Question: Do people have experience using iWork in general and Pages in particular? Are they any good? And more specifically, if I have to be able to open up MS Word files with track changes will that work in a tolerable manner?
« Philadelphia Story | Main | Obama on Training »
iWork?
09 Nov 2007 12:13 pm
Comments (16)
I use iWork, Pages in particular. Don't know about Track Changes, but the basics translate back and forth just fine. (Formatting, including tables and such, is flawless.)
I've used Pages for a year now and unless you have really special specific needs it works just fine. No problem open word docs or converting pages docs to word. It was only about $40, too.
Keynote is spectacular. The others are good. numbers has some excellent features, but needs a bit of fixing. It is a 1.0 product. Pages is good, but could be more light weight. Takes awhile to open up and a bit of getting used to. Pages is excellent for casual layout jobs. My daughter makes great use of it for High School projects.
All are much better looking than their MS counterparts. In my experience, exchange with MS products has been good.
I've had Office '04 since it was introduced on Mac and recently got iWork.
Everything I do now I try to do in Pages. Resumes, letters, novels... it just flows better in Pages than it does on Word. I think it's a worthy investment for only $79 ($71 with education discount). Especially considering the way you can open Office files in iWork apps.
Don't think I've tried out interoperability with MS Word track changes, but have you given a look at OpenOffice? Generally I find the Word import/export functionality to work pretty well on documents that are primarily text, although things go a bit pear-shaped when there are lots of embedded images/graphics/things in frames.
But the price is certainly fair.
Yeah, I agree that everything in Pages & Keynote looks better. Way better. But (at least on my ol' Powerbook G4), Pages in particular runs sloooooooowly. The girlfriend's MacBook Pro on the other hand has less of a problem. But it is still noticeably slower than Word.
I use Pages, which is reasonably good if you're only using it for text editing, rather than formatting. For example, if you use complex styles in Word or Pages you probably shouldn't expect perfect fidelity moving from one to the other. Pages retains most formatting, at least on Word 2004 for Mac documents. Your uses with track changes and comments should work well, but as other posters have said, you should probably use the 30 day trial and test it on a few documents. You should also be aware that text in Pages looks subtly better than Word -- I'm not sure why this is, but it makes working on long first drafts easier. Combined Pages with a good keyboard and I'm a reasonably happy guy.
I've only used Pages since the '08 version: prior to that, it was too primitive. Remember that Microsoft is supposed to release the next Mac version of Office in January. If it's half the relative improvement of Windows Office, it'll be a phenomenal upgrade.
Matt,
Pages in iWork '08 tracks changes very well, in my experience. It goes back and forth between MS Word pretty flawlessly.
The only catch is that it changes your workflow, since the native file format is .pages instead of .doc. When you open up a word document, it converts it to a .pages document and you have to re-export it as a .doc file if you want to share it with a Word user. Doable, but you have to adjust your workflow a bit if you're sending files back and forth to Word users.
If you're going back and forth between PC folks a lot, I'd suggest waiting two months for Office 2008 to launch and trying that before you make Pages your default word processor.
I haven't purchased iWork '08 yet; still using iWork '06. I refuse to use anything other than Keynote for presentations. Keynote is fantastic. I was always conflicted about Pages, but the new version looks like it (positively) answers my questions about it. I played around for a bit with Numbers on a friend's machine and found it will do anything I currently use Excel for. I've already hit up my wife to buy my '08 for Xmas.
why on earth do you need track changes? to relive your numerous grammatical and typing errors on this blog?
seriously, start proofing your stuff first before you switch to another platform.
One thing worth noticing: If you're on an Intel mac, right now Pages will fly circles around Word.
Of course there'll be a native Office one of these days (still not sure when).
I personally find pages more bearable than Office, but if you're very used to it and its advanced features it might not be worth the switch.
Anyway, I've decided I don't give a whit about formatting and I'm doing all my writing in Scrivener these days (http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html). I say so just as a satisfied customer.
I tried Pages on a heavily-formatted Word doc (I'm a patent lawyer, so we have lots of styles and margins and crap pre-set in the docs we work in). When I exported it back into a .doc, it was totally fucked up.
It's probably fine for simple term-paper-type docs, but for my purposes, sadly, it blew. I'm currently using Word 2007 via Parallels when I need to work at home.
Yep, complex formatting won't survive the round trip, but track changes, which is what Matthew specifically asked about, does in my experience.
I'm not surprised that Ryan's briefs and such don't work well. The less formatting, it would seem, the better off you are; the closer you are to just using text, which presumably gets passed off to the Atlantic layout guys, or to the blog, or whatever, and the farther you are from deciding on final copy, the better off you'll probably be with Pages.
Incidentally, I'm using Pages on a two-month-old aluminum iMac, which replaces a four-year-old PowerBook, so you should be aware of the other posters' comments about speed on older machines. Word and MS Office in general should be much faster on Intel machines when the native version is released in January.
Comments closed November 23, 2007.
| 
Heads in the Sand
Download the free trial and try it.
I prefer Word, but your needs may be different.
Posted by Petey | November 9, 2007 12:23 PM