I ran Mac for years but never actually considered using Page or Numbers. A long time ago I gave up on MS Office and switched to Libre Office which was… fine-ish. I also use Google Docs but wouldn’t want to give up a local desktop office suite altogether.

Having just bought a new MBP I opened one of my old MS Word documents forgetting I’d not installed LibreOffice yet and of course it opened in Pages. I figured maybe I should give it a go instead of knee-jerk rejecting it. My first issue is that almost anything I ever work on will be something that was almost certainly made with Microsoft Word and it’s very annoying to me that in Pages, I can’t just cmd+s save a Word document as I edit it, having instead to save a .pages version for safety and periodically ‘exporting’ a .docx and overwriting the previous export to update it in order to maintain the document’s compatibility with anyone else using it in Word.

I also tried recreating my invoice document that I first made many years ago in Word. Editing the original was a non-starter, just impossible to get it looking right but that’s okay it wasn’t designed for Pages and I was trying to keep an open mind. So I remade it from scratch figuring it was a good test bed as it has some just basic writing of words on a page but also more complicated formatting and tables to recreate in a specific way to make it indistinguishable from my original document. I got there in the end but it was horrendously painful. I haven’t given up on it yet because I figure Word is actually probably one of the very first computer programs of any type that I ever used so to say it’s just what I’m more used to is an understatement. Because of that, learning anything significantly departing from Word will naturally be hard, and unlike Google Docs and Libre Office Write, it doesn’t try to emulate Word. The thing is though, maybe I could get used to it, but I’m kind of wondering, if it’s worth the bother. My main reasoning for trying is that it’s there already, so why install something else and I may as well get my money’s worth and while over-hyped, often Apple software is really nicely polished and a joy to use so I feel like I want to like it and to use it. But with the learning curve plus the compatibility issues with Office, I think the bar for it being worth it raises to the point where it really has to actually be better than word in a meaningful way to justify it, not just as good. Is Pages better than Word? Certainly right now it doesn’t look that way, but I’m still adjusting of course.

Does anyone else use it and do they like it? Is it something that once you get used to you’d never want to use anything else? My other problem is that for some reason most of the Apple Support articles and forum posts answering questions I have all seem to be from around Circa 2012 at the latest and very rarely any more recently than that. Often they refer to menu items that are slightly out of date and subtly different now, which is weird. What happened in 2012 that seemed to stop people using this software?