Pasting text from another document or website

Question

Hello,
I'm trialing iWorks '09 and have to admit that while I love Apple, I cannot fathom iWorks. It is not intuitive for those of us used to MS Office, which I readily admit is not necessarily a good thing, but the tutorials and the manual don't even cover the basics. Like cutting and pasting.
Yes, there's nice sections that deal with this topic in the manual and tutorials, none of which deal with real-world situations.
I need to copy some legal boilerplate off a website, paste it into Pages, and manipulate it to suit my purposes. The cut is fairly lenthy, probably 100 lines of text. I create a new Pages document position the cursor and paste. The text comes out beautifully, except that it spills over the first page and into the abyss, not the second page. I have since figured out (no thanks to the manual or tutorials) that in pasting this website material, Pages creates a table, in which one of the rows contains my 100 lines of text. Since it's trying to stick the first row on the first page, it only shows as much text as the page will allow.
OK, I'm cool with that. Kind of. So I try to copy and paste the material that fell off the first page onto the second page. But wait! I can't go spelunking off the first page into the abyss. Pages will not allow me to retrieve the text at the bottom of the cell. Just for giggles. I insert the cursor towards the end of the first page and start typing. When I get to the end of the first page, the cursor also disappears into the void. I know its down there. I know that what I'm typing is actually being inserted. But there is no way to see it, cut it, paste it, or do anything with it.
OK, well at least in know that I'm dealing with a table, although there's nothing that makes this obvious (I only found out by going through the inspector and noticing that the text tools were all greyed out but the table tools were all raring to go). How can I get my leftover text back? I tried to manipulate the number of rows and columns in the table. I tried to split the row and the column (that's probably not the right thing to do, but I was desperate). Nothing works.
The first order problem is that Pages decided for me (though I didn't ask it to) that what I was pasting in was a table. There's no obvious way to get it not to do that. In other words, Pages is doing too much thinking for you, a sin usually more associated with MS. I want a dumber program that will listen to me, not a smart, specialized program that insists on doing things that I don't want it to do. I want my software to do what I want, not to try to make me conform to its conventions, which may not be appropriate to what I am trying to do. Isn't end-user orientation supposed to be what Apple is all about?
The second order problem is that there seems to be no clear instruction for what to do when encountering basic cut-and-paste operations that go awry, like this one. In the real world, people are always going to be cutting from websites, other documents, etc., and these may not fit into the preconceived notions of Pages' developers of what a cut should be. Tough. If Pages can't handle 100 lines of text being pasted in from somewhere else, an absolutely elementary operation, I don't have a good feeling about the iWorks suite as a whole.
I've had conversations with people about similar problems in Numbers. I was trying mightily to be open minded over there, realizing that there are more than two ways to skin a cat, but if Apple wants to move iWorks, it has to meet its clients where they are -- in a world dominated by MS (unfortunately). Like many others, I'm no fan of MS. Apple has always been my choice for computers and hardware. But I can't afford the time of taking a class at my local community college to relearn basic word processing operations I learned 25 years ago on MacWrite and MS Word 2.0. The iWork glossies sure look nice. Wish I could use it. But learning how is going to be an insane time killer and right now I just don't see how it's worth it.

Answer 1

The default behaviour of OSX is to copy and retain the format of copied objects and text.
This makes it possible for example to copy and paste the contents of a web page with all its links and layout. IMHO this should not be the default behaviour, it should be the other way around.
However in your case as you just want the text and have it take on the formatting of where it is being pasted:
+Menu > Edit > Paste and Match Style (command option shift v)+
making sure that the text you are pasting into is the default style. Start a fresh blank document if you like.
It also pays to watch what part of a web page you are copying from. You generally can see if it has selected outside the block of text and sometimes it is necessary to select from the bottom up to avoid gathering in too much formatting.
I think you may enjoy a simpler word processor, that has more than enough features but still remains simple.
Try my favorite:
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/21977/itext-express (free)
Peter