Using Apple Pages in a Microsoft Word world
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- Опубликовано: 14 ноя 2023
- Microsoft Word is the lingua franca of everyone who doesn't write. If you prefer Pages, or anything else, though, here's how handle converting to Word -- and just where it can go wrong.
LINKS:
Libre Office: www.libreoffice.org 
Хобби
I'm still bitter about the loss of Word Perfect :(
The other day I read about a System 7 emulator for Mac and was so tempted to see if I could get WordPerfect for Mac running on it. I imagine I'd be disappointed after all these, years but I liked it so much back then.
I lament the loss of WordStar.
Lotus Notes
Goodness, that’s taken me back.
I remember it fondly but not quite so fondly that I miss it. Whereas I do miss WordPerfect. I’m sure I’d be disappointed if I were to use it again after all this time, though.
Your comments about MS word and your change in mindset when you thought why waste your energy trying to make it work rather than using something that works with you, is simply a breath of fresh air. I subscribed immediately.
Thank you. I actually remember the moment so clearly.
For some reason I could listen to you all day
Thank you.
Thanks again, William. Quite informative. I must admit I love Pages. I used it extensively in a Windows work environment - mainly because most of my reports were completed documents - I didn't have to share an incomplete one. Pages to me is a combination of Microsoft Publisher (which I used extensively at one stage but couldn't be opened by any other program) and Word. In fact, the whole iworks suite is fantastic (always preferred Keynote over PowerPoint). At one stage (iworks 09) I thought they had a good chance of rivalling Microsoft Office. But the initial changes they made for iPads stopped that (although all the features have been reintroduced). But Apple's approach is "they are a hardware company- not a software company". Fantastic bit of software - I just hope they continue to maintain it.
Thank you. Apple did that thing with revamping an app and removing really key features until they slowly put them back, didn't they? I know with Final Cut Pro that killed it in the film industry, I'd forgotten it happened with Pages too. I'm with you on Keynote, too: I've been known to drag a MacBook and an old Apple TV just in order to be able to present from Keynote instead of converting to PowerPoint.
As a former newspaper editor who had to work with a stable of freelancers, my advice was generally just to bite the bullet and buy Word. It’s a standard tool of the trade, most publications will expect you to submit a perfectly functioning Word doc, and they don’t have time for wonky formatting issues or other wrinkles. I’m sure Pages is fine and it’s great to have a free tool that Apple supports. But editors will remember when they go to open a file they need right now and it doesn’t behave as expected. To your point, it’s a lot easier to get away with using something like Pages and exporting to a Word doc if you keep the formatting to a minimum and don’t do anything fancy with it.
I've been there, though curiously enough also with Word documents where the formatting is ridiculously overdone.
@@WilliamGallagher Ah, yes; remember the early days of the Mac, when it seemed like every $&@*# document had about eleventy-nine different fonts? 🤣
@gr-os4gd I know that when I get sent a piece - PC or Mac - and it has many colours, the text is going to be crap.
@@WilliamGallagher Like so many animals, their bright colors are a warning. :P
@gr-os4gd that made me beam.
I transitioned from MS Office to Pages, Numbers etc. quite recently. I wasn't using even a fraction of MS Word functionality. Still keep free versions of MS Word / Excel (View Only), to double check any Pages / Numbers exports. Usually have no issues, but experienced the odd graphic / formula related issue prior to sending the files out. Many thanks for the video William. Keep up the great work! 👍🙏
Thank you, that's very good of you to say.
I was living and working in Australia in the late 1980's and recall those lovely Microsoft Manuals that came in a collection box. No idea how they were printed but the smell of those books has stayed with me to date - like sugar covered peardrops and Caramac - you have to be English :-)
I never liked Caramac, I am clearly a failed Englishman. But while I only ever had the one Word manual you see in the poster of this week's video, there was one day when WordPerfect Corporation sent me a pallet of software. All their versions, DOS, Unix, things I'd never heard of, and every one of them with huge volumes of manuals. I wish I still had some, I so enjoyed studying them.
@@WilliamGallagherI'll wager you were a Merrymaids man. Or liquorice torpedos! 😅
@@peterc2248 No, I was a Mars Bar kind of guy, with occasional posh bars of Bournville dark chocolate. Chocolate is the key thing, I feel.
