Hi aLL:
At times we all need either Word or Pages for one reason or another. (I do…)
If you are like me and need to go there at times. I was wondering if there are many users of Pages out there an if any of you have moved over from Word. (If so, are you happy?)
Thanks,
Howard
I just recently received iWork '08 for my birthday (yes, it was on my list 
) and am slowly moving over from Word '04. It’s taking some getting used to, but I’m liking it quite a bit.
On Tiger, Word '04 works ok, but on Leopard and on my Intel Mac Mini - UGH! 
It crashes at least once a session, usually more. I’ve used the new “improved” Office '07 on Win systems and just did not want to deal with that on my Macs.
All of which led me to Pages. It really is a lovely program, imo, and I am particularly loving the comments feature. I can’t give a more indepth review of it since I’ve only had it a short while, but I think I’m going to enjoy using it.
When I first got a Mac it came with a trial of MS Office and iWork.
The MS Office trial lasted a few minutes; iWork got payed for pretty much immediately. I live a completely MS Word-less life and I’m much happier for it!
Ditto here on Pages; it’s great. I did OK with Word '04, but Word '08 I dumped after only a few hours of trial: it’s bloated and sloooow on a PPC. With Pages, I can open Word DOC files, revise them, save as Pages but export as DOC or PDF. The PDF format is outstanding, because the Web links are live.
Earlier, I had dropped Entourage for Apple’s Mail, iCal, and Address Book. Now I no longer bother with Word or PowerPoint. For the first time in many years, I’m free of MicroSoft and have no regrets.
I dumped Microsoft years ago. I have iWork 08, but I mainly use Keynote. Although pages seems to be great, I prefer Nisus Writer Pro, and for spreadsheets I prefer Tables to Numbers.
Basically, it’s just that I prefer not to have to export all the time, and NW has used RTF as its default format since the beginning.
My only point of contact with Microsoft is MSN, which I’m forced to use because so many of my colleagues and friends will use it. But I try to wean them onto GTalk 
Mark
I use InDesign CS3.
I pretty much use Pages for everything I don’t use Scrivener for. Unfortunately everyone and their brother still requires Word files. I’ve checked a few files to make sure that what I see in Word is what I see in Pages, and I’m at the point now that if it looks okay in Pages, it’s fine to send. (As a .doc file. Alas.)
I don’t know how Pages operates with really big files (400+ page manuscripts, for instance).
Pages sounds like a wonderful option.
I do feel a bit of guilt however. I have spend endless money on Microsoft software over the years.
Just to stop cold might not be fair to Bill. What if he needs the money?
Howard
I use Bean. Pages and Word are both overkill for my work, although I had to go back to Word last month to work with an editor on a big magazine story – the track changes and comments functions are, I grudgingly admit, useful, though still not worth the other bother. (Next time I get one of those requests to work in Word and use change tracking and comments, I’m gonna try NeoOffice.) Pages looks nice but I never print anything so Bean is plenty-- almost everything most writers need, and just as important, nothing else to get in the way. And it’s free…
Wow…
Bean looks fascinating.
The idea of not needing a full blown program Like word, or eve, to some degree, Pages, is a great idea.
I seldom use all of what is included in those programs. Truth be told, i understand little of it.
Howard
To add to my previous post: One issue that I’m having in going from Word '04 to Pages is the lack of macros. I have set up quite a few over the years and it’s frustrating having to go back to doing everything manually. I’m going to take a closer look at TypeIt4Me (which I already own but haven’t used much) and see if I can recreate some equivalents there. I’m not too hopeful, though, as many of my macros dealt with fields rather than just text.
To be fair to Pages, I’ve heard that the new MS Word '08 for Mac no longer has VIsual Basic support, so my macros wouldn’t work there either. Eeeeeesh. More steps backward than I care to count. 
MS Office 08 is ahhhhh blahhhhh
They dropped VDB completely, changed the default format to .docx
FOrce you to install a bunch of hooky fonts.
Tries to uninstall previous versions of Office (ie. 04)
Crashes alot
Hangs at startup.
Feels slow and bloated.
Pros are it is Universal Binary now but truthfully it seems slower than 2004
Enterouge only had slight enhancements.
OFfice is still over bloated and seems to be heading toward a lethargic demise. I won’t reinstall it until a few major bug fixes.
Stick with 2004. Your life will be much easier. That is unless you need to open a document in the new 2007-2008 “extenesion X” format.
Thanks, Wock. Yeah, I’ve seen the Office '07 on the Win side of things and Yikes! 
I will stick with Pages for most of my (simple) formatting needs because Word '04 crashes on me far too often. (This is in Leopard on an Intel machine.)
I do miss my macros, though. 
I’ve got pages, but when I need to track changes, I use Neo Office. For whatever reason tracking changes in text works better in Neo… (and no, I have yet to even try Word '04 let alone '08 on my Mac)
Hell, I do have word 07 on the win machine and I use it for FINAL layout of books, mostly because it can do some things that I like very easily. But as a primary word processor, not really
I got Mariner Write today, and though it is lacking page markup (which I have gotten spoiled with), it looks like a great fast loading word processor for doing first drafts. In fact, for really short pieces, even more than just a first draft. Yes, Bean is free, but there are some things it does not do
Now I-Works does side notes in an amazing way, and that is what I use it these days mostly for. After all… Neo’s implementation of that is more than just LOUSY and that is across the Open Office family.
By the way, I wish that more than just neo and pages did tracking changes, and yes I now understand it is a bear.
That’s one thing Pages has over Word, actually. As soon as I went over 120 or so pages in Word, things started getting very flakey and unreliable. Pages '08, on the other hand, has been rock solid with every document size I could throw at it - even the my friend’s 758-page first draft of his fantasy epic.
The trick seems to be the way that it only holds a few pages ahead and behind the currently rendered page in memory at a time. On the other hand, I suspect Word attempts to load the whole document (load a big document and you see Word’s memory footprint go up, and up, and up).
I also suspect that if you do a lot of jumping from page 3 to page 95, you’ll notice slight delays in Pages where you wouldn’t in Word. On the other hand, I do all of my ‘jumpy’ writing in Scrivener now