You probably own Apple's Pages, and you may even have opened it. If you did, what you think depends on what you're used to: new users just dive right in and start typing, while we've heard Word users complain that it simply isn't powerful enough for them. This is an odd one: they are actually right, but not in the ways they expect. Pages does lack some of the very heavy-lifting word processor functions that Word has, but few people use those. What Word fans
think is missing from Pages is the more general day-to-day features that in fact it has, and has very well.
Pages just tries to stay out of your way, and that is superb for when you want to concentrate on writing -- but it can be a pain when you know you need a feature and you can't find it. It's as if Pages took Microsoft's idea of the Ribbon toolbar, and made it work. The Ribbon is explicitly designed to show you only the tools you need right now, and yet in practice you ignore two thirds of the tools it shows you and you always, always,
always have to go hunting for where that thing you need is.
Mind you, the less you try to compare Pages to Word, the happier you'll be: you can do a feature comparison, but think about your writing instead of your experiences with word processors. This Pointers gives you a run down of the Pages tools that will help you get your writing done. While Pages isn't perfect, and we'll show you how to work around problems, its features do genuinely make this an excellent word processor.
This is specifically about Pages for Mac, and we tested it all on version 5.5.2 for OS X Yosemite. Some of what is said, however, may apply to the iOS version, now at v2.5.2.
Templates
We're just getting this one out of the way first because it's the one feature you will keep seeing. When you go to open a new document, you get options for completely blank ones in portrait or landscape and you get myriad templates. There are Pages documents here for writing newsletters, for term papers, for posters, for envelopes, for everything.
We have never clicked on a single template but "blank portrait."
Maybe this is just a function of what we write, but we need a word processor for text -- and tend to worry about where the words will go, and what they will look like, later. Plus, we never print anything out if we can possibly help it, so we didn't even know there was an envelope template until we went looking and blew the cobwebs off it. Since they're right there in front of you whenever you choose New Document, though, do have a scroll down and see what you've got. There may well be something that fits exactly what you need and if so, grab it and the best of luck to you.
Most of the time, however, you're going to be clicking on that blank document, and specifically on the portrait one. We'd really like a faster way to choose that, rather than schlepping through the template picker every time.
The blank screen
Write some text in your fresh new Pages document. By default, very little gets in your way. You see the white page, and your cursor is waiting for you. To one side, you get the Format palette and across the top you get a few icons for inserting images and so on. Compared to Word, it is barren -- and we like it.
There are more things you can add to this blank screen. Such as text, which is your job, and also a title. This is an oddity: you can click in the title bar of the document and enter text, but that is different to choosing to give it a title as you save the document. We recommend Save, because we always would. We're still not used to how Pages keeps saving for you.
In this case, though, there is also a handiness to using the Save dialog. It is simply easier to press Apple-S to bring that up than it is to click on the title bar. For some reason, that title bar click is tricky, and as keyboard junkies we're not always sure what to do after we've written the title. If that's you as well as us, this is what to do: just press return.
You can spoil Pages' clean look by choosing options from the View menu. Take a look at the gallery for how you can balloon out a simple page with options to show invisible text -- like using Word's Pilcrow button -- page layout boxes, rulers, guidelines, comments, image adjustment controls, and we've just lost count. Ah, right: there's an option to show the word count.
This is the only one we leave switched on, and again that is down to the type of writing work we do. Presumably Apple thinks most people don't need this, because it is not on by default, and also the little word count bubble gets in the way of your writing. That's very common on the iPad version, but also happens here. Nonetheless, the word count is useful, so we live with it.
Write with style
Pages has style, and it has styles. If you haven't already used these in a word processor document, then shame on you. Try them once and you'll never stop. In a good word processor, Styles are a system by which you say this sort of text is a heading, and this sort is a normal paragraph by highlighting the examples, and defining them. Pages makes a note of all the characteristics of the style, and later you can decide that headings should be in gigantic bright red text and normal body text should be green. After a couple of clicks, that's exactly what you've got. Every heading in your 170,000-word book is now garish red, and every paragraph is so green that it'll make you feel queasy.
Pages comes with many Styles already done for you -- these will be different in the various templates you can choose -- and they are all very tasteful. They're also smart; if you write a title and press return, Pages changes to make what you type next be normal body text instead of another title.
Write some text and highlight it, then click in the Styles part of the format palette. By default, that is right at the top under the word Text, and there will be a line like Title or Body. You may have to click on the lozenge button that says Styles if you don't already see this. When you've got it, though, click on the dropdown next to the word Title or Body: you'll get a list of pre-built styles. Choose one, and see your highlighted text change instantly.
