| Monday, October 1, 2007 |
10:57 - Pages vs. Word
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I still have yet to get anywhere near the purchase price's worth out of iWork '08, but I did use it a little bit over the weekend. Just enough to do some author review for the current book I'm finishing up.
The one and only reason why I need Word these days is revision tracking. That's the feature where each different identifiable person who opens up the file gets their changes added in a different color, and you can mouse over the changes to see a ToolTip-style popup showing who did what exactly—whether it's deleting text, adding text, changing formatting, whatever. Up till now, only Word did this. Not TextEdit, not AppleWorks, and not Pages.
Well, now Pages does it. And it does it super-well.
Having the change details in the "comments" column like that is an awesome idea. You can see everything immediately, and the controls for accepting and rejecting are right there in the colored box, not right-click-activated like in Word. Visually it's far more direct than having to remember whose text was in what color, or mouse over everything to get that sluggish ToolTip up. In Word, change-tracked text always gets really muddy and hard to read, after it's been through two or three editors who all have different ideas of how a paragraph should read. (If you select a bunch of text to cut and move to a subordinate clause elsewhere in the sentence, you end up with words half-crossed-out, initial caps separated from the rest of the words they're attached to, and long unreadable strings of strikethroughs in different colors. The only way to see how it's going to look on the page is to turn off revision tracking temporarily, which hides all the struck-through stuff.)
Pages' solution, perhaps most importantly to me, is fast. The whole word-processing environment feels solid, chunky, and immediate, even on my four-year-old G5. Text rendering, naturally, is impeccable, unlike the nasty Windows-esque antialiasing behaviors you get in Word. And there's no lag in scrolling, selecting, or editing, which is more than can be said for the woefully Rosetta'd Word.
I'm writing this only from a few minutes' perfunctory impression of the app; but if what I saw in those few minutes is any indication and if—big if—the resulting Word file is compatible with my dev editor's Windows Word... then I just might have myself a replacement for the last non-Universal app on my laptop.
UPDATE:
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Brian Tiemann
