[pairof9s]

"We would like it to be a Word-killer; but why is this taking years to implement?"

I'd remind you that Word has been out for 25 years. Development has to be managed as to avoid too many features requiring too much time to release, or focusing on limited important features with incremental enhancements over the same period.

I agree with your frustration with Pages' limitations, but as Vista showed us, taking a long time to create software that gives everyone everything often fails worse!

/

[bousozoku]

It seems as though a lot of people are missing the point that the whole application suite is $79, but want each application to compete with those equivalent applications in MS Office.
Pages is quite a deal (and has been since version 1.1) and it's just nice that it's working pretty well now.

[pcharles]

I am certainly not looking for a Word or PowerPoint killer, but I am looking for the few things I use in Word and PowerPoint. I have to confess that I have bought every verson of iWork and use it for fluffy things like family christmas letters because I like how it works for those things.

In an environment that is 2/3 windoze and 90% Office, it only takes problems with one or two features for me to run into serious roadblocks.

I would love to dump Creative suite in favor of Elements and Vectordesigner, but there are just one or two problems that prevent me from doing this. One big problem in the Adobe world is that the Design Premium Academic costs around $600. If you add up the cost of buying alternatives along with Acrobat then you soon get close to the Academic price of a much larger bundle, even if you do not need those applications.

[denvernative]

A couple things to keep in mind:
iWork '09 is $80 for a single user license. If I want to install it on both my desktop and laptop, its $100. Meanwhile, Office '08 (Home version, which is all I need) can be found for about $100 at Amazon and comes with enough licenses to install it on both my desktop and laptop.
I am definitely not an MS fanboy, but I do not think we should take price into consideration when comparing iWork to Office.
On a related note, scrolling a document in Pages '09 is abysmal compared to '08. I really, REALLY want Pages to replace Word on my laptop, but I just can't do that yet.
-D

[reyespoint]

bkempf1012 said:

Still no cross-reference?
Still no paragraph sorting?

bkempf,

I think you may have posted something about the paragraph sorting issue re: the last version of Pages as well.

I'm curious as to why this is important to you. If you'd like, feel free to respond to me with a direct message.

Thanks!

-Jeff Battersby

[reyespoint]

Hassly and non-intuitive indeed...

The data in each column is used as the header information, ie A1, B1, C1, D1, et al. So columns A, B, C, D... become Name, Address, City, State,...

Pages' error message says, "Please select a Numbers document that has one or more named header columns and one or more rows of data."

The wording of that error message may in fact be incorrect. At the very least, it's misleading.

You can individually select a column and make it a header column, but you'll continue to get the same error message. But, if you select the first (or any) row and then select Convert To Header Row, the data in each column of that row becomes the column header information.

Frankly, it's a bit of a bollox and the wording of the error message doesn't help matters much. Life would be much easier here if Pages just gave you the option to user the first row of data as the header row if there is no header row selected.

Meanwhile, creating a header row turns the data in that row into a Header Column and that data becomes the field names that you can use for a Pages merge. Painful? Yes. But easy enough to use once you get past the initial confusion.

Hopefully there will be some kind of fix in a future update. No word from Apple on that though.

-Jeff Battersby

[scottbayes]

reyespoint said:

Hassly and non-intuitive indeed...

The data in each column is used as the header information, ie A1, B1, C1, D1, et al. So columns A, B, C, D... become Name, Address, City, State,...

I do understand that the headers are for the columns below them. My question was about what to select: selecting a header row (e.g. either B2:E2, or the whole of row 2) seems correct, but selecting each column (e.g. B2:B50 or the whole B column) seems wrong (or at least tedious). Both terminologies were used in the article, and since I had problems, I wanted to be sure I understood correctly what was to be done.

Do I also need to establish and select a header column (e.g. A1:A50)? Seems unnecessary and wrong for a Mail Merge.

Do I need to avoid putting any actual data in column A, instead reserving it as a "Header column"? That would seem unnecessarily limiting.

Quote

Pages' error message says, "Please select a Numbers document that has one or more named header columns and one or more rows of data."

The wording of that error message may in fact be incorrect. At the very least, it's misleading.

You can individually select a column and make it a header column, but you'll continue to get the same error message.
But, if you select the first (or any) row and then select Convert To Header Row, the data in each column of that row becomes the column header information.

This is in fact what I did, selected a row (row 2, containing "field names", which were dummies for testing purposes: "A", "B", "C", "D") and converted it to a header row. A header column would not be useful in this context.

Or do the field names have to match Address Book field names? This seems unnecessarily limiting, but who knows?

Quote

Frankly, it's a bit of a bollox and the wording of the error message doesn't help matters much. Life would be much easier here if Pages just gave you the option to user the first row of data as the header row if there is no header row selected.