Sometimes you just want to change one heading to bright red, in which case you can just choose the color from the next section down, headed Font. You can change anything about the line you've highlighted, from font and alignment to spacing and size. Make some random changes, and look back up at the style section: it will have added an asterisk to your style. So If you're writing away in the style called Body and then make it bold or vivid green, the style name becomes Body*.
Click on that to get the drop down list of styles. In that list, there will be a tick next to the active style, and because you've made a change, there will also be a pop out menu to the right. Choose that, and you'll get the option to say that every Body line in the document should be changed to this horrible green. You can create a brand new style, and call it Repulsive Green.
This does mean that to change all of your body text to green, you have to go through several steps. If it stops anyone writing in green ink, we think that's a price worth paying. However, it does also mean that this potentially huge change to your document requires a positive choice on your part. You won't accidentally change everything, and that was something that used to kill us with Microsoft Word. Mistype a keyboard shortcut, and you were looking at a hellish mess.
No hellish messes
Pages has all these style tools, and it has all those options for displaying rulers or page elements, but it also has taste. Without any tools switched on, without covering up your text with any rulers and options, Pages helps you design a good-looking page.
Drag an image into Pages, and start trying to position it. Pages will show you little yellow guidelines that move as you do. You'll see immediately when you've lined up something with the page or with other elements. No guessing, no squinting at the ruler, you just see unmistakably when you've got it right.
Speaking of dragging images in, go crazy. You can drag in JPEGs and more, and they will all go in nicely. Word creaks under the weight of images, and they may be the most common cause of crashes in that application. You can also choose images from your Photos, iPhoto, or Aperture libraries by selecting them in the Media button toward the top of the screen. Similarly, music and video from iTunes are a couple of clicks away.
You just need to think about what you're going to do with them in the end: if you're going to print this document out and staple it to a tree with a Lost Cat heading, you will want a photo -- but you won't want video.
Getting out of Pages
We may rarely print anything, but it's rarer that something we write doesn't have to go somewhere or to someone else. Pages has a Share button that lets you email a copy of your document to someone. We'd like it to be a bit clearer that you can share the document in different formats, that your recipient doesn't have to have Pages themselves. Still, once you choose Share and Send a Copy, you get the option to send by Email, AirDrop or Messages – and in each case, you can then change the format to the now-standard Word (.doc or .docx), Pages (if the recipient has it), a PDF, or as an ePub.
The odds are that you're going to choose Word. If you do that, click on the advanced options drop down and specify Format: .doc (1997-2004 compatible). It is astonishing that .docx is now 11 years old, and still so many people haven't upgraded that it's safer to send in the old format. However, we really recommend the older .doc for everyone, because we've had odd problems with Pages' version of .docx. It looks like OpenOffice users have the most difficulty reading these, but the older .doc format gets around that.
Actually, we've had most problems like this when sending from Pages on iOS. The iPad and iPhone version of Pages doesn't give you the option of the older format. As good as the iPad Pages is, this is one case where we tend to send documents out as PDF.
Bad Pages, bad!
Lacking from both the Mac and the iOS versions of Pages now is the ability to save a document in Rich Text Format (RTF). It simply is not there anymore, and there is nothing you can do about it.
Not directly, anyway. Pages is an enjoyable app to write in, and we like the way it has all this power under the hood but lets us just get on with our writing. We like it enough that we'll sometimes do a little workflow on OS X to get around the RTF issue. We'll write in Pages and then when we're done, Select All and Copy. Then we'll open Apple's note-taking app TextEditor, and use TextExpander's ability to paste plain text. Then we can save that TextEdit document, and send it on its way.
It's easier than it sounds, and doesn't feel convoluted when muscle memory in your fingers just does it all for you. However, it is a kludge, and we hope Apple pops RTF back into future versions of Pages.
That is one issue. Apple stripped Pages down to the bare essentials back a couple of years ago, rewriting it from scratch as it did with Final Cut Pro X, and as it is doing with iPhoto, which is becoming Photos. Right now it's mostly all back, but RTF is one key omission.
Still, take that roundabout workflow as a sign not that Pages lacks features, but that it's good enough that we put up with the odd issue like it. It's not our full-time, do-everything, turn-to-it-automatically word processor, but Word has become oh-yes-we've-got-that-somewhere in part because of how good Pages is.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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