As a long time Mac user, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Apple’s word processor, Pages, for years. On the positive side, Pages always excelled at graphical page layout. I could create custom documents, complete with shaded boxes, colorful graphs and functional tables. Compared to Microsoft Word, Pages did page layout well. Unfortunately, Pages has never played well with MS Word’s DOC or DOCX file format. My great looking Pages documents would turn to mush when output as a Word File. Simple text applications were fine, but anything complex had problems.
Bottom line: I used Apple Pages sparingly, and only on the Mac. A PC version was never available.
Earlier this year Apple in their wonderful wisdom, decided to gut the Apple Pages program and remove over 100 features from the program. On top of that they came out with a new file system that was incompatible with the old one. My sparkling new Version 5 Pages program couldn’t open my old Pages documents. This was crazy. The pages program went from almost five stars on Apple’s site to just over one star. It was absolutely horrendous!
Reading the Apple docs, it became apparent that Apple wanted to make Pages cross platform compatible with their IOS products (iPhone and iPad). To do this they had to dumb it down.
Gone were..
- Odd/even pages (Can’t output a book now)
- Mailmerge
- Bookmarks
- Design options
- Many more…
So now many of the features that I routinely use in a word processor are gone. All my book files are now incompatible. I can’t even open my old Pages files… ARRRGH!
So… to be honest, I just completely gave up on Pages. Thankfully my previous 4.3 version was archived on my Mac so I could open my old files.
So this is where my post would of ended… a horrendous death of a reasonable product.
Fast forward about 8 months to the release of a new Mac operating system Yosemite, and an updated 5.5 version of Pages.
I tried the program again…
- Most of the more complex word processing features are still missing
- The reviews are better, but still disappointing
- A few new interesting tweaks have been added
However…
I discovered four things that may make this a program you’ll use all the time…
- The program is free on most platforms. No yearly subscription to pay like Microsoft.
- Cross compatibility with Mac, iPad, iPhone and Web based IOS interface (PC compatibility)
- Easy to use interface that works well on the Mac and on portable devices
- One new feature that will revolutionize the way you interact with your complex documents
It’s this last feature that has me really excited. Over the past few weeks I’ve been able to create amazing documents that have literally saved me hours of time.
Imagine if you will…
- Walking to a meeting, saying a few commands into your iPhone, hitting one button and printing out complete meeting outlines, customized for each attendee.
- Entering a few vocal entries and printing out custom business cards for your event. Speak another command and print cards for your whole crew, with custom fonts, graphics and logos, right from your iPhone or iPad to a portable printer, even in a place that doesn’t have wireless access.
- Entering a few vocal entries and printing out three separate resumes, custom designed for specific people/companies right from a local Starbucks with a portable printer
- Print cool custom designed name tags, tent cards, and info bearing bookmarks, right from your iPhone on one sheet of cardstock for each attendee to your training session.
While the programming and design has taken weeks of time, the results are simply amazing. The average person can input data in a simple form and the program does all the conversion.
The best thing is, you’ll be able to download these complex documents for an incredibly low price and get productive right away. No programming, designing or tweaking. Just fill and click.
Because of the complex nature of the docs, I’ll be releasing these one per week, over the next few months. Each will have step by step instructions, and a helpful video to get you started right away.
Be sure to sign up on our mailing list, so you’ll be notified as each one comes out.
Our first Apple Pages document will be free , released in early December.