Pages Review
http://digitalsandbox.us/wp-content/pages1222005.jpg” alt=“Pages” />Macteens is running a very nice review of Pages on their site. There is also a nice review over at MacWorld written by the guy who runs MacOSXHints.com. He gets into a little more of the nitty gritty of it which is nice. I agree with just about everything they had to say. I haven’t had too much time to play with it (or do much of anything if post frequency is anything to go by) yet, but I like what I see.
Basically, Pages is not a Word killer. Not even close. Word has soooo many more features it isn’t even funny. But that is really the crux of the issue for me. Word has too many features for the average user. I consider myself a pretty average user. I just write letters and reports, nothing major. I don’t use Mail Merge or any other of a hundred different features Word provides. I don’t need even 10% of the features that Word provides. I don’t really use Excel or Entourage much at all anymore either. And PowerPoint is handy on occasion.
So basically I pay a lot of money (not too much really, as I am a student) for Office and I only use the equivalent of one and a half programs (Word and little PowerPoint). And I don’t really even use Word to it’s fullest extent. Furthermore, the few things I do use Word for, it doesn’t do so well. Have you ever tried to do even a simple layout with Word. I’m not talking a Pages style layout. I mean a word document with some pictures. The stupid program tries to place my images for me at every opportunity. I just want to move it up a half an inch and it shoves it up into the header. Excuse me, I think I know where I would like them, thank you. That is why I got excited when Apple released Pages.
Pages is basically everything I need in a word processor with everything I need in a page layout program. You get your charts, lists, footnotes, headers, etc, and your pictures, tables, and everything else you could want in a simple package. For me it really is the perfect blend. I find it very easy to create great looking layouts form scratch and the templates Apple provides are, to put it plainly, stunning. And they can be modified with simple drag and drops.
There are still a few bugs to work out. The MacWorld article I linked to had a few of them lined out for us (the poor exports are a little disheartening), but overall I am totally comfortable with switching to Pages full-time. I am even hatching an ingenious plan for a…I’ve said too much. Just wait and see. Anyway, for those of you who don’t need a bloated piece of software like Word (not trying to insult it, but it is overly bloated for the average user), then you should definitely give Pages a try. Two thumbs up from this reviewer.