@@WilliamGallagher Indeed. We had Bournville as a special Christmas treat in our stockings and my dear old Mum had a whole bar of Jamaica Rum - very risque in the 70's! :-)
Thanks, I agree with you. Back in the days of DOS, I remember WordStar being the most popular word-processing program. WordPerfect was my favorite. It could do a lot of things WordStar couldn't. I used Word and Excel a lot before I retired. Now that I use Macs exclusively, I only use Pages and Numbers. They're easier and more fun to use. Apple has been criticized for neglecting Pages and Numbers, but I don't think they have. They've added a lot of functionality to them over the years. Apple uses its free apps as a selling point for their hardware. I do, however, keep a Microsoft 365 subscription because, as you say, the world expects Word (and Excel). I also make heavy use of Scrivener, Bear, and sometimes Ulysses.
WordStar! I'd forgotten that. One of my earliest jobs was writing manuals in WordStar. One day I came in to the office and WordStar was gone, completely replaced by WordPerfect. We all looked at each other, looked at WordPerfect, shrugged, and carried on writing practically as if there had been no interruption. Then six or seven months later, the firm did some deal with Microsoft and we came in one morning to find WordPerfect had been removed and Word installed in its place. Took us the day to figure out how to use it enough to get back to work.
Every time I have to use MS Word once in. Blue Moon because I’m on a someone’s windows PC I find the MS has changed the interface such that I have poke around for minutes at a time to work out how to do the basics. Pages and MacOS do some of this but only in very minor way. All technologies atrophy when companies spend billions to make marketing driven ‘improvements’. Same thing has happened to automobiles over the past 20 years. Really liked your down to earth delivery. Thanks.
Thanks. I once walked to my desk at BBC Worldwide and heard the calmest, most polite man SWEARING AT THE TOP OF HIS VOICE about Microsoft Word. BBC had just updated to the version with the ribbon which -- at the time, I don't know if it still does -- hid the Open and New controls behind what just looked like a Microsoft logo.
You're brilliant, Mr. Gallagher. I subscribed.
Thank you, that's very good of you to say. Made my day.
It blows my mind that people can write anything substantial in Word or Pages, I need all the help I can get and so write with Scrivener while organising all my research in a database... you guys are clearly on another level.
Oh, don't get me started on Scrivener: I utterly adore it. It's a mystery to me, actually, why I sometimes reach for Scrivener and sometimes for Pages; it's always unconscious, like something is telling me I'll need the features of one more than the other for a given project. But I've friends who are novelists who swear by either Pages or Word and they'll never move; they're really who got me thinking about this topic this week. May I ask what you're writing at the moment?
@@WilliamGallagher I'm attempting to write a novel that requires *allot of research,* and that part is where Scrivener fails _'for me'._
Finding information and research while being kept abreast of maturing scenarios throughout the book required something more. When I first began to use Scrivener I was excited by the control it offers the user over the text, but the research area quickly became a mess, and without the skills and abilities many here possess... I was soon lost in a world of conflicting data.
I spoke to you sometime ago about building a database to control information in a way that I think, and I built it, but it only when I began to use the app that I realised how I had limited it and cut-off-its-feet. Don't get me wrong, it worked great but I could see greater potential... I've just finished the revision from the ground up _[with some help from a professional],_ and after a little tidying up shall, _'God willing',_ resume my project. It's often the case, that it's only after you create an app and started using it... that you finally understand what you really want or need :O
Pages is like sitting down with a beautiful manuscript when you’re actually testing what others will see. You can add the final illustrations and diagrams as you go, and test print the pdf, and Pages never slows down. 450 page manuscript with full resolution illustrations and hundreds of diagrams and not a single slowdown or crash. I could never have done that in Word, and Scrivener makes compiling too complicated for seeing the final formatting.
Scrivener is like a messy handwritten stack of notebooks you shuffle around on a desk. It’s cluttered and blissful to go through the depths of every possible iteration of every idea you can imagine. But it’s stressful sometimes when you know exactly what a chapter already needs to be. Too many tools get in the way of flow. The focus and simplicity of an empty Pages document is so clear and clean. Every time I know exactly what I need to write I pull up Apple Notes, or Pages, and whenever I want to dabble and plot and tinker and get lost in the drafting process, then it’s always Scrivener.
@@ghost-user559 Thanks for the reply Ghost, and I am sure you understand that you speak from a position of having attributes that many do not possess. I just had quick look at my little database, and I have twelve main characters divided into three groups following various scenarios, with all moving to a point where 'God willing' the story shall conclude. Each is set upon a strong foundation, supported by differing histories and attributes set to invoke certain emotions in the reader. People such as yourself might take this in your stride, for which I envy... but being a slow writer with episodes of study _[days, weeks and even months]_ I need all the help I can get to bring me up to speed after a bout of study, as well as keeping the vision alive.
