Well yesterday I picked up iWork 08 and I haven’t had a whole lot of time to check it out yet but I do plan on reviewing several (if not all) of the applications in the coming month. Regardless, this morning I needed to prepare a legal pleading for work and I thought it was the perfect time to check out just how well Pages 08 plays with MS Office. I took a word document with a legal pleading paper embed and imported it into Pages. For those non-lawyer types that means the document has a ton of formatting including lines down the left side, line numbers and a variety of other unique formatting that doesn’t make much sense but the courts require. Anyway, it looked perfect in pages. Not only did it look just like it did on my windows box, it even recognized the tracked changes.
At this point I am fantasizing about not using that slug Mac Office anymore and already looking for other word processors to delete off my drive (Sorry Bean). Well I got it all done and then clicked “Export” to “Word”. I snapped it onto a thumb drive and loaded it into my PC Office 2003 program. That is where the trouble started.
It did recognize the format, more or less, but the font and line spacing was inconsistent, the font size shrunk from 12 to 8 points throughout and the numbering down the left side of the page was all jinky. Put simply, it was a mess. I don’t have time to sort out if this was operator error or just the way it works on complex documents. I’ve got to fix this mess on my screen now. Regardless, I thought I’d drop a quick line in from the trenches on this issue.