Macworld Forums: Review: Pages ?09 - Macworld Forums

Post your comments for Review: Pages ?09 here

But still:
- no custom number formats (such as "Figure xx" or "Table xx")
- no support for additional table of contents (e.g. list of figures, list of tables,...)
- indent level in list setup cannot be stored in paragraph style
We would like it to be a Word-killer; but why is this taking years to implement? When can we expect the "PagesPro" application?

Still no cross-reference?
Still no paragraph sorting?

Being a daily Pages user, there are several things that are important to me that Apple actually implemented:
1) Save as Word doc... THANK GOD.
2) Live word counts... Again, thank God.
3) MathType support... Makes me want to buy MathType just so I can create a single document with all the formulas I need to remember.
4) Outline mode... this will seriously come in handy.
5) Full-screen writing mode... This is a lifesaver, and will probably keep me on Pages for awhile.
I'd rather focus on what Apple gave us, rather than what Apple DIDN'T give us. Pages '09 looks like it's definitely worth upgrading from iWork '08.
BJ

I’d say that the biggest issue for the scientific community was and still is the lack of cross-references.
The workaround for the integration with EndNote was to insert citation codes, export the final document to RTF to generate the bibliography and then replace the citation codes with the proper citations.
For equations I’ve been using MathEQ for ages and it has always been able to edit a formula if you paste it back from Pages. Besides, it’s a far better product, compared to MathType. For one, the MathType installer required me to close all running applications (what the hell?) and installed a non-unicode conformant version of the Symbol font. It took me some time to find out why some symbols in old documents were screwed :(
Unfortunately, there’s no easy workaround for the missing cross-references issue. The best way to deal with it that I’ve found so far is to bookmark all elements that you are going to reference to and then set up the references as hyperlinks to the proper bookmarks. Then, if there is a change of numbering, you first go through the bookmarks to update the numbers there and then go through the links to make sure they correspond to the bookmarks they link to. You can imagine that this is quite a tedious process when you have several dozen references.
And the inferior AppleScript support makes it impossible to build a script that could automate this task.
Add to that svevends’s comments and you see that working with Pages in an academic environment is still far from being a breeze.

Not to say that links do not work in a printed document!

<>
OK, I'm lost. Am I creating a header row, a header column, or both? Sometimes you say "row", sometimes "column" in this paragraph.
I went through steps that appeared to create a header row in Numbers (at least that choice was no longer available after I used it the first time), with simple field names like, "A", "B", etc, added 3 rows of numeric data for each field, then saved xyz.numbers. Back in Pages, I tried to define a merge field, but when I selected xyz.numbers, I was told I needed to provide a numbers document with headers and data.
I agree, it seems a bit hassly and non-intuitive.

Luckily, links do work in an exported PDF document, however.

Based on what I read on Apple's discussion board for Pages 09, Endnote is not working well in Pages 09. Given that for many the integration with Endnote would be a big selling point, and given the fact that Battersby mentions this feature under "pros," I think this review should have shed a light on these issues. They may reduce the application back to "boutique" status.

I really like what Apple has added to Pages 09, but I am not convinced it is time to put away Word just yet. While you can import and export word documents, advanced formatting and equation editing is lost. This makes colaboration with Word users pretty tough.

I find Keynote to be even worse. It takes everything people hate about Powerpoint-style presentations and makes them even more "in-your-face", but cooler to look at and therefore more likely to be used incorrectly. It is clearly geared toward business where the flash is more important than the message. The same problems with importing and exporting exist in Keynote. While I can open PPt Windows files with path animations, I cannot save them back to a Powerpoint because Keynote does not think they are supported. Even though PPt Mac does not create path animations, it will play them, so If I want to use path animation in my class I must use Windows to create the files, or present using a Mac. Neither of which are all that practical. Keynote does not save editable equations. Something else that cropped up in keynote is that you cannot link to hidden slides. In PPT I can hide slides with extra problems on and link to them with buttons. During class, if I feel students need to see extra problems, I can click a button and reveal some hidden problems that should help with the concept. In Keynote this is not possible. The embedded slide feature is cute, and keeps things tidy, but it does not seem to add any functionality to the presentation.

But not when you print them! :-)

Good review. Is there somewhere a list of ALL the new features? Also, with MathType, you do not have to purchase- if you download the trial, after 30 days it goes into Lite mode, which is equivalent to Equation Editor in Word and Claris/AppleWorks. At last!!!
The requirements say 10.4 or 10.5, but when I downloaded iWorks 09 it said it needed 10.5.6 to work. Which is it?
Can't wait for the Numbers review- many subtle changes it seems....

iWork does work in Tiger.

It sounds as though Pages 09 is finally worth at least looking at. If data merging is important, though, Word's data/mail merging is much more comprehensive than Pages at this point. Ironically, Word can merge data from Filemaker into Word documents, but Pages apparently cannot.