iWork Pages is nearly a dream come true

By Paul Andrews


For anyone who writes, Apple Computer's new iWork Pages program is a provocative software bellwether.

I came into it wondering if I could finally avoid having to use Microsoft Word on the Mac. I came away thinking the dawn of a longtime dream was nigh. Because most correspondents, including my wife, send documents as Word e-mail attachments, I wanted Pages to be able to open a .doc file with a click and then give me the option of saving it (again with a single click) as a .doc when it came time to close it. Ideally, Pages would recognize the file as a Word document and automatically save it that way as well.

Not quite. I tried sending a column written in Word and saved in Pages to my editor, who could not open it. I tried another tweak, renaming the file with a ".doc" extension instead of ".pages," the native Apple format. My editor could read all the text in a Word-based application, but because formatting was lost, it opened as one long paragraph.

To save a Pages document as a Word file requires selecting an "export" function and choosing the .doc extension. It ought to be simpler, but at least Pages offers a Word alternative. In the two weeks I've had Pages, I haven't had to open Word once.

But Pages' .doc capabilities soon receded in significance as I strolled around the software's powerful but simple feature set. Pages does rudimentary word processing fine, although for complex formatting you'll need a full-featured program like Word or Nisus Writer Express, a Macintosh third-party product.

But Pages is more a page compiler than word processor, and that's where its allure lies.

Gradually the Web is changing the way we compose words for others to read. Eventually, I hope to see an "editable Web," where posting text, photos, audio and video on a Web page becomes as simple and flexible as typing text on a word processor.

Click on a piece of text from my desktop or a Web page and drop it into a site, and it automatically reformats consistent with the site's design. Pull in a table and the text wraps around it automatically. Slap in a photo. Insert an audio file. Mount a video.
You can do this today with powerful design software. But it's a life and a half.

With Pages, I put it together in 10 minutes. I drew in text from a heavily formatted, 2,000-word Word document. I dropped in photos imported from my Windows PC. I built and inserted a table.

I grabbed an audio file from the Web and plugged it into the page. I inserted a song from my iTunes collection.

Pages not only handled all of this mishmash of content, it reformatted text to reflect original fonts and sizing, and wrapped text around the media elements. For the clincher, I dragged a 5-minute mountain-biking home video into the file and waited for the page to erupt in flames. Instead, the video played fine.

The step that's missing from Pages is carrying the content to a Web site. Although the text and display formatting remain in place, the elements have to be entered by hand. That typically means reformatting as well.

My point is Pages is advancing the art of document composition to be Web-ready. Apple is building a unique software ecosystem for the Mac, and I can envision a .mac Web site seamlessly sucking in a Pages file like mine without having to reformat or mount multimedia files.

With Pages, we're not at the point of the editable Web. But for the war-weary who recall the daunting days of PageMaker and Ventura Publisher, who suffered through hard-coded HTML editing and formatting and who still spend far too much time managing Web pages, Apple's new program takes us a step closer to Web publishing "for the rest of us."


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Why Apple iWork Really Matters
ARTICLE DATE: 01.28.05
By Michael J. Miller

MacWorld was dominated by Apple's new iPod shuffle and the Mac mini, but the new Apple product that may turn out to be most influential is iWork '05.

Here's why: Microsoft Office is as dominant in the office market as Microsoft Windows is on the operating-system side. But in recent years, Microsoft has focused more on adding enterprise features than on changing the core word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation features. Office has some decent competitors—Corel WordPerfect and StarOffice/OpenOffice—but they have focused primarily on being compatible with Microsoft software.

Apple's iWork is the most creative office-productivity package we've seen in years. It combines the second version of Keynote, a presentation package, with Pages, a new word processor. (No spreadsheet yet.) Both programs are visually stunning, with graphics, shading, and lots of incredibly professional-looking templates.

The first version of Keynote, back in 2003, looked great, but was slow and didn't have a lot of the features that presenters need. Keynote 2 seems faster (though still a bit sluggish on a G4), has more snazzy templates, and offers new features for presenters.

Pages is a simple desktop-publishing program with super templates. You start with a design, then replace the dummy text and graphics with your own. Both programs give you an amazing amount of control over fonts and graphics. And both are well integrated with Apple's iLife suite, letting you use photos and music from iPhoto and iTunes through a new Media Browser.

Unfortunately, neither program is fully ready for the broader business audience. Keynote is sluggish at times, its importation of PowerPoint is far from perfect, and it doesn't offer a slick way of publishing your presentation on a CD or DVD. Pages lacks a grammar checker, revision marks, and the collaboration, tracking, and security features that Microsoft Word offers. And Microsoft's multiple-toolbar approach lets you work faster.

So why is iWork so important? Because the software truly rethinks the way these features are presented. iWork offers a visual way of looking at your documents, so it brings out many features that are buried in Microsoft products. I look forward to seeing where Apple takes these applications in the future.

This more competitive software from Apple might finally get Microsoft to overhaul PowerPoint, and might also get Microsoft and the developers of other Windows-based productivity packages to rethink their software design. And that could lead to more innovation than we've seen in office suites for a long, long time.

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Sounds promising, but bad for Microsoft. But it could turn out good for us even if most of you are using Macs, windowsers will probably benefit too. Why? Because this pushes Microsoft to be more innovative, we can expect to see lower priced Microsoft Office suits and more features. Reports from Microsoft are that people (and corps) aren't renewing their Microsoft Office licenses, (or something like that, but people aren't buying the newer versions of Office anymore)

Apple is what keeps Microsoft from souching and designing and getting innovative and competitive.

I use innnovate around Microsoft and Apple, because Apple is and Microsoft isn't. If apple wasn't here Longhorn would probably not have the features it CLAIMS to have now. Despite my disappointment with Microsoft, I kinda give it some slack because it deals with threats and alot of things. But Microsoft isn't what it was during the ol' DOS days....

I found this out in my issue of PC Magazine, I got it a few days ago.