[harpo64]

I didn't see it as Apple being taken to task, just a look at whether it works, and the consensus here seems to be that for anything more than basic text documents, it doesn't. The only sense in which Apple is being taken to task is their claim of compatibility which only exists on a very basic level. As others have pointed out, having to use an Export option rather than a Save As is an example of how the process is hardly transparent and seamless.

[cweber]

> {quote:title=harpo64 wrote: }{quote}As others have pointed out, having to use an Export option rather than a Save As is an example of how the process is hardly transparent and seamless.
[/quote]
I totally disagree with this statement. By not offering MS Office format(s) as a "Save As" feature, iWork applications avoid a split personality syndrome and guarantee that all their features will work cleanly, every time. Learning to choose "Export" when one needs to save to an external format is simple and keeps things organized. You are either inside where everything is seamless, or outside where you have to think a little more.

There's nothing worse than saving as some less capable format, and then wondering why things don't work as well as usual. I think Apple has done the right thing here.

[smallgroupdude]

I don't use Pages a lot. But to be fair to iWork I want to note that one of the challenges in our team is getting different versions of Word and Powerpoint to work with each other even though most of the people are using PC's.

[samrhall]

@cweber: I agree. I don't understand the complaint about the Export vs. Save As. If you are using iWork as your main suite, then you save in that format and export only when you need to share with someone on an Office format.
That said, I've just upgraded to Office 2008, and I like it so far. I still use iWork for my own work, but with a lot of Excel documents coming my way, Numbers' compatibility (especially with exporting back to Excel) just does not cut it.

[montgomery_burns]

samrhall said:

@cweber: I agree. I don't understand the complaint about the Export vs. Save As. If you are using iWork as your main suite, then you save in that format and export only when you need to share with someone on an Office format.

1) You also need to Export if you want to save as plain text or RTF.

2) It appears that Pages can open other formats but cannot directly edit them. Any file that is opened in Pages, whether plain text, RTF, or Word, automatically defaults to Pages format. This can be seen in the title bar of the document window. So if you open a non-Pages file in Pages and make changes, you have to click "Export", select the original format and then get a warning that the file name already exists, instead of simply clicking Save.

3) In Apple's own Preview and TextEdit applications, you save files to different formats using Save As. Consistency of design is often touted as an advantage of Mac applications. But here we have an example where Apple is not consistent with themselves.

Finally, it's interesting to note that TextEdit can save to many more file formats than Pages. For example, TextEdit can save files as HTML, OpenDocument, and Word 2007 (.docx) while Pages cannot.

[bigpics]

LukeBacon said:

For me the limitation of iWork is its lack of ability to 'Save' properly as an office .doc etc... having to use the 'Export' feature does rather devalue this ability, and for me it's loss of an absolute essential.

This is absolutely THE issue for me. On my PC, WordPerfect prefers to save in its own format, but can be set to save as MS Word by default, and/or to choose the format (many, many formats) to save as.

Pages insists on being "saved" in... ...pages (just what the world needs: another proprietary compound text document format), and THEN being "exported" to Word (or oldWord or whatever .doc files will be called someday).

Now I've realized you CAN export BEFORE saving (and then never save, to avoid two copies of each document you might need to share as Word, but that's still more complicated (and slower) than allowing a direct save in Word:

1) the file on your screen still says "untitled."
2) to save changes you have to re-export and then answer a "do you want to replace dialog"
3) when you re-open your doc original you get warnings on even the simplest doc.

e.g., I just typed five characters into a Pages new window, exported, and then opened it and the warning told me it had removed certain word-specific formatting characteristics. but I'd changed no margins, fonts, inserted nothing, so again extra steps for nada.

To me this smacks of a conceit which pokes its nose out of the tent in other ways in the Apple experience -- and in this case for no good reason I can think of other than trying to achieve lock-in to "the Apple way." It may work for them in the long run, but most of my docs have to be sharable with PC users, and pressing CMD-S is too much simpler than the cockamamie steps above to the point of making my preference for the Pages interface not worth the trouble of overly (and ARTIFICIALLY) complicated document management.

SINCE Apple touts "compatibility" as an important feature of iWork, can anyone tell me exactly what's so fracking special about the .pages document format that we must be put through such hoops for that compatibility??

Last word: maybe if turns out docX is a truly open standard and starts to be seen widely in programs other than Word, Apple will realize they're cutting off their nose to spite their face and adopt it, at least as a second alternate "save as". I hope so, as otherwise my only use for otherwise highly appealing iWork will be the occasional Numbers work sheet.

[vgiguere]

As a scientist writing numerous research papers, my main complaint with Page is its inability to work with citation programs like EndNote. The makers of EndNote complain on their site that Apple is not helping them create an add-on module for Page. This is a huge mistake for Apple, a company that is so present in the higher education/science market. Page is therefore completely useless for hundred of thousands of Mac users. To be fair, EndNote is currently incompatible with Word 2008, so we are stuck with Word 2004 for now (I have both Office 2004 and 2008 installed at the moment).

[folklore]

vgiguere said:

As a scientist writing numerous research papers, my main complaint with Page is its inability to work with citation programs like EndNote. The makers of EndNote complain on their site that Apple is not helping them create an add-on module for Page. This is a huge mistake for Apple, a company that is so present in the higher education/science market. Page is therefore completely useless for hundred of thousands of Mac users. To be fair, EndNote is currently incompatible with Word 2008, so we are stuck with Word 2004 for now (I have both Office 2004 and 2008 installed at the moment).