Meanwhile, creating a header row turns the data in that row into a Header Column and that data becomes the field names

(I find Apple's user-level error messages to be very unhelpful in most cases. Typical messages such as "There was an error opening file Xyzzy.abc" don't give me any clue as to what to do to resolve the problem. But that's a fish of a different kettle)

I still have trouble with the terminology "Header column" in this context. Unless I'm totally lost in space, each Header we're interested in is a header for a column, not a "header column" (which would be a column of headers). I agree the cells of the header row become field names for the columns below them.

In a different context a Header column could be useful, of course. E.g. a pivot table, or other non-database-ish table.

Quote

that you can use for a Pages merge. Painful? Yes. But easy enough to use once you get past the initial confusion.

Doesn't really seem painful if/when it works; the field names have to come from somewhere.

Anyway, initially I left-clicked in the left edge of the row containing header names (row 2), which selected the whole row, then converted to Header. But after that I kept getting the above-mentioned error when I tried to use that row in the merge. I also tried selecting instead the 4 specific cells of that row (B2:E2), the ones representing the field names for the columns containing my data, but that didn't work either. Does the first field name have to be in the leftmost column of the row (e.g. A1:D4)?

Quote

Hopefully there will be some kind of fix in a future update. No word from Apple on that though.

-Jeff Battersby

Thanks for the help, Jeff. I may try again later.

ScottB

[folklore]

Can anyone comment on Mellel v. Pages for academic work?
All of the comparisons tend to be Pages v. Word...

[DStokes]

I don't read the comments too often...but I did today and the one thing I haven't heard anybody talk about is the "font preview"??? Is there something I'm doing wrong or does Pages just not offer that. When I choose the fonts buttons...I want to see what the font actually looks like instead of JUST the name of the font. That drives me absolutely crazy! I don't want to have to highlight>change the font on the actual document>decide I don't like it and do the same thing over again for each font. I very well could be missing something...if so, please let me know!

[Ventzi_Zhechev]

The best way to quickly check the look of many fonts for your document would be to open FontBook, paste some text in the preview box and go through the fonts that you?re interested in.

[reyespoint]

DStokes said:

I don't read the comments too often...but I did today and the one thing I haven't heard anybody talk about is the "font preview"??? Is there something I'm doing wrong or does Pages just not offer that. When I choose the fonts buttons...I want to see what the font actually looks like instead of JUST the name of the font. That drives me absolutely crazy! I don't want to have to highlight>change the font on the actual document>decide I don't like it and do the same thing over again for each font. I very well could be missing something...if so, please let me know

Open Pages Preferences (Pages->Preferences) make sure the General tab is selected. About halfway down there is a checkbox (Show preview in Format Bar font menu.) Make sure there's a check in that box. Alternatively, you can hold down the Option key well opening the Format Bar's font menu and it will toggle the preview.)

Hope that helps!

-Jeff Battersby

[SallieB]

I was a long time Windows user. My favorite word processor was
Publisher - at first stand alone and then part of Office. When writing books or booklets the process was so simple. BOOK was a choice of layout, followed by portrait/landscape layout - and 4 pages with the option of text boxes on each. Reach the end of the 4 pages and you're asked - 4 more? With boxes? Yep - and on you go - smooth as silk.
I really like the Pages setup & do use it for some documents but why hasn't some genius figured out the simplicity of Publisher and applied it? Seems like everyone today is a writer so it's not as though there's no demand. As it is - I have Windows & Parallels installed and use Publisher. Upgrade Pages? Nah.

[crescentdave]

Re: no real font preview- this is just one of dozens of differences between Pages and Word. I know it's hard for the base to accept, but there are just some things Pages has yet to do as well as MS. You can talk about the 25 year head start ... but it's just whining. I haven't noticed anyone coddling zune owners because they started a few years behind the curve. They're behind the curve, period.

To me, working in a mixed shop, as well as a mixed household, what's even more dispiriting is how much further advanced Word for Windows is over Word for Mac. It makes me absolutely furious there is no parity between the platforms.

[rlav]

>Can anyone comment on Mellel v. Pages for academic work?

>All of the comparisons tend to be Pages v. Word...

Hear, hear! It seems to me that people who need to track changes, and people who need to work with Windows users, would be most interested in a comparison with Word, while most other Mac users would want to know how Pages compares with Mellel and Nisus.

Also, it would be nice if Apple's decision to opt for Endnote support in preference to Bookends or Sente could be addressed.

Overall, a very informative review, by the way. I really feel Macworld should allow reviewers of key software like this far more space. Many of us would happily lap up thousands more words like this.