A wish list of Pages.app features-- anyone have work arounds?

Question

I'm trying to stop needing Word altogether. It is bloated, crashes, and well, a micro$oft program...
I LOVE pages '08. Particularly the tracking changes, and the entire look and feel of the application. A big plus for me (as a writer) is the ability to highlight in TONS of different colors. But it seems to be lacking a couple things that I really wish it had. Maybe I'm missing something though.
* The ability to have continuous page view-- just text and no page images breaks.
* the ability to pull the text color and highlight color boxes out from the menu for easy access when needed? I don't see them anywhere in the inspector?
* different menu bars for different tasks-- word processing, drawing etc? I don't need all the drawing stuff when I'm just writing.
* automatic saving at a specified time interval? I don't think it has this feature, so I am trying to remember to save often, but even the saving seems slightly slower than Word (although everything else is speedier).
* the ability to "save as" a word .doc--instead of having to export to word? I don't think this is an option right now which is curious to me. In the "save as" dialog box it would be nice if one of the options was "save a copy as .doc" or ".rtf" Maybe there is a hack or pluggin for this?

Answer 1

geek,
You can't have what I call a "toilet paper roll" view in Pages, where the text is continuous, without a break. Pages uses a page metaphor, and will always show separate pages.
Highlight a group of words, click on the Text inspector > More, then check the Character Fill box. Choose your color. You can have this open all the time for easy access. You can also have multiple inspectors open, if you've got the screen space, so you won't have to change away from this view.
Pages already gives you a different Format bar, depending on whether you're in Word Processing or Page Layout mode. But, as with the previous answer, you can always have your Text inspector open for WP documents, and Graphic inspector open for PL files.
No automatic saving. This is a much-discussed omission in the program. Personally, I've never needed it and never wanted it. My writing is important to me, so I've just trained myself to hit command-S every couple of paragraphs.
No love here. You can't "save as" a .doc file. You have to go through the Export process. It's a pain. It would be nice if Pages would look at a doc's current saved state, and save as that. But it always wants to save as a Pages doc. No way around it that I know. This is also a much-lamented "feature."
-Dennis