Jeremy’s World

I recently moved to the Mac platform having used Windows-based machines and Office for well over 5 years.  Being a student (in both computer science, politics and French) as well as working part-time for a company that manages buildings, I often make use of a word processor to put together essays, specification documents, manuals and briefs.  As a result, being able to use a powerful, yet simple word processor is necessary for me.  I don’t always make use of word processors to the full power of Microsoft Word, although with those features available, life is made a little easier.

So, when I moved over to the Mac platform in late November last year, I was confronted with an interesting question - which word processor would I use?  Would I stay with the Microsoft Office application: Word, or was it worth trying something else like OpenOffice Writer (which I use often at uni on the linux machines) or maybe even Mac’s latest version of Pages ‘08?

I got myself a copy of Office 2004 for the Mac and began trying out the functionality in comparison to the well-known Office 2003 (by the way, I still think users on Windows should stick with Office 2003 and not move to Office 2007 until, maybe, late 2008 when everything is truly set in concrete - if Vista is anything to go by of course).  It became immediately obvious that working with Word 2004 was going to be problematic.  There were clear interface problems - failure of pictures to appear from ex-Windows documents, scrolling issues with footnoted documents (such as some of my essays) as well as other smaller little things.  These were more accentuated with my Dad’s mac when he moved over having been a long long time Windows Office user.

I knew that Microsoft Office 2008 would be coming out in the New Year, but that was just not good enough for me.  So, I decided to give Pages a go.  Pages is part of Apple’s iWork suite (the latest version being iWork ‘08 which comes as a trial version with the latest version of OS X, Leopard).  Pages is an interesting product.  It has a very nice clean interface, but its approach to word processing is clearly different from that of Word (although I note that Word 2008 for the Mac seems to have taken some of the ideas from Pages such as Toolbox idea).

I was pleasantly surprised to find though that the different way of working… well… worked.  It did take a bit of getting used to at first, but I was soon able to produce elegant specification documents for the development of a piece of research software I am working at the moment¹.

There are of course problems, however, with some of the functions of pages - these are possibly resulting partly from me as a user of Word - but it is important to note these for users making a move to the Mac and considering using pages.  For example:

• Line spacing is signficantly different in Pages as opposed to Word - this is particularly in an issue when attempting to import Word documents into Pages
• The handling of bullets is a little strange in Pages, especially when trying to move outside a bullet/numbering block, it is still yet to be natural
• Page numbering can sometimes be a little weird when working with some of Pages’ constructs such as the types of breaks available

However, at the same time:

• Styles and images are easily manipulated and transfer well from an imported Word document
• The interface is relatively easy to work with thanks to Apple’s core operating system interface

I will be honest though: since the release of Office 2008 for the Mac, I have moved back primarily to Word as many of the existing issues in Word 2004 have been resolved in Word 2008 making working in MS Office for the Mac a little more of a joy than a burden.  Having said that, Pages is still a good alternative if you want to try out something else.

Jerry Pournelle has several interesting articles on moving to the Mac and using MS Word for the Mac on his website for interested users looking at the possibility of making a change of operating systems (and essentially the way of working).

Oh… a conclusion… if a new computer user starting with a Mac or a user moving from Windows to the Mac, stick with MS Office.  However, make sure you get your hands on a copy of Office 2008 for the Mac and not Office 2004!  If you want an alternative, Pages from iWork ‘08 does function well, but is probably still well behind MS Office.