Review: Pages ‘09

• Article 65 of 89
• MacFormat, March 2009

When it comes to word processing, Word is still very much the daddy, the program all other word processors have to beat if they're to stand a chance of being used. Pages has been trying its best for some time, and while the latest version matches and even exceeds Word in some areas, it's still an also-ran in many ways - particularly now Word 2008 has a decent page layout component.

Pages '09 is mostly a collection of improvements to existing Pages features, rather than really big changes. Many of these improvements are cosmetic. As with the other iWork '09 programs, there's the updated Template Chooser when the program launches that gives you mouseable thumbnail previews of the themes, of which there are an additional 40 in Pages. Some of these are considerably better than others, although there is the decidedly unpleasant Green Grocery range, for example.

The default toolbar has had something of a change, with the new Outline and Full Screen modes getting buttons and iWork.com replacing Track Changes in Pages' affections - although the icon is still there in the toolbar customisation sheet. The iWork '09 Share menu also appears in Pages and acquires the Send to iWeb and Export options previously available under File, as well as the Send via Mail option for emailing Pages, Word or PDF versions of your document. Anyone worried about whether the dreaded .docx is supported can rest easy since Office 2007/8 formats are supported throughout iWork '09 for both import and export. And the paragraph styles sidebar has switched from the right-hand side of the document to the left.

Top of proper new features though is Full Screen view, an interesting 'innovation'. This makes Pages fill the entire screen while losing the Desktop, Dock, menubar and any palettes you might have open, leaving just your document, a page number indicator, a word count and a pop-up sidebar for page navigation. The idea behind Full Screen is to remove distractions from view when you're trying to compose your thoughts. While Word doesn't really have anything like this, WriteRoom (http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom), for example, does and it does it better with more customisation. We also found that when switching back to normal view, trying to persuade Pages documents' not to continue to block out other programs was almost impossible without hiding the whole program.

Outline mode lets you create a detailed outline view of your document, with multiple levels of topics and subtopics. While Word has had that since as far back as Word 4.0, Pages lets you drag and drop topics to reorganise them and the information associated with each topic and sub-topic will follow it around. It also includes inline images and movies in the outline view as thumbnails or at actual size. While this will no doubt be a godsend to some logically thinking people, it does necessitate some discipline in terms of formatting, since it requires the use of headings and sub-headings, which won't suit all document types.

Pages' mail-merge facility has also been updated to be able to draw on tables in Numbers documents, something that's considerably easier than with Word 2008.
For more advanced users, there's now integration with both EndNote X2 and MathType 6. EndNote lets you create and edit bibliographic references while MathType lets you generate equations far more sophisticated than those produced by OS X's Grapher application, the fallback for Pages '08. The level of integration is impressive, far surpassing the simple copy-and-paste you might have expected: EndNote's database of references is searchable within Pages so you can find the reference you want and then embed it - you can then format it using one of the 3,800 reference styles available within EndNote; MathType's point-and-click equation generation functions are available directly within Pages as well, and equations generated can be edited and resized using double-clicks and dragging corner-handles. However, neither package comes with Pages so you'll need to make additional purchases in both cases; both tools offer greater capabilities than those available in Word, however, although it's worth pointing out that both come with native integration with Word (and other Office apps) anyway, albeit less extensive.

On balance though, for the ordinary user, Pages '09 doesn't really have much that Pages '08 didn't. As beautiful and easier to use than Word as it is, overall, it doesn't have that package's power. Of course, with Word often being accused of feature bloat, that might be a good thing as far as many people are concerned, and it also doesn't come with Word's price tag. Nevertheless, Pages while good enough for many people, just isn't going to be giving Microsoft too many sleepless nights for now.