The story of how I acquired a copy of Apple's Pages software (part of the recently introduced iWork package) is an interesting one and is a good example of why Apple is gaining more acceptance in the industry these days. It all started with a new job... a return to a marketing position (which I hadn't done for years in favor of a more technical SE job), complete with a brand new Marketing department: a new VP, a few great people, and a handful of new ideas. And a lot of work. One immediate task: Create a newsletter, for both print and email.
Not having much of a budget per se, I sat down to a Microsoft Word newsletter template. It started almost a month ago, and began life as an eight-page design that would be big enough to house a whole quarter's worth of company and industry news. The MS Word template seemed pretty good, and text wrapped (more or less) as it was supposed to between text boxes in a two-column layout with a sidebar on the outside of each facing page.
My happiness lasted only a few days, until it I needed to change the length of the document. At that point it all went downhill.
Not having enough content for the initial 8-page design, I deleted two pages. But then one story grew a bit. And another story was needed. Now what? I tried, for quite a while, to figure out how to add a new page — and not just any page but another new "template" page with the linked text boxes. How do I link a text box? The built-in help wasn't helpful, and a google search confirmed my fears: it was going to be so tricky to do that I was better off building the newsletter all over again from scratch (only leaving all 8 pages in place this time).
One business trip, and then another, delayed progress on the newsletter. Finally, the third and last business trip was in progress - I had just arrived at the airport on a tuesday, with only a one-day trip to distract me. THe problem was, there was now only one week left until deadline, so I was afraid to abandon the next two days just because I was traveling. Well, as fate would have it, I missed one flight (Boston + Snowstorms = missed flights) and found myself with over four hours to kill. I found a seat near an outlet, sat down and plugged in.
The next two-and-a-half hours of this story have been censored, so as not to offend the weak of heart. Suffice it to say that I ended up back in a Google search about MS Word newsletters when random pieces of my text copy started inexplicably reverting back to Times New Roman 12-pt. I was frustrated, and muttering words under my breath so horrible and obscene that they will probably prevent me from ever obtaining a seat in some higher realm after my demise. I couldn't find any help, but I did stumble across a review of Apple's iWork, and more specifically the word processing app Pages. I don't have the review at hand, but I can summarize it like this "Pages is not a Word replacement - it doesn't really hold a candle to a real word processor, but its templates are amazing and has some very good desktop publishing capabilities that would make it ideal for creating fancy newsletters..."
I packed up my laptop in a moment of combined frustration and inspiration, and drove about 20 minutes north to the Peabody Mall's Apple Store. I bought a copy of iWork for $79, and was back at the airport in no time. I had about 20 minutes before my flight, too, even after going through security for the second time in one day.
Before boarding the plane, I tried importing the Word newsletter into Pages to test file compatibility. Now, considering that this is the most convoluted document template out there - with about a zillion floating text boxes, embedded images, text wrapping, and the like - Pages did an amazing job. There were only about four small instances of where the formatting needed to be fixed, and maybe a few more adjustments to make the document look, well... ugly?
Yeah - ugly. There was a phenomena that occurred during the introduction of OS X, and later the Safari browser. This was a sudden realization by Mac users that on screen text could look good. Suddenly, those less-than-perfect designs began to show their rough edges. Just like when moving from VHS to DVD, the small mistakes becomes more crisp, and what was once perfectly OK is now ugly. And it happened again.
Did my original design look this bad, or was it Pages' fault? A quick look back told me that yes, indeed it was always an ugly word document in newsletter's clothing. Yuck. I would start fresh, but not until after my 1-hour flight to upstate NY, a quick dinner, a bit of presentation work that was needed for the next morning (resisting the temptation to try out Keynote for the sake of urgency), and a large coffee would I have the time.
It was almost midnight by then, and I'd had time on the plane to read the small yet informative manual that came with Pages. I sat down, created a new document using one of Pages' built-in templates. I adjusted it a bit. I started copying in text from the word document one entire story at a time. Thanks to the "Paste and Match Style" command, I could paste text from anywhere into the template and know it would appear the way I wanted it to be and not the way it started out — which in this case was with some miscellaneous Times New Roman strewn through for no reason.
To make a long story slightly less long, 40 minutes later I had a new completed newsletter. Having never used Pages before, I had accomplished what over 15 years of document creation with Word failed to allow.
I slept, finished the next days meeting, fought through more snow to get home, and when I had some time and a clear head, I began to test pages in some other ways. The original review aI read said it couldn't handle basic word processing as well as Word, but at this point I no longer believed that assessment. So I opened a great test document - my book. My novel, which — if you are not cheap — you will buy, is a 90,000+ word manuscript, with some simple but specific formatting.
Pages opened it without a single error. I changed the entire book to a two- and then a three-column layout, and changed the entire text style several times using Pages' excellent style tools. Then I changed it all back (the hard way, not with undo's) and saved it as a pages file. It still looked exactly the same, only now the .pages file came in at less than half the size of the old .doc file.
This little experiment only took about three minutes, so I tried out Pages' export capabilities on both the newsletter and the book. The book was, again, flawless - although now the file size was bigger than the original by 50%. The newsletter need a bit of work. The exported .doc opened fine in Word and the general layout was there, but some of the image wrapping needed to be adjusted.
So, in my own experience and opinion, I declare that Pages kicks ass. I'll still use Word for day to day stuff, just so that I wont have to deal with file exports, but for the newsletter — and for my next book — I'm using Pages. It was a $79 investment that allowed my to meet a deadline, make a better document, and all with little to none of that patentable Microsoft frustration.
Next, I'll tackle Keynote. I use PowerPoint a lot, and am kind of an ace (insert sound of me, patting myself on the back). I have a collection of fairly fancy .ppt's that include media, animations, tables... you name it, and its in there.
[Edit: clarification: Pages needs to specifically "export" to get Word .doc files, .pdfs, html, RTF or plain text. However, it will open these files natively, simply by dragging the desired files onto the Keynote icon]
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