Since switching to Macs over three years ago, my firm has continued to use Microsoft Word. Why? Well, for no reason other than it is what we were used to, since we had used it back in our PC days. Honestly, doing something a certain way because "it’s always been done that way" is not a good enough reason.
I have wanted to switch our firm over to Apple’s Pages for quite some time. In fact, I had intended to do so before the end of 2007, but I simply didn’t have time to do so between working on my clients’ cases and my speaking engagements. Not that I’m complaining, as being too busy is a wonderful "problem" to have.
Yesterday, I was completing a long document to fax to another attorney on a pressing matter. Just as I finished it, #%&@ Word locked up on me and caused me to lose the whole document. As a result, I had to redo it at double-speed to meet the deadline, which is less than ideal. I decided that was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and I made the decision that we were making the move to Pages right now!
For quite some time, I have used Pages for my non-work writing, including both my personal correspondence and seminar presentation materials. Simply put, it is an outstanding program. It is very intuitive and easy to use, yet is has very powerful features. Best of all, it is stable and has never locked up or frozen on me. After all, if the best software program in the world isn’t dependable, how useful is it?
I will keep you posted over the coming weeks as to how our transition goes, but I fully anticipate that it will be very smooth. My assistant has never used Pages before, but I am confident that she will pick it up and master it in no time. After all, she had never used a Mac until I replaced her PC with one, and within a day she was extremely comfortable with it. Stay tuned …
I read that a problem with Pages is that, when it opens a MSWord .doc, it does not just read that file. Rather, it converts it to Pages, and the resulting document has to be saved in Pages-format. i.e. it is not possible to seamlessly read and write to .doc format. That would play havoc with existing file archives. Perhaps an alternative to consider is the OpenOffice word processor. (I don’t have Pages, so I cannot verify this).
I considered switching to Pages several months ago (along with numbers). Unfortunately, in a vacuum the programs were wonderful, but when I had to share completed documents with clients, courts and other attorneys I ran into compatibility issues. If you could seamlessly import and export into the “Word World” it would be a viable option.
As an aside, I also updated to Office 2008 to see if this would alleviate some of the earlier iterations problems. Primarily due to Excel 2008’s lack of Visual Basic support I am now back using Office 2004.
One day I thought it would be fun to see how long it would take me to come up with a pleading template — a caption all nicely done, margins to meet the local rules, and styles for headings, citations, etc. As a newbie to Pages I thought it would be quit a project. Wrong. I was done in less than an hour. It’s a great program — very intuitive. I hope more in the mac community give it a try. It’s $79 per seat, so it’s not like you’re risking a lot trying it out.
Pages exports readily to Word. Simply pull down the file and click on export. There you are offered Word, PDF, RTF, and Plain Text.
As to its cost, unlike Office programs it has a full version free trial.
Its templating capabilities are much more powerful and user-friendly than in Word.
Sorry for my skepticism, but I don’t want to go through the “Wordperfect round-trip” ordeal again. For a long time, we fought the good fight to keep using Wordperfect (an admittedly superior word processor) by opening Word docs in Wordperfect and then “exporting” out to Word to share with clients and other lawyers using Word…wrong!
It is just too much of a pain with all the formatting headaches that develop. I’ve never been a Word fan, but it’s what my clients, fellow lawyers, and courts use, so I’ve had to stick with Word on the Mac as well. If Pages opened and saved in native format, okay, but as long as you’re doing the import-edit-export round trip, you are fraught with disappointment.
I’m about to replace my Windows machines at work with Macs and have been thinking a lot about what could possibly replace WordPerfect, the workhorse in my office for nearly 20 years. The obvious anwer is Nothing, but I’ve been fiddling with OpenOffice 3.0 beta, which opens WordPerfect files quite nicely and also with Pages. Since I’ll be using Daylite as a replacement for Timematters, I wanted to be able to merge data in Daylite with Pages or OpenOffice but neither supported merges.
Well, a couple of days ago, the Daylite folks released a new beta version of DL which provides merge capability. It works. There’s even a way to get custom form data out of Daylite into Pages. If you’re a Daylite user this makes Pages very attractive. Like Ben, I’ve been using Pages for non-business stuff and it really is a beautiful little program. We’ll be using it when we make the switch later this summer.
Dstrauss, if we were talking about something like string theory or deism I could understand your skepticism.
However we are talking about a computer program which you can test for yourself. Download iWork’08 for free and try exporting. If you find it is too complex or does not work then that is fine.
The fact that others (all with advanced degrees like yourself) find it works reliably without a great deal of effort may well mean that what you are resisting is not Pages but change itself.
I like Pages and try to use it whenever possible. I haven’t tried its import/export support for Word, but I have done that quite a bit with OpenOffice (which another commenter suggested). I was underwhelmed. Even simple documents contained significant layout differences and there were frequently problems.
Relying on compatibility is tough because, no matter how much testing you do, you can’t possibly test every single combination. There’s always that chance that the document you get tomorrow will be totally screwed up.
Of course, using Word doesn’t solve this problem. We recently received (at home) a Word (for Windows) document in which someone had put text boxes (the drawing element) in table cells. It probably looked fine on their computer or they wouldn’t have sent it. But on our computer with Word (2004 for Mac), most of the text was off the bottom of the page. It was dreadful.
Basically I try to avoid situations where I am sharing a document with someone and expecting that person to edit the document. For every other type of situation PDF works just fine.
I think you’ll be glad you made the switch. I use only Pages and require staff to do the same when working on any documents I will use. My newest secretary had many years of Word experience, but was comfortable in Pages within days. I gave her the Apple training series book and the small booklet that came in the box with the very first version of iWork. Good luck.
Still need Word or WP for TOA generation. I draft on Pages, then export to Word format, which my secretaries, believe it or not, then convert to WP for TOA generation. Along the way, formatting is lost and has to be reapplied. I believe its the Word to WP step that does the damage. In any case, I am sufficiently frustrated with restoring formatting, that I may revert to writing in WP, via VMWare.
The TOA issue is a really good point. We are not an appellate firm, but we do our own appeals, and when I say we I mean my associate and my assistant.
I would think that someone could do a script for a TOA, apparently not yet. The deficiency does not change my usage, but obviously someone in the office must be able to do it automatically.
Despite all of the positive reasons for moving from Word to Pages, I find no equivalent in Pages for a text expander such as AutoText which inputs formatted and styled text into a Pages document. I also know of no third party solution to that. How have you managed to input paragraphs, tables or even sections of such text?
The program TextExpander by Smile on My Mac (smileonmymac.com/TextExpander/) does allow pasting of text, formatted text, etc. into any program, including Pages. It does a great job and is a bargain at $29.95.
Thanks for your response to my question on TextExpander. I enjoyed it but I found that transferring Word formatted documents to Pages, especially with tables, does not go so smooth. Anyway, another topic in which I find no comparison between Word and Pages is the availability of custom fields. Word allows multiple custom document fields whereas Pages allows none. What have you found as a work-around for this ?
Ware:
I did use the demo version for the full 30 days. In almost every instance (and we do not use heavily formatted documents) every Word document I imported generated a table of errors in formatting that Pages could not resolve. Then on the export side, the documents, when opened in Word on both my Mac and my secretary’s Windoze machine, would have visual formatting errors (margins, lists, etc.) that had to be corrected. Again, I am no fan of Word on teh Mac (anymore so than on Windoze) but the round trip needs to be seamless without corrections. It just is not between Pages and Word.
I would also like to use Pages exclusively, but have not been able to find any method to do document comparisons. Does anyone have a solution. I know that you can track changes but this does not help when I receive documents edited by some else – or does it? Thands