Apple’s iWork - Pages
I’m going to review my experiences with Pages, the desktop publishing program from Apple. I’ve worked with Quark and Pagemaker, and was anxious to see how Pages stacked up. Pages comes either in the bundled software with your computer, or separately as the iWork suite, which includes Keynote as well. Pages is a newish program. It’s said that someday it may be a replacement for Appleworks. Well, don’t throw the Appleworks application out just yet. Pages is good, but needs some refinement.
When you first open Pages you are overwhelmed with these really cool templates. There are all kinds of professionally-designed files for home and school use, such as “Family Newsletter,” “Education Newsletter,” “Club Newsletter,”and such.
It also has stationary, resumes and other useful setups. It’s supposed to be able to read Microsoft Word documents but I’ve found the Word import can often make documents look unlike their Word originals. Of course,that’s probably more to blame on Word, because many of the Word.doc files I receive from PC users seem to be in a cryptic formula that can sometimes only be formatted correctly on a Windows-based Word application. But that is a whole ‘nuther issue.
My reason for purchasing Pages was to be able to make a newsletter for a club I’m involved with. I opened up the first club newsletter template and ‘lo and behold, it was a template for a British car club, which is the very type of club I was wanting to publish a newsletter for. At first all seemed to go well. I would take out the filler text and put in my own. I added my own pictures. It worked great. As one page would get filled up, it would flow into a new page. This happened with each page until I ended up with my eight page document.
Pages kept adding the pages, which was ok in concept, but the problem arose when a change was later made to an article and the CPU would work and work to make the text flow over however many pages I had created. A change on page 1 would reflow the text all the way through page eight. Moving one picture would result in a 15 second delay! Then you would want to change that and another 15 seconds. I was rapidly becoming exhausted with the wait. And I was running on a
relatively- fast G4 (1.33Ghz processor). I couldn’t understand how it could be slow since I used to run Quark on an PowerMac 8100 without any speed concerns at all.
Soon after the initial version of Pages was released, someone figured out that there were problems navigating through a long project and added a pane that has thumbnails of each page. You can click on them and it will take you to that page. When the page is selected, it is highlighted yellow. It was after that pane was introduced that I realized my 8 page document selected all at once as if it was one page. Try to delete page 4, for example, and the whole document would go with it. It was then I learned how to tame Pages.
I made a new document and added one new page at a time. Starting from a blank page and adding my elements that I cut and pasted from my monster eight page, page,I now had 8 separate pages. And with that,things got faster and easier and much simpler to use. However the strange end-of-page marker takes some getting used to. At this point in the maturity-level of Pages, it’s kind of like a puppy, eager to please but wetting the floor along the way. I think of myself as a power-user and when I became so frustrated by a simple thing like moving text around, I wonder how a less savvy user might be put-off by some of these frustrations. Either way,I’d give Pages a positive rating. For the money it has some flash and dazzle, but hopefully will grow up soon.