RUBAIYAT  I agree that Pages' progress has not broken any world speed records. Progress seems to be in randomly odd directions, with the obviously broke ignored and things that used to work becoming broke in the new version.

My beef with Pages is all the blithely ignorant design decisions that seem to have the sole purpose of making things harder. Time and again they have reinvented the wheel, by adding more sides to it.

If you work only in the templates, and spend the time to learn its quirky ways, it can be usable, but go off the beaten track and you better have your Machete and Rough Planet Guide handy.

The split WP & Layout modes "solution" is execrable. Go from one to the other, and you have the fossil features of both appearing in the other to add to new user confusion.

How absurd that they are so incompatible that you have to resort to copy and paste to move material between them.

Guess which has most of the features of a DTP layout program? Why Word Processing mode of course!

Layout mode lacks any useful facing pages, no master pages, no auto flowing text and the need to endlessly insert pages is bizarre, as is the lack of any retrospectivity in the "templates". Word Processing mode is little better, lacking features that were standard 20 years ago.

No named retrospectively editable colors, no layers other than the master objects in WP mode, no ability to view and edit styles in one place, no bleeds, no spreads, no crops, no slugs, no imposition, no spot colors.

Worst of all if you output to PDF/X to try to send to a commercial printer it renders all shadows, reflections, transparency and text overlapping images at an unprintable 72dpi. Apple deceives its users by telling all the customers in their stores that this is a full DTP solution and then gives no warnings of the consequences if they try to use it to go to press.

Also no warning of exactly when your large document is going to become unopenable.

After the initial excitement comes the dawning reality that this is not going to be as easy as Apple made out, and growing irritation at invisible or hidden UI elements. Particularly the lack of a freely visible selection tool that can grab objects under other objects.

Most of all I detest the arse backwards way everything works.

Just to change a style, you have to replace it. To change a template you have to overwrite it. Using exactly the same name with the correct U&lc, but working blind because you can't see it. Coloring an object avoids the obvious method of selecting it and clicking on a color swatch and once applied you can't tell what color it is, because there is no feedback on selections!

Weird things like Personal Templates appear in Template Chooser in a nesting order opposite to the way you had them in Finder. Creating templates, that actually apply as expected, is one of the most convoluted long winded processes I have ever encountered, and of course they behave differently in WP and Layout mode. The counter intuitive way they work, endlessly catches me out and confuses new users.

Having thoroughly confused most users, forcing them to seek help, Apple of course has matched it with appropriately crap documentation. My guess is they are as clueless as to how it works as the rest of us, if not more so.

I can continue in far greater detail.

Curiously it is the seductiveness of something that has so much promise, but is so poorly executed, that throws up a challenge for me.  
(Version 4.0.1)

YOSHINATSU  Pages is the perfect tool for writers.

Implementing little features of DTP, along with nice thing like proper Word importing, and native export to .pdf/.doc, it's one of the best apps Apple has ever made.

Complete, stable, cheap, simple but full-featured, Pages blows Microsoft Word away.

A definite must-buy.  
(Version 4.0.1)

RUBAIYAT  Pages is an amazing amalgam of tantalising features and poor implementation.

If all you want to do is open up one of the very attractive templates and substitute your own material you will be reasonably happy. Try to make it do anything serious or make major alterations or try to create your own material and you will be confounded at almost every turn.

Despite being a clean sheet in design, it has been patched and patched again to try and make it fill some of the demands of its users. The patches add features in odd and inconsistent ways, some of which work - sort of. What doesn't get patched is what is wrong with this program.

The first thing that got patched was what has become 2 modes, Word Processing and Layout. As it was a bit of a dog's breakfast trying to be a Word Processor and a DTP program at the same time, Apple split the 2. You diverge at the point of selecting a starting template, then can't go back.

Some features work in one mode and some in the other. Apple makes hardly any effort to let the user know which does which. Crazily enough the only master pages are in the WP mode. The Layout mode just makes predesigned sheets which aren't retrospective they are like photo copies of the layout. Despite showing options for facing pages, the pages ignore them except for headers and footers. You actually have to create Layout versions for each side and manually put them in the right order. If you have headers and footers they will twist from one side to the other irregardless of whatever else is on the page.

There is no layers, no direct selection tool (for Pete's sake, what millenium is this?) the master pages are primitive in the extreme and only exist for WP mode, there are no named colors that you can systematically use in styles and retrospectively change, no spot colors, no crop marks, no real support for commercially ready pdf files (there may appear to be but they fail), reflections, shadows and text over bitmaps are rendered at a ridiculous 72dpi. I could go on for ever, but there just isn't room.

Apple frankly lies about the MsOffice compatibility. It saves and opens Word format files but has so many problems it is better avoided.

This is classic Apple post Steve Jobs' 2nd coming, all style and very little substance.

It is hard to believe that this is the child of the company that virtually started the DTP revolution and wrote the book on User Interfaces.  
(Version 4.0.1)

WILLIAM25  TROUBLE

OS 10.5.6, PPC, iMac , 2.0 Ghz

Would not install. Dialog reported iWork was not in the applications folder when it was in the original install place.

Machine acted funny after install. Restarted. Fans revved up and stayed that way for a couple of minutes.