I just don't know how you guys do all that with the likes of Word, one great advantage you have is the shear speed you work at the time you are able to put into a session, either way its a gift I openly confess not currently having, yet I soldier, on undeterred. :)
Finally! A similar perspective. You are correct, my main reason why i like Pages rather than Word is that pages is a vector style program while Word is a Bitmap. Im not sure why the world goes for a blurry program. Tell them Pages, latex, or even indeed is better.
Ha, i meant to say “indesign” not “indeed”, the spam emails are confusing me
I didn't know that about Word and Pages. I am definitely Team Vector. Thank you.
I wrote my first book in Word, relying heavily on styles and outline view. Once "complete" the real work began as I would export as html for epub and then edit in Calibre as needed to upload to Amazon.
Thank you for sharing your experience. I'm tempted to give Pages another try, now knowing a writer uses it in a workflow that sounds like work.
What do you think of Calibre? I've only used it for converting books I want to read on a Kindle and it definitely does the job but it looks very clunky to me.
AppleWorks FTW!
Grief, I'd forgotten AppleWorks. That takes me back.
I used to use Word and Excel on the original Mac, way back in the mists of time. For the last 20+ years, though, I've used LibreOffice (Windows, Linux, and Mac). I'd dearly love an iPadOS version.
I didn't realise that there was no iPad version of LibreOffice. That rather shows how much I use it, doesn't it?
The other day my router was down for most of the morning so I couldn't use Notion or any online writing software and had to go back to Pages to write my Medium blogs. It was frustrating but felt good towards the end, how a free software saved that day's productivity tasks for me.
Oooh, I forgot Notion was online. Ouch. This reminds me of when I was working on a magazine and there was a power cut. The whole 120-odd staff groaned at the same time and I looked up, confused. I was writing on a laptop and it had just switched to battery power without interrupting me. 'Course, all the rest of the staff then got the day off while I sat there typing. Hmm.
@@WilliamGallagher haha, yes! I guess the old ways are the golden ways unless your laptop battery dies and you have to go analogue 🙃
Word for Mac ate big parts of my diploma thesis. By that time Pages just came out, so it wasn't an alternative. I used mellel, which was very efficient, especially for academic writing. When Pages got better around 2007, I used it for my regular work and never looked back.
I don't care what app it is, the loss of your writing is criminal, isn't it? All that work and the certainty - probably false, but it feels certain - that you can never write it as well again. I wince for you. But I'm relieved everything's been fine since that dark day.
Thank you
My pleasure.
Scrivener it is for me - on Mac, iPad and Windows, and it can export ("compile" as they call it) to PDF, Word, RTF, epub, Kindle ... whathaveyou. Takes a bit to getting used to and its "philosophy", but so convenient as soon as you know your way around. No matter if you write a novel, a screen play, collect knitting patterns or recipes or just as a notebook - it even has a corkboard style view. You don't really get a WYSIWYG view before compiling, but you can define styles, tables, lists etc. as in other word processors. Reference material as PDFs or images will be saved with the document, which I find very useful.
I love Scrivener. What I cannot fathom is what goes on in my head when I start a project and I automatically open either Scrivener or Pages. Without conscious thought, I open one or the other.
I am not going to say a word until I know this posts. I finally gave up last week...after so many tries to tell Angela what journal approach I use.
IT WORKED! And also I am extremely tantalised now. Do email me about your journalling, I want to tell her.
Thank you for a very useful 58 Keys. Have Pages and LibreOffice installed on the Mac - both work well but I always write in Pages. Like the idea of a 'TX' folder: I will be creating one as my tomorrow's task!
Any more hints and tips on getting the most out of Pages would be most welcome.
Thank you. I realised when I was saying that about the TX folder that I seem to have a lot of them. One for each client. And I should just make it the one, shouldn't I? As for Pages videos, there are already two more in 58keys that might be useful if you haven't spotted them already. One is a quick collection of five Pages tips: ruclips.net/video/-xyg4K5gjTE/видео.html And the other is an extended Three Biscuit Guide to everything I could think of about the app: ruclips.net/video/XToOfS4A38c/видео.html
Microsoft 365, the web version of MS allows you to have a free account where you can upload a word document and see it online. This allows you to compare its look and layout changes vs your local Pages. The same for Excel vs Numbers etc.
Thank you, I should've thought of that. I have a client who requires me to use Word and actually provides it -- but only the online version. Maybe I've just been burned by online writing too often, but I still use Pages on the Mac and convert for them.
