HI Alex, I've started a new job recently at a law firm where producing professional looking documents with advanced features, and using advanced collaboration, are all key. The industry standard for word processing is Microsoft Word. I've been using Pages on my Mac and so far things have been working pretty well. In fact, for some things (e.g. filling in interactive forms), Pages has been better than some versions of Microsoft Word (e.g. Word 2010, which really messes up interactive forms). There have been one or two formatting issues due to incompatibility between Pages and Microsoft Word, but these have not been major.
I can't go through step by step explaining how Pages is different to Word--if I did, it would take so long I'd need to start billing by the hour. But here are the key points. The short version is, it is definitely possible to create professional papers or essays with Pages and VoiceOver. It's simply a matter of learning how to use it and getting comfortable with it. There are definitely things that could be improved, but there are those with Word and JAWS as well. IN the end, it will come down to personal preference and willingness to learn. I like Pages for creating content, but not so much for reading content. Having different visible sections for document body, header, footer etcetera is great for creating content, but it makes navigating long documents tricky. Word also has easier commands for navigating by paragraph (control-down arrow). With Pages one can use option-down arrow, but this only reads the last line of the paragraph, rather than reading the beginning of the paragraph which is usually more informative. After moving around the Pages interface to achieve certain things, it can be difficult to get back to where you were in the document. With Word, however, the keyboard focus always remains where you were last typing. All these issues would not be such a problem for writing your own essays from scratch, but can be annoying if you're reading a book or paper someone else has created with hundreds of pages. Pages currently has an annoying bug where it's difficult to select text which wraps over a page. This is being discussed on this list in another thread. Not sure if we've discovered a good work around yet. Selecting styles in Pages can be a little fiddly, whereas in Word quick styles are pretty easily accessible from the context menu. However, once you have assigned shortcuts to styles in Pages it becomes really easy to use them. Entering and editing footnotes is much easier in Pages. In Word, JAWS becomes highly unresponsive when editing a footnote. However, it's much easier to read footnotes with Word. There's a shortcut key which makes JAWS read the footnote when your curser is adjacent to the footnote number in the body of the document. In Pages, however, you need to navigate to the footnote area, and then navigate back when you're done. This is not super difficult, but it's just a few extra steps compared to the single shortcut in Word. So again, this makes Pages better for creating content (in this case, footnotes), but Word better for reading it. Track Changes are another beast altogether. I'm just starting to get my head around them. So far, track changes are not ideal in either Word or Pages. I use them a lot in Word, but once a document has a lot of tracked changes things get a little confusing. They are usable with Pages but can be a little tricky and fiddly. Best, Nic -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
