Pros & Cons
Whether you're delighted or dismayed by Apple's completely rewritten Pages app depends on how much you used the older version. Users who invested years of work in the old versions of Pages are complaining loudly in Apple's support forums that essential features have disappeared, at least temporarily, from the current version. If you're a long-term user, you should definitely continue to work with older versions that shipped as part of the iWork '09 office suite—and you'll still have that version on your system even if you download the new version from the App Store. But anyone looking for a Mac-based alternative to Microsoft Word should take a close look at the new Pages—not only because Apple gives it away free to anyone who buys a new Mac or already has an earlier version of the app, but also because the new Pages is impressively intuitive and elegant. It also makes new steps in live collaborative editing.
First Impressions
I'll get back in a moment to the issues caused by Pages' new file format, and by the temporarily-missing features. Meanwhile, here's what you find if you're trying Pages for the first time. Pages is the first word processor that's designed from the ground up for today's wide-screen computers. Back in the day of 4:3 monitors, when you wanted to adjusting formatting or page layout, most word-processors opened a window over the page that hid the text you were changing until you closed the window. Pages now uses a panel at the right of the screen as the place where you control most—not all—the features that used to be either in a top-of-the screen toolbar or in floating "inspector" windows or other pop-up windows. A "tips" buttons shows or hides boxes with advice on how to use major interface features.
When you're editing text, the right panel shows a spacious set of icons and controls for fonts and paragraph layout, complete with the familiar gear icon for advanced typographic features like automatic ligatures (connected letters available in some fonts, like "Qu" with the tail of the "Q" extending beneath the "u"). When you click on a picture, the right panel instantly switches from showing text-formatting functions to showing image-formatting features, and the panel changes again when you're working in a table. The screen is never cluttered with icons for features that you can't use until you move to another part of your document.
Different looks and reduced features
The new Pages does a better job than any other word-processor of simplifying some common tasks. For example, in the old version of Pages, as in Microsoft Word, you had to insert invisible section breaks before you could use different headers and footers in different parts of a document. In the new Pages, you simply click in the header or footer and click a button that says "Start new header/footer here." Unfortunately, Apple took away flexibility when it added ease of use, because the new Pages, unlike the old, won't let you create different headers for left- and right-hand pages. New features support collaboration, so that co-authors and editors can create their own color-coded comments, and simultaneous editing will be available in the browser-based version of the app.
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Pages's new visual design has a lot in common with the minimal visual style introduced in iOS 7, and it's surprisingly effective in Mac OS X. Working in the new panel design is restful and distracting, especially when you compare it with the clutter that the old Pages displayed by default. Unfortunately, the bad old pop-up windows still appear for features like manual spell-checking, but that seems to occur because Pages uses OS X's built-in spell-checking interface—the same one that appears in TextEdit, for example—instead of its own more modern interface. Oddly enough, Find and Replace also appears in a pop-up window, although the old version of Pages included an option to open a side panel that listed all the search hits in a document.
When Apple released the new Pages, user forums erupted in complaints about missing features, including some uniquely valuable features like the ability to select non-contiguous text and select all text formatted with a specific "style." Also missing is the ability to place a graphic inside a table cell and the entire mail merge feature that made it possible to create customized form letters using data from the Address Book app. The same kind of torrent of complaints occurred a few years ago when Apple created a new version of Final Cut Pro with features missing from the old version. Just as most of those missing features eventually made it back into Final Cut Pro X, you can expect missing features to find their way back to Pages. An unanswered question is how long you'll wait for advanced features that Microsoft Word users take for granted, like the ability to compare two versions of a document and highlight the differences between them.
Final Thoughts