@@WilliamGallagher I think Pages is a much more pleasing/comfortable writing tool. I too have to submit reports in Word Doc format and I use the free online version to check my Pages to Word export for any conversion formatting glitches.
Thanks for the video.
I enjoyed this. Mainly a Word, Excel, PowerPoint fan. Familiar with them and I have no concern about the aesthetic.
But if nothing else, this serves as a reminder to me that there’s a good alternative.
Though ironically, the one ‘book’ I have written, was done in Pages 🙃
That last line made me smile, thank you.
I love Pages. the 'export' control converts to Word, PDF, etc
Indeed.
Fun discussion. It's almost enough for me to not want to deal with anyone who requires Word format if I could possibly help it.
It's funny to remember that Word and Excel were first written for the Macintosh to take advantage of the mouse and the nice fonts and on-screen formatting when the PC world was still DOS and Lotus 1-2-3 and Word Perfect.
Microsoft eventually had to create Windows to support Word and Excel on the PC.
I usually just use TextEdit for my writing purposes. It will also supports styles and will export in .docx and other Word and Word-like formats. I typically just use plain text until I've decided how I want the text to be laid out.
One of my editors exclusively writes in TextEdit but I like all the abilities that word processors give you for zipping around your text. Mind you, everything I write for that editor I do in Drafts 5 which is pretty much plain text. As for the history of this stuff, I so clearly remember people regarding the early Windows as being just a run-time front end for Excel. They solely launched Windows for Excel, then would go back to DOS. How times move on.
I'd be very interested to see a "full cycle workflow" of working with Pages on your side, and Word on your editorial side. That is, seeing the process you use when the edited version comes back to you, and how you resolve change tracking, etc., right up to the point where you're ready to send in the next revision.
It _seemed_ like you were suggesting that you merged changes back into your *original* Pages document, which I presume would be a manual process. And it certainly seems like converting/importing the Word version into Pages and making that the new canonical version would, after a few cycles, produce some wonky behavior on one side or the other of the translation boundary. So I'm really curious how you manage it.
FWIW, I used the very first version of Word back in the 80s, on a Mac Plus. (After starting with WordStar) I "grew up" with it as a writer, from version 1.0a to 3.x (when styles were first introduced, IIRC), and finally to Word 5.1a, IMHO the pinnacle of Word's usability. That was certainly the last version I _enjoyed_ using. It's probably why I like Google Doc so much these days, it's much the same relatively simple feature set, modernized for today's needs.
No, when the Word document comes back with tracked changes, I just open it in Pages. Pages then converts it into its own Pages format, but the tracked changes are transferred perfectly. I really think that's marvellous and without it, I wouldn't be able to do this because, yes, otherwise it would be manual and there's just not time.
As for the versions, I don't think I've ever gone more than two revisions of a document. There's a book I was writing a long time ago that got killed for rights reasons -- after I'd written 150,000 words -- and that looked like it was going to go through more, but the project died and nothing else has come close. I didn't have any concerns about problems, though; the final book was going to be a hugely complex volume but as ever that was going to be done at the page layout stage so my text was quite straightforward.
I only briefly used Word 5.1 but I remember reviewing Word 6 for DOS and finding the most preposterous number of bugs in it. I think that's what started me down the line of what-else-can-I-write-in?
@@WilliamGallagher Ah, OK, I misunderstood that part. So the version you send off to your editor becomes the canonical version, and when they return it, _that_ becomes the canonical version, and you just let Pages deal with importing and exporting. And the key to not running into a "translation degradation" problem is that you keep the documents simple.
I remember Word 6 very well. It was truly terrible. IIRC, it was the version where Microsoft tried to bring together the Mac and Windows versions, and the Mac lost. Bloated with features, sluggish performance, and so many bugs. We tried to roll it out at the job I had then, and everyone rebelled. We stuck with Word 5.1a for many years, and waited until several major upgrades of Word had brought it back into the realm of usable.
Have you used markdown? I find it really helpful to prevent me messing around with formatting and just focus on the structure of the document. Apps like Ulysses export from it to so many different formats like word, PDF, and HTML and most CMSes can understand it too.
It took me a while to get it but once I did. It reminds me of using wordstar back in the day where formatting used codes.
It’s not good for tracking changes and commenting - at that point I’d take it into Word.
I wrote quite a lot of my PhD thesis in Ulysses and I do rely on markdown to just write when I need to.
