Cage match: Word vs. Pages

So from my last post I got a comment from Jonathan to basically do his homework for him. To make life easier for you the reader here’s the comment:

So can you give me a full analysis on Word vs. Pages? I’ve considered buying Pages, but I’m not sure if it’s the right thing to do.

Comment by Jonathan — October 19, 2007 @ 7:06 pm

Fear not poor Jonathan, I am here to light the way with my first ever Word vs. Pages totally subjective review. Oh and science has no place here, this will just be a lot of observations and screenshots. It’s best not to ask for things like say, evidence, just accepting on blind faith will make this all go a lot more smoothly.

Starting with my all-time favorite, the Blank Template, Pages looks like this in its default view:

Word? Looks pretty much the same save for the lack of a unified toolbar:

Even though the Word toolbars are annoying as all get out I’m not going to ding them for that. The Word 2008 release is coming in January and from the screenshots I’ve seen this has been fixed. I also feel bad for the Word team at Microsoft. They have this product that has always sold well for them and then Apple goes and changes their processors to Intel AND does so in a manner that anything written in CodeWarrior becomes a huge pain to port. I wonder if Apple poured sugar in their gas tanks too or if they thought that this was enough.

Now Word has this little view tab thingie in the lower left hand corner which changes how the main editing window is displayed:

Choosing the first one gives the default view and the third one shows the full page view. The second one gives this outline view:

I’ve never used the outline view and much to my surprise there was a fourth view, the notebook view. Clicking on it either creates a new document or it transmogrifies your current document into a notebook one.

Considering I had no idea what this was going to do I chose the new document option.

Look at that, it looks like lined paper from a notebook. I guess you’d use this for taking notes or something. Like if you were in class and you weren’t playing with IM/Facebook/MySpace.

Now Pages really only has two modes, normal and page layout. (i.e. The one to create things like newsletters that most people never choose.) You can’t flip back and forth between these two though. The only time you get to choose is when you create the document:

Now I’m a man with a newsletter writer tool in need of a newsletter:

One of the features of Word that I do use a great deal is the change tracking and commenting. You get to it by clicking these icons in the toolbar.

The icons in Pages are so close to the Word ones that you’d think they were separated at birth:

Pages then highlights your edits in this gutter on the left hand side with arrows pointing back into the main text.

I think I generally like how this is done but I’ll admit that I am a little surprised that the changes and comment boxes are square. It seems like Apple generally likes to make things like this a little bubbly.

In contrast this feature in Word is my mortal enemy. No matter how many times I do it I get my inline comment view, which looks a great deal like Pages’ version, into a situation that looks like this:

with all the changes showing up at the bottom of the window:

Then I have to mess around looking for how to change it because I never bother to write it down or take notes or do anything reasonable like that. I’m pretty sure that you have change to full page view to get it to work like I want, only when I did it today:

Figures. I guess that kinda sums everything up though doesn’t it.