I've given up on EndNote. The last time I used its cite while you write (CWYW) feature, Word 2004 crashed so often that I started saving after each sentence. My short (less than 20 pages) document was as simple as they come, and Word still crashed four or five times an hour. That was the last straw for EndNote as far as I'm concerned.

I'd suggest taking a look at Sente and Bookends as alternatives to Endnote. Both have free demos and both have a feature set that beats EndNote. My research group and I just purchased a group license for Bookends that was very reasonably priced. I haven't yet used Bookends for a major project, but it certainly looks promising.

I'd also suggest using Mellel as an alternative to Word or Pages for academic work. Mellel was built with that sort of work in mind.

What truly sucks about it is that if you regularly collaborate with Windows users, you're pretty much limited to Word and EndNote, despite their inferiority compared to other products on the Mac platform. There just aren't any competitors to Word/EndNote for Windows.

[jamesboycott]

Thank-you for making this point. The Editor's comments were either sloppy or misleading. iWork does not "save" into Office formats; it exports to them. This subtle difference is the single greatest reason I refuse to make the switch to iWork. In an office/industry/country where .doc is the standard, I cannot work on a day-to-day basis in a word processor that forces me to generate a second file every time I want to share something with a colleague.

[samrhall]

[quote name='montgomery_burns']
>

samrhall said:

2) It appears that Pages can open other formats but cannot directly edit them. Any file that is opened in Pages, whether plain text, RTF, or Word, automatically defaults to Pages format. This can be seen in the title bar of the document window. So if you open a non-Pages file in Pages and make changes, you have to click "Export", select the original format and then get a warning that the file name already exists, instead of simply clicking Save.

Maybe it's due to the way I work. As much as possible, I use Pages as my native program. If I'm sending someone who uses Word a document, then I like being able to Export it and still have my original document open. Otherwise, you are doing a Save As, then for me, a lot of times going back to open the doc up in Pages.

Granted, if you are doing a lot of editing and sharing back and forth, then the compatability begins to fade. That's why I keep Office around. Plus, working between Numbers and Excel is almost impossible with the docs I receive in Excel. I much prefer working in Numbers, though.

[MJBlair]

>>>>iWork does not "save" into Office formats; it exports to them. This subtle difference is the single greatest reason I refuse to make the switch to iWork. In an office/industry/country where .doc is the standard, I cannot work on a day-to-day basis in a word processor that forces me to generate a second file every time I want to share something with a colleague.<<<<

Seems to me there's a very valid reason Pages "exports" to Word .doc rather than "saves" as default. File format. Pages files are packages. Word files (at least until docx) aren't. Besides, what would be the point of using Pages if you set the save file format to Word as default? You might as well use Word. Furthermore, "Save as..." requires a "second" file each time you want to share with a Word user too. To base your choice of Word processor on whether it "saves" or "exports" to Word is, well, a bit silly (said with all due respect). The choice should be based on word processing functionality. If Pages does what you want and does it just as well (or better in some cases) than Word, use it. If you're main criteria is Word compatibility, use Word.

[meta]

bigpics writes:|~11013]
bq. Pages insists on being "saved" in... ...pages (just what the world needs: another proprietary compound text document format)

The Pages file format is a [documented open format.

[noahcread]

I have found iWork to be an easy alternative to Office for all my personal and study needs. I still use Office '04 for any work related spreadsheets. Something about the way Numbers exports tab delimited and comma separated files doesn't agree with the database program my company uses. Other than that it feels nice to know that I'll only need to meet the iWork price point for any future upgrades.

[folklore]

MJBlair said:

Seems to me there's a very valid reason Pages "exports" to Word .doc rather than "saves" as default. File format. Pages files are packages. Word files (at least until docx) aren't. Besides, what would be the point of using Pages if you set the save file format to Word as default? You might as well use Word. Furthermore, "Save as..." requires a "second" file each time you want to share with a Word user too. To base your choice of Word processor on whether it "saves" or "exports" to Word is, well, a bit silly (said with all due respect). The choice should be based on word processing functionality. If Pages does what you want and does it just as well (or better in some cases) than Word, use it. If you're main criteria is Word compatibility, use Word.

You're missing the point: because Apple advertises "compatibility" with MS Office file formats, I should be able to open, edit, and save a document created in MS Office apps. You know. With Mac simplicity.

Even if I absolutely loved Pages, I work in an environment (academia) where collaboration is not just a norm, it's a must. I just can't know everything all by myself. But put me and a colleague or two together, and we actually do know everything about a specific topic. It might be that I have a good grasp of the statistical method, and the other fella's got a great grasp of the previous literature.

If the other fella is using Windows, he's using Word. When we're co-authoring a paper, I have to be able to open, edit (with changes tracked), save, and send the resultant file back to my colleague. She then does the same, lather-rinse-repeat, until we have a finished product. We have to preserve all formatting (i.e., styles), tracked changes, comments, tables, figures, footnotes, etc across all revisions regardless of who is working on the document.

I can't do that with Pages. Even if it could read and write Word files with 100% compatibility - which Pages simply cannot do - having to "export" the file is tedious and creates multiple files for the same revision of the document. It creates a document management nightmare. It's not simple. It's not Mac-like. It's a kludge. It's not what I think of when I see "compatible" in marketing materials.

In short, the folks who expect a "Save as" instead of "Export" aren't being "silly." They're asking for a feature that has long been included in other word processors. Both Word and Wordperfect can "Save as," and at least in the latest versions of Word, one can change the default file format to any one of a huge number of formats.