[bigpics]

meta said:

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.

Quote

a "open" format that .01% of computer users can open......

[cweber]

Folklore, I think you are barking up the wrong tree. What you require is a 100% drop-in replacement for Word. Pages isn't marketed as such, because it is not. If your stated level of compatibility is of such central importance, then you are best off using the same product as your collaborators, maybe even on the same platform. Nothing wrong with that.
In general your needs and requirements should determine the choice of software, not the other way around.



Back to the main topic: The article's title asks, "Can they get along?". That's a simple question and the simple answer from my vantage point would be: "Mostly yes, as long as your needs are simple and straightforward."

[dpaanlka]

iWork and Office together was the subject of an article I wrote a few months ago, entitled "iWorking with Windows."
You can find it here:
http://www.info-mac....king/index.html

[folklore]

cweber said:

Folklore, I think you are barking up the wrong tree. What you require is a 100% drop-in replacement for Word. Pages isn't marketed as such, because it is not. If your stated level of compatibility is of such central importance, then you are best off using the same product as your collaborators, maybe even on the same platform. Nothing wrong with that.
In general your needs and requirements should determine the choice of software, not the other way around.

MJBlair said that requiring a "Save as" command was "silly." I was merely demonstrating that it is not a silly requirement at all for serious work. No barking here. :)

I agree 100% that iWork and MS Office get along reasonably well, particularly for home users. I posted much the same earlier in the thread. More demanding users or people who need to collaborate with Windows users will likely be disappointed by iWork.

For the record, I use Pages for simple flyers, and my wife uses it to create a complex monthly newsletter. I'm no iWork hater. It is simply inadequate for my work - which happens to involve quite a lot of "getting along" with complex MS Office documents and cross-platform collaboration.

[dpaanlka]

folklore said:

MJBlair said that requiring a "Save as" command was "silly." I was merely demonstrating that it is not a silly requirement at all for serious work. No barking here. :)

Correction... for your serious work. Plenty of people do "serious work" in iWork all day long, myself included.

[folklore]

Fair enough. Naturally, serious work gets done in iWork. I've said as much myself - my wife puts together a sophisticated newsletter every month in Pages that Word simply would not be able to handle. It looks stunningly great, and it takes her next to no time to format the document. Pages is a wonderful tool.

But that doesn't involve getting along with Office, which is the topic here.

The fact remains that for serious collaborative efforts involving complex documents, iWork and Office do not get along well enough for one to depend solely on iWork. Frankly, I place most of the blame for that on Microsoft - the market would be better off if everyone used a published, real standard document format instead of proprietary, de facto standards. Blaming Microsoft for it doesn't get my journal articles written, however, so I use Word when collaborating.

[dpaanlka]

The same can be said in reverse. In a group project where everyone has iWork '08 except one person who has Microsoft Office, the person with Office is the one adding the complications.

[folklore]

dpaanlka said:

The same can be said in reverse. In a group project where everyone has iWork '08 except one person who has Microsoft Office, the person with Office is the one adding the complications.

Logically you're correct, although the chances of that happening are infinitesimally small. Mac users are a minority of computer users, and iWork users are a minority of that minority. And if you have even a single Windows user in your work group, it doesn't matter how much the rest of you like iWork - your Windows user will be using MS Office.

Which, once again, means that if your documents are complex, you'll be using MS Office too. If your documents are simple, iWork may suffice. Frankly, I wouldn't bet any deadlines on it, though, and your workflow will be needlessly complicated by the exporting from Pages that's required.

[dpaanlka]

My point being that you have to make the distinction between something being fundamentally wrong with iWork itself and the complications of trying to use alternative software in a world dominated by one that often produces unsatisfactory results.

It shouldn't be a "requirement" for iWork to flawlessly work with every document format under the sun.

[folklore]

dpaanlka said:

My point being that you have to make the distinction between something being fundamentally wrong with iWork itself and the complications of trying to use alternative software in a world dominated by one that often produces unsatisfactory results.

It shouldn't be a "requirement" for iWork to flawlessly work with every document format under the sun.

You and I can certainly agree that requirements are task dependent. Some users may not care whether iWork can work with MS Office documents.

Those users would not read this thread, since the topic of discussion is whether MS Office and iWork "get along." If I didn't have to work with people using MS Office, I wouldn't care a single whit about MS Office compatibility.

Again, I'm not an iWork basher. I think it's a great software suite, especially given its price. Home users can certainly get away with using iWork instead of shelling out full retail for MS Office. But if your livelihood depends on collaborating with people that use MS Office - if you require your Office suite to "get along" with MS Office - then iWork obviously falls short.

[kepardue]

A little perspective needs to be injected. Microsoft has an Office release cycle longer than the span of Pages' entire life! OpenOffice has a six month beta period alone that's only producing an application that looks and acts identical to version 2.0 with a few minor new features. Apple has taken Pages from nothing to a true alternative with three versions in four years. And, as it was pointed out, Microsoft is a moving target with file formats. You can try to match it but you can be guaranteed that it's going to change in a year.
In all fairness though, Apple is just as bad, if not worse. I mean, do you want to save in iWork '05 format iWork '06 format, or iWork '08 format? It's ridiculous. But look what's happened since iWork '08... OpenDocument has gone to version 1.2 with its format which pretty much completes the spec, Microsoft has released most of the inner workings of their old binary formats, and Microsoft has recieved ISO approval on OOXML.
I mean, there's so much focus on data interoperability and opportunity to improve the import/export capabilities that with the next version or two out there's no reason that we shouldn't have near-native open/save in standard formats with consistent rendering... note that I'm talking about the ISO reference spec on OOXML, because we all know that MS is going to change the goalpost as they always do.
I would love to see iWork adopt ODF as its default format and move beyond proprietary data formats for office applications. But... could you even express the Numbers model of multiple-tables-per-sheet in ODF?
Innovation and open standards rarely go hand in hand, it seems.

[plot]

iWork remains a poor substitute for AppleWorks and any Microsoft product remains unnecessarily complicated and clunky. Apple desperately needs to upgrade AppleWorks. AppleWorks is still easier to use than iWork, has more features than iWork (e.g., database, painting, drawing), runs faster than iWork, and its files take up less space than comparable iWorks files-- i.e., an AppleWorks spreadsheet file takes up less space than a Numbers file and opens and saves faster.

[sailingwindward]

Don't buy this they need to get the Bugs out first, when you save a file no one you send it to can open it (especially Docx)
I called customer service and they asked if I could open the file, when I said yes I was told it's not their problem that no one else could open it ( so basically too bad for me)
I finally uninstalled it from my Mac, I guess better luck next time.

[nrets]

I too use Word 2004 for research papers and grant applications and rely heavily on EndNote (which works perfectly fine for me). However, I got tired of dealing with Word's slow and jumpy scrolling speed and its habit of making figures suddenly appear in the wrong place, stacked on top of each other. I found that for large documents with lots of figures Pages '08 is so much better. That leaves the problem of EndNote incompatibility. I tried to use Sente but I had problems importing my EndNote reference library which has about 1,500 references and gave up dealing with its clumsy interface. The easiest thing is to open EndNote and cut and paste groups of citation markers onto the Pages document. Save the Pages document as a Word file and use endnote to scan and insert citations. Saving as a Word document does not appear to mess up the formatting and figure placement. Then reopen the document in Pages and you are all set. The one problem is that Pages does not keep the invisible markers EndNote inserts in the Word file so that you can unformat the citations. So if you want to change the format you have to go to the intermediate Word document. It requires a little bit of keeping track of document versions, but so far has been an OK workaround.