Pages 08 vs MS Word
I’ve been weaning myself off Microsoft products for quite a while now, and as I sit pushing through an Information Memorandum I think I’ve taken the final step. Pages from the Mac iWork 08 suite is just fantastic. I’ve been a heavy user of MS Word for a long time and have created some fairly monstrous system specs in the past. But these days presentation really helps and I found myself frustrated by Word’s crappy layout controls. I want multi-columns, floating objects, drop shadows .. basically Word should have bridged the desktop publishing divide years ago. Pages does this and I love it. I know I could create the same document in Word .. but it’d drive me nuts and I’d drop back to vanilla formatting.
So, I’ll issue this IM in pdf, export to Word for others to review and edit, and reap the benefits of how productive a Word Processor really should be. Not to mention iWork costs a ridiculous $99 next to MS Office’s $650 heft .. who’s a cash cow for Microsoft then?
July 24th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
Hearing this sort of thing is like music to my ears. (That a very old and sad cliche isn’t it? Sorry).
I am loathe - let me repeat that: loathe - to say this, but Office 2008 has had some major improvements and the page layout aspects are much improved.
Funny thing is that at the Office 2008 launch Word and Excel both frequently lagged on their demo machine- a maximum spec Macbook Pro. And most people at the launch walked away commenting about how it looked as though Microsoft had copied Pages button for button.
Not that they have a history of doing anything like that….. *cough*vista*cough*.
July 25th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
Yep .. I haven’t seen Office 2008. I’ve been using the old office 2004. Might be harder to get me off Excel, but so far Pages has been a delight to use ..
August 3rd, 2008 at 8:49 am
Unashamedly ‘mac’ orientated, I was keen to see whether I could change to Pages from Word vX - I certainly liked the price! My work is word-processor intensive and I need to be able to exchange documents with clients without losing version control or giving them any headaches. Pages’ file format was my biggest barrier to entry. It took me back to the Mac SE20s where every file had to be converted to be read on a PC. It’s the same with Pages. The last thing I need when exchanging documents with clients is to have to convert (and reconvert) documents with every exchange - and who’s going to promise me 100% integrity every time?
So, reluctantly I upgraded to Office 2008:mac from Office:mac vX. It’s prettier, but that’s about it … at least I still get to curse Bill Gates whenever my autonumbering goes skuwiff!
August 3rd, 2008 at 12:33 pm
yep, Word no doubt has a stranglehold on the market. Rats! I’m trying my best to break free (we’re also using Neo Office in-store .. http://www.neooffice.org/), but can certainly see when documents are exchanged and Word is the standard .. there’s not much choice. Although adobe is doing some interesting things … if they had a commenting/revisioning system within acrobat reader, that might become an option for publishing documents for review. And then there’s http://acrobat.com … http://www.adobe.com/acom/ .. why not create and collaborate online at the same time???
August 21st, 2008 at 11:43 pm
My enthusiasm for Pages waned dramatically when I discovered the absence of two critical features: outline numbering and cross-referencing. Mac app developers need to “grasp the nettle”