Things that Pages can do and Word can't

Question

It seems to me that a fair number of posts are from people who expect Pages to do everything Word does. But Office has been around for a long time and is considerably more expensive. It would be nice if Peggy and a couple other experts could point out a few things that Pages does more easily that Word, or perhaps that Pages can do and Word can't. In other words, what are the advantages of using Pages over Word, other than complete independence from Microsoft?

Answer 1

jamarimutt,
I'm neither Peggy nor an expert, but I've been using Pages since January 2005 -- which qualifies me as both an early adopter and a maschist. So I thought I'd weigh in.
To me, the real beauty of Pages lies in how easy it is to put anything you want on the page, and move it to wherever you need it to be. That was true for Pages 1.0 and it's even more so today.
I'm a novelist, so it's very important to me to find a word processor I'm comfortable with. I tried Word and was turned off by its bloat and complexity. I took Nisus Writer Express for a spin and was shocked by how it ruined my documents. I tried Mariner Write and found it to be compact, reliable, and mostly old-fashioned.
When Pages 1.0 was released, I figured for $40, it was worth a go. Without reading a manual, I had set up a complete novel-writing template (with fonts, styles, page views, etc.) in 15 minutes that I still use. I think font-rendering is superb -- Pages documents just look better on the screen.
I've even shown my completely non-technical wife how to use Pages, and she whips out gorgeous-looking documents on a regular basis for her work.
I also appreciate the fact that it gives you a choice of how to use it: the inspector palette is there for those whose brains work that way. Most of the same tasks can be accomplished by using the format bar and the ruler. Or there's the menus.
It's not perfect. It's slow on some people's systems, although not on my G4 iBook or my Intel iMac. Some folks are exasperated by its limp mail-merge capabilities. Other folks are infuriated that it doesn't offer an auto-save feature. And there's a variety of other wishes and things people grumble about. But, all in all, I think there's huge satisfaction with Pages -- not just because it isn't Word, but because it delivers the goods in its own right.
Many, many people are doing very serious, meaningful, and professional work with Pages. Amazing when you consider that it's one of three applications in a suite that costs 79 bucks.
-Dennis