Probably the best purchase I have made at the Mac store was to add the One to One service to my MacBook Pro purchase. About once a week I go in and get a one on one tutorial from one of the staff at the Apple Store. For an extra $99 at the time of my MacBook purchase I get unlimited tutoring sessions regarding my computer and Apple sofware such as the iLife suite and the iWork suite. The staff have always been great. They all seem to be very knowledgable and friendly.
Today I finished with my first session regarding Pages. Pages seems to be a good word processor but I am glad I was being tutored. I have a MOS certification in Word 2007 and I work with Word 2003 at work all day long. I have the Microsoft way of doing things burned into my brain. I definetly had to have help with doing things the Apple way. I could see at this first glance that Pages was lacking some collaborative working features and was less feature rich in general than Word 2007 or 2010. But some of the features I saw lacking would only be needed in a work environment and about 90% of the home users wouldn't ever notice them missing. Ironically, many workers do not take advantage of these features either. Why? Well, most people haven't really been trained thoroughly on Word to begin with.
I would say that Pages has the advantage over Word in one respect. If a person took advantage of the One to One program they would probably be more efficient, more productive and learn faster than with Microsoft's Word product. I have noticed that Microsoft has added a similar program in their stores and have made great efforts to get "training" out to the public through the internet. But I think that the average Apple user knows where to get this extra help better than the average Microsoft user. For the home user that does not use a lot of advanced features and goes to the One to One sessions I think Pages is "better". If you can use a good program well it is better than using a better program poorly. I think an educated user using fewer features is a much happier and productive user. But that was my first impression of Pages, we will see after using Pages and going to more sessions how my opinion develops. That is the great thing about the One to One program. Maybe after a couple of more sessions I will change my mind becuase of what I will learn as well as experience. The One to One program provides that learning opportunity over time that a first impression on a sales floor doesn't. It is also better than bringing a program home, getting stuck and putting it aside because "it doesn't work." I can always go back and have my questions answered. I can also renew the program for additional fees over then next two years so there is no hurry either.
I will still be studying for my Microsoft MOS certifications in order to support people in a work setting. I think that there are important reasons why businesses need to stick with Word. I was kind of shocked that Pages doesn't have a feature that allows you to compare two different documents or drafts of the same documents. I also was dissapointed that you couldn't make comments about comments on a document or filter what comments you wanted to see from different people. When you have a team of people working on a document like a contract or marketing materials these sorts of things can really be important. It is possible that my tutor didn't know how to unlock these features but it wasn't readily apparant how to do this from the interface either. More time and research with Pages on my part might reveal these features. I also was dissapointed that Pages would read both .doc and .docx documents but you could not save to a .docx format. I wonder how Pages users collaborate on documents from Word users? Maybe this too is something I need to look into. The One to One session was great despite these dissapointing discoveries. I learned a lot quickly and was able to "skip" to these questions because of the one to one tutoring session.
This of course is not a review of Pages. It is just another entry into my ongoing "engineering"/learning journal that I keep here on this blog. This entry should not be used as reference. These are just my observations and questions as I go down my path of learning.