I may be the only writer who doesn't like Markdown. I so often have to write quotes with clarifying extras -- "'It wasn't [the victim's] fault,' said the officer" -- and the second you tap that opening square bracket, Markdown is trying to write links. I realise there are ways around this but Markdown is supposed to be so much easier than HTML that you can just get on with your writing and yet suddenly I'm having to learn escape characters.
@@WilliamGallagher yes I had that problem, particularly with Endnote's citation characters. I think I just modified Ulysses's internal tags to get around it ;)
@@WilliamGallagher No, you're not the only one who doesn't like Markdown. I'm a recovering geek who is accustomed to working with text markup, but even I got tired of its limited scope, lack of standardization, and unpredictable results.
I tried using Pages for a six-month period, and I created a mess. Everyone I interact with uses Word, so I had to create Word versions of every shared document. This meant at least two versions of each document to keep track of, and with back-and-forth editing, I'd end up with multiple versions in each format. While creating a newsletter with 12 articles, the folder would easily balloon to 50 or more individual documents if I didn't keep on top of deleting old versions. And I didn't want to delete old versions until I was sure I wouldn't need to refer back to them. It was confusing and exhausting. I finally purchased a standalone version (not a subscription) of Word for Mac 2021 for about $40.
I am this very morning running a spreadsheet to keep on top of versions of articles. I have a simpler situation than yours or I might well have to do the same as you, though.
So here's a problem for you. I'm writing something, that is heavily illustrated, noting that I'm doing the illustrations, and it has to flow together since the imagery and the text support each other. You said in your video that word processers aren't really the optimal place for imagery, noting that while I do know how to insert pictures and flow text around them in MS word and in my old copy of Open Office, I'm a bit baffled about how to transmit the finished product to a publisher and have it arrive intact and in something close to the order I've sent it..
Does PDF format work for some of this, or do we go directly to desktop publishing software for this kind of hybrid document?
If you're working with a publisher, I would put placeholder text in the manuscript. I have done this with online publishers where I had no input into their systems. So I'd say "IMAGE 001", for instance, and then be sure that the filename was prefixed IMAGE 001. It's more work for the publisher and I don't like that, but it works. I've just put two magazines to bed and am starting on a third; I will do all image work in the publishing app Affinity Publisher at the end. But then I am working alone on this magazine, or at least this part of the magazine, so I can use whatever system works for me.
I like writing in Pages over Word - especially on the iPad. But last I checked there was no way of managing secondary literature for academic papers, and for some of my writing I need that. Do you know of a good and dynamic way to manage cited works in Pages?
Do you know of Papers for the Mac? I've never used it or anything like it, but that's the app that came to mind when you asked -- and reading their site, it keeps talking about syncing with iPads and iPhones. So I presume there's a Papers app for iPad, though they don't seem to link to it.
@@WilliamGallagher Thanks a lot. I’ll look into it. I hadn’t heard of it, so that’ll be my next project 👍
Help please. Thank you for your insight. I use pages, and get it all. When I convert from pages to Word, the document is as required, BUT, when I attach it to an email, to forward, it does not send with the same format. The format disappears and the double-spacing also reverts to single spacing. So, although the Word doc. appears all correct, it is not opening in that format from the email. Any suggestions, thoughts? Thanks again.
Is it your recipients who are telling you the formatting has gone wrong, or are you seeing it that way before you send it? If the latter, you're probably doing what I do and clicking on the attachment to get what Apple calls Quick Look. I would have expected that to show you the correct contents but it's possibly just trying to show you the text. Otherwise, my only guess is that you're doing what I have also done, which is mixing up the documents I attach.
@@WilliamGallagher thank you so much William for taking the time. I have managed to solve the problem by installing Microsoft 365 for Mac. I was saving in Word, but publisher required "double-spacing," which disappeared when I sent via email. The format, Pages Book layout, also disappeared. With 365 I can now "open in word" and the format is correct (header, footer etc.). I noticed this issue was a big problem for people (especially students sending reports), so maybe this may help others too. Again, thank you very much 🙂
I use Pages for all my word processing, including the writing of novels. I haven't used Word in years. When I opened it recently on a friend's Mac it seemed horribly bloated an unintuitive.
It's funny, isn't it? I've had people tell me roughly the opposite: that Pages seems empty or even just doesn't do much. But it's because Apple hides things away -- arguably too much -- while Microsoft wants you to know everything it does, in your face, learn all of this before you write anything. The iPad version was a total rewrite and, I think, consequently much better than the Mac or Windows ones.