Same way with Keynote and Numbers.

Watch out.  
(Version 3.0.3)

EVERLAST_34  Anytime I send a file made in Pages 09 to someone who uses MS Word, they always have a problem opening it. I then end up copy / pasting it into a Word doc. Kinda defeats the purpose.

Anyone else have this problem?  
(Version 3.0.3)

XIAOPANGZI  Observations:

• Although still not as crisp and clear as text on a Word page, antialiased text in Pages ’09 is much less blurry than in previous versions of Pages, so Pages ’09 is now viable as a replacement of Microsoft Word, as long as Find & Replace functionality is significantly expanded in the near future.

• Unable to search for bold, italic, underlined, subscript, superscript, or highlighted text, or text with specific fonts, colors, etc., within documents in which the original writer did not define styles (did not use a style sheet).

• Unable to use clipboard content for Replace All, such as when replacing all instances of “CO2” with the equivalent that contains the proper subscript number.

• Unable to specifically search for only one-byte or two-byte characters within a document, unlike the Japanese version of Word (or with Japanese enabled via Microsoft Language Register).

• Unable to automatically convert double-byte characters to their single-byte equivalents or vice versa.

• Unable to search upward.

• Unable to search for combinations of unspecified numbers and letters or use any other wildcard searches.

• Unable to search for unspecified uppercase letters or combinations of uppercase and lowercase letters.

• Unable to highlight text if the desired color is already selected in the Apple, Developer, Crayons, and Web Safe Colors subpalettes in the Show Colors formatting palette, so a different neighboring color has to be temporarily selected before reselecting the desired color to be applied to the current text selection.

• Difficult to identify the applied highlight color of selected text, as the System Preference’s default Highlight Color is still used even for highlighted text instead of Pages using a color that directly contrasts with the applied highlight color, as is standard in Word.

• Word files with first line indentation lose most of their indentation when opened in Pages.

Desires:

• An option in Preferences that enables certain Views—especially Show Invisibles—by default for all documents, whether newly created or imported from Word format

• Access to the Inspector via the pointer while inputting search (and replace) criteria in the fields of the Find & Replace dialog box, as most documents do not have styles defined by the original author

• Ability to search across all open documents and search upward to find the previous instance of any criteria

• Fullest possible regular expression search via the Find & Replace dialog box but preferably selectable from a pulldown menu with natural user-friendly language.

• Ability to apply the currently selected color in the Show Colors palette as highlighting for any selected text via a single click (without having to deselect the desired color first) and then have immediate visual feedback that the highlighting has been successful by displaying the text selection highlight in a color that directly contrasts with the applied highlight color.  
(Version 3.0.2)

EASER  I prefer Numbers to Excel, mostly because my needs for that program are simple, and it runs smoother and easier for me. I'm still playing with Keynote but find it promising. I do not like Pages. I ran a simple test. I created a Word document with a moveable graphic image wrapped in some text. Pages did not display the graphic when I opened that document. Nisus did. I'll be buying iWork for the other two programs, but not for Pages.   
(Version 3.0.2)

BRUMM  My opinion on word processors for OS X:

The last days I've tested many word processors and I found Mellel to be the best so far,

Mellel is not bloated like all the "Office" suites (Neo, OO, MS, are all to slow, ... for me Neo Office is the best of these beasts.)

and Mellel is better than:

- Nisus (Nearest competitor but Nisus doesn't support soft hyphen!, I simply cannot work without soft hyphen.),

- Mariner Write (really bad font display/spacing for many years now, only english, carbon - so it needs to be rewritten for future OSX releases, will they do that? I'm unsure.)

- Pages (Again no soft hyphen!, occasionally crashes and after a while gets very slow, ... but I exspect the next versions will be much better)

- Papyrus (very ugly, carbon, no real testdrive possible - crippled trial version, but some interesting features - I keep an eye on it)

- AbiWord (Many bugs and no updates the last 2 years, I think they don't support the Mac anymore)

- Bean (really fanstatic freeware, but based on Apples buggy text-engine. No soft hyphen! So only usable for some very short texts, best freeware I've seen for many many years - of course I keep an eye on it)

For now I will use Mellel.

The only things that I don't like are related to the interface design, for example the round beveled look of the ruler and tools section is very outdated now, a boring all-grey mix of alien spaceship ("aqua"-style) or early iTunes versions ("metal"-style).

But besides that Mellel has the best combination of features for me, so my money goes to them.   
(Version 3.0.2)

ANON BUD  Love it! This has become my replacement for MS Word 2004. It seamlessly opens Word docs and the comment feature integrates well with Word's.

The cost is great for iWork '08; so much so that I'll not be paying for another MS Office upgrade ever again!

Would like to see this cross compatible with Office so I do not have to convert Pages files to Doc each time I want to share something with Windows users, but this is only a minor thing for me.  
(Version 3.0.2)

ORION MK. V  No problem installing or running this update. Despite criticisms by some, I love Pages' amazing robust, but intuitive mix of tools. It's more a cross between Word and PageMaker than InDesign or Quark. It offers enough writing tools with enough layout tools to really be unique. Aside from early 1.x releases -- which were slow and buggy -- 3.x is really a very solid app.   
(Version 3.0.2)