two columns. That doesn't work in pages. If you do that, it changes the number of columns for the entire element you are in. That can be bad if your working in the main body. I ended up having to make a new text object, splitting that into two columns, then anchoring it to the text in the body.

Now the above sounds kind of painful. But that's what's impressive about pages. In Word I would have had to search the menus to make the text object, splitting it out into columns, then searching the menus again to anchor it in place. In pages I just made the text object from the tool bar, opened the Inspector, and everything I needed was right there. While the Inspector is very similar to the Palettes in Word, there's only one and it stays the same size horizontally (that was a pet peeve of mine in Word). I also felt like I had 100% control over everything in my document. I don't get that with Word.

I will say this though. The one feature that pages lacks that I think will turn a lot of people off is track changes. That can be very useful, even if it does introduce some insecurity into your document.

[Ji Eun]

just this morning i edited a major document in pages. the document was created in Word some months ago, heaps of heavy charts and images, was a graduate school economics paper full of footnotes, references, TOC, etc. for me this was the test of Pages as a possible Word-killer, and the result is... if you are NOT doing multi-user 'track changes' editing (as mentioned above) or equation editing, and if you are importing all your tables and images from Excel or Keynote / PPT, then Pages is pretty much IDEAL.

i would never dream of creating a 'serious' table / graph in Pages as it is not geared toward that in the first place. at the same time i would not use Word either for those tasks. but if you are doing your slides / tables / graphs in Excel, PPT or Keynote, Pages imports via copy / paste beautifully, command c --> command v, in fact it handles this much MUCH better than Word does, imo. it's faster and more accurately formatted by default to fit your page margins and whatnot. PPT slides and Excel charts, for example, import into Pages as a regular image to which you can add a stroke or shadow or whatever via the Inspector, same as in Keynote.

Also, as you know, you can export files in any number of formats including of course PDF and DOC, and the first time you open an exported .DOC in Word you will be very pleasantly surprised that formatting, margins, etc are almost entirely intact, however you should do a quick check of the import to make sure everything is as it should be. After using Word since version 6 on Windows and later Office X / 2004 on my iBook G4, Pages presents an attractive alternative for most of my everyday word processing needs, not to mention the very nice templates which may come in handy if i ever need to find a lost dog or whatever.

While not a 'power user' application, it is by far the best Word alternative I've ever used, and for US$79 it is an absolute bargain compared to MS Office. i can not recommend iWork strongly enough, if for nothing else than Pages. Kudos, Apple.

[mitchell_pgh]

Originally posted by parsec_kadets:
So are you saying that Word doesn't randomly hose formatting?

I was basically saying "the right tool for the right job". I'm not saying Pages isn't amazing, but Word shouldn't be nervous. Pages is more of a quasi page layout program with a built in word processing program as compared to a full fledged word processing application.

Pages lacks a thesaurus, grammar check, etc. (I'm not saying they aren't coming, but I wouldn't say it's a Word killer just yet)

[voyageur]

I wonder if bibliography software developer ISI Research plans to eventually have EndNote work with Pages. That's an important requirement for many researchers.

[dividend]

a) to do simple things: use textedit or word
b) to do good-looking things which need to look consistent and will be long, use Pages.

I am testing pages at the moment and will return later with a more in-depth review.

[LeeG]

Originally posted by voyageur:
I wonder if bibliography software developer ISI Research plans to eventually have EndNote work with Pages. That's an important requirement for many researchers.

They will argue it works via RTF, etc, there is a section in the manual of Endnote 8 for how to use with other word processors, but I know what you mean.

Until Endnote supports Pages with Cite-as-you-write, I am STUCK with word. It's the killer feature for writing articles with many references.

BTW - does Pages support RTF??

Lee

[Superchicken]

What does end notes do?

[voyageur]

Originally posted by Superchicken:
What does end notes do?

EndNote is a bibliographical database into which you import your references when writing research papers or journal articles. It interfaces with Word and will automatically format your citations and bibliography. You tell it the journal to which you're submitting your article, and EndNote formats it according to their style for you.

It also allows you to do literature searches of many online databases, so you can easily build a library of references based on certain search criteria.

[BHD]

Originally posted by LeeG:
Until Endnote supports Pages with Cite-as-you-write, I am STUCK with word. It's the killer feature for writing articles with many references.

I understand why people feel the need for the functionality that Endnote provides, but the app itself is a horribly-coded piece of software peddled by a company that has little respect for its users. Every year they release a new bug-fix and call it a full version upgrade.

I'd like to see Apple add this sort of functionality as a system service and erase ISI's monopoly in this market.

[ManOfSteal]

Originally posted by LeeG:
BTW - does Pages support RTF?

Yes.

[kidtexas]

Originally posted by Ji Eun:
if you are NOT doing multi-user 'track changes' editing (as mentioned above) or equation editing

In my humble opinion, if you need to do equation editing, you should run from word as fast as possible. Can you say Latex?

[Sage]

Along those lines, a question: Does Pages actually do multi-user track changes, or are you just saying that it handles it really badly? I use Track Changes and Comments quite often, so that's important to me (I just realized that was a really stupid sentence).

[Randman]

I don't think Pages is meant to replace Word. I plan to use both, just as I often use TextEdit now, then import the file into Word.

[wataru]

Originally posted by kidtexas:
In my humble opinion, if you need to do equation editing, you should run from word as fast as possible. Can you say Latex?

Word is the last thing you should be using if you need to do equations. LaTeX all the way

[LeeG]

Originally posted by BHD:
I understand why people feel the need for the functionality that Endnote provides, but the app itself is a horribly-coded piece of software peddled by a company that has little respect for its users. Every year they release a new bug-fix and call it a full version upgrade.

I'd like to see Apple add this sort of functionality as a system service and erase ISI's monopoly in this market.

Amen- it is buggy garbage, but needed, and it IS a killer function.

L