Pages, Word, and You
So, it turns out that Pages isn’t the Word killer we thought it might be. Check out Dan Pourhadi’s review to see why. Basically, Dan explains that it’s much more a layout program than a word processor, although a pretty good one.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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via the keynote and Apple.com’s Pages er, page, I’d wondered about this. It looks much more about layout than writing a letter to Grandma.
I actually think this is cooler than a “Word-killer”. I’ll have to play with my father-in-law’s Pages install and see if it’s worth the $
my copies of iWork ’05 and iLife ’05 should arrive at my desk soon.
but yeah i also figured from the keynote that Pages wouldn’t exactly seek to be a Word-killer, more like a healthy alternative with a different approach to document authoring. I’ve scoured through OS X Word’s pre-baked templates, and haven’t typically been pleased.
keynote i think is far superior to powerpoint in everyway, once you crick your neck and get your head around the inspector. hey, i’d recommend it purely on the cube animation.
however, having spent a lot of time writing large docs with pages i find it a little trickier to migrate over from word than the keynote switch. the one thing that pages is definitely better at is (surprise surprise) image manipulation. if you’re in the creative industries then i would say get pagea asap. if you’re a standard business user just happening to be using a mac then my advice would be to sit tight for a bit and wait until pages 3 comes out.
I would say, if you’re working with text and images, word process in Text Edit or something that lets you just pour the text out on a page and then paste into Pages and use its superior layout features, treating the text as just one more object to work with. In the end, your work flow is much easier and your end product is much higher quality.
If all you need is the basic text, just use Text Edit or some similar app. Either way, needless complexity is removed and you can just get stuff done.