I have used windows since 1993 until 2019 and I struggle with the same issue but then vice versa.
I can’t get my head around the (for me) un logical way Apple works and I loose a lot of time trying to figure things out. Also the explanation of macOS could be a lot better. Especially filing on a Mac is a disaster if you are used to a good filing system that you have to share with others. It seems that the downloads file and the desktop are the main storage place.
I will get there one day but my brain is ruined by another kind of logic
As for pages:
I can typ but creating a good lay out, headers footers contents and chapters is a continuous struggle.
I keep trying to move away from Office however as I use Word etc at work I found it impossible. Maybe I should have persevered more? Or maybe I should just accept that for me Office is the writing software for me?
Are you happy enough with Word? For all I have problems with it, I do know writers who adore it and they should absolutely stay with it.
@@WilliamGallagher I am not unhappy with Word!
What drove me nuts with Pages to Word was in University. Writing seven pages and after exporting to Word, it would be 5 1/2 pages.
Hard to know which word processor was at fault there. I had a thing where I was required to deliver a certain character count, something odd like 137, and the editor complained I was always delivering 139. But I wasn't converting anything then: Microsoft Word gives you two ways to get a word count and they disagree with each other. Insane.
@@WilliamGallagher I blame Microsoft since they always do weird things. I've always preferred the Apple offerings to Microsoft's.
.ODT is the saved format of Libre office and Libre office's native format, maybe you saved have used Libre office to open it. just saying
In truth, I did get that document open but I was the only one who could from a group of about half a dozen. I was freelance and working somewhere else or I could've opened it and sent a Word version around, but by the time I got to see it, there was already a quite blistering email thread about the problem. I stayed out of it.
Ive been giving this a go and WOW, it’s wonderful to be using an app on my Mac that feels like a Mac app. The only issue I’ve found is if I paste something with quote marks into Pages (eg from Apple Notes), when I export it to Word, the Word version has something odd… try it. In the exported version move the cursor right using the arrow keys over the quote mark… it jumps, then jumps back. It’s driving me mad. Has anyone else experienced this? (It isn’t a problem if I type a quote in Pages, just pasted ones). Hope someone can help me before true distraction sets in.
I can’t try it where I am, but I’m curious: does it happen regardless of how you paste the text in? I mean regular paste versus paste and match style. Terribly interesting: I know Microsoft loads a ridiculous amount of formatting detail in the pilcrow at the end of each paragraph, I didn’t know the quote marks were complicated.
@@WilliamGallagher Yes, I've tried both pastes, and even tried pasting "plain text" from BBEdit and the problem occurs (only with curly, straight quotes are fine). This morning I tried converting all quotes to straight and then back to smart (using the transform menu) - that didn't work, it even broke the smart quotes I'd typed manually. I'm lucky my proofreader noticed this before I sent the document out. Particularly frustrating as it isn't visible on the screen, but clearly something is up, due to the cursor jumping over the quote.
@@WilliamGallagher A tech friend of mine has looked into it. It turns out that Pages is exporting the dodgy quotes as "right to left" text (the rest of the text is left-to-right, as I would expect in English). Fingers crossed it's a bug Apple will sort soon.
@@martinkendall9430 Thanks, I've been wondering about this.
*Pages is much, much easier to use and far more intuitive than Word. Things that take 2 to 3 steps in Word take 1 step with Pages. It always seems to be that way with all things Microsoft or Windows.*
I agree. It always seems to me that Microsoft wants to be able to say that its apps do any feature you can think of, so they add in everything -- and don't consider whether it's accessible, or even useful. The famous example is Show Codes, which was such a staple of WordPerfect that people originally would not buy Word without it. So Microsoft adds in a feature it calls Show Codes, tells everyone it's got it. And its Show Codes had no relation to why WordPerfect users found the feature so useful. It couldn't: the two word processors were built so differently that it was impossible to actually implement a useful Show Codes in Word. But Microsoft only cared that they could have something of that title. listed on the sales sheet. I've gone off on one now, haven't I? I'll get some tea and calm down.
Isn’t ms word “free” to view documents, but not to save them? I believe it is, or was.
Good point, I missed that.
I guess espousing the practice of writing in plain text and keeping track of your text files with git will fall on deaf ears.
Yep. I'll never put something on Github that I'm not planning to send to someone and it is shocking to me how technologically-impaired a lot of publishers are. You can't criticise someone for just not happening to know something, but I've seen reactions ranging from petulance to anger that anyone dare ask them to look at something they haven't before.
It’s apple so of course it’s crap
,