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Originally Posted by
lordjeremias 
as opposed to using office for fun?
Well my original remarks contrasted "work use" vs. other uses, but it seems the metaphor breaks down rather quickly.
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Originally Posted by
lordjeremias
... again, obviously it is for work... but what i mean is: you insert a picture, add an automatic numbered caption (legend : "Figure 8 - ") to it and there cross-reference it in your text like "Figure 8 shows that..."
now if you go back and insert other picture before "figure 8", and automatic caption it, it updates the text and caption to figure 8 (which will now be Figure 9) . So you don't have to be fishing around to "cross-references" everytime you change somethin in your document order or add something. this for Equations, graphs, bibliography etc etc
Agreed. Pages really lacks serious TOC, index and note features. I still use it for serious writing because I hate Office so much but yes, these kinds of things are still quite lacking in Pages.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
lordjeremias
... well, let me tell you that it would have really helped me out when i found out that pages didn't have one and lost 10 pages of a phd article draft. i saved it once in the beginning, because with Word you do that to get autosave working, and then wrote it all through the night and when i finished and was going to format it, tried to click save but clicked "iwork.com" instead and puff! there it was, a pages crash, no recovery of document and a night of work (inspired one i might say) gone.
it s a main "beef" because it actually helps people, it is a main and basic feature of every single text editor i know, and it should have been implemented since day one! EVEN TEXTEDITOR.APP HAS ONE! it's ridiculous that a so called "professional writing app" doesn't.
Again, in my experience Word auto-save is more of an annoyance than anything else and a lot of the users I see are confused by the ghosted icons. More often than not, when I'm dealing with auto-save trouble-shooting, the client has mistaken an autosave icon for a "real" icon and has thus lost their document without knowing it. Also, more often than not, when we go to recover someone's document for whatever reason, Word simply can't reconstruct the document from the autosave info and everything is lost anyway. (This is all on Mac OS-X of course).
These are just two pin-hole views though I guess and each situation will be different.
The thing I like overall about iWork and Pages versus Office is that for the first time in many many years someone (Apple) has actually re-thought what the program should act like. All the other alternatives to Word and Office are basically just crappy buggy copies of the same UI. They also tend towards giant integrated Office environments and in some cases can't even be used in a separate fashion. Open Office is a horrendously bad design in this regard.
iWork has the advantage (IMO of course), of stripping out all the unnecessary crud and add-ins that Office and Word has. For instance in Word there are two (or three depending on how you define it) different ways of paginating a document and they are each completely incompatible with each other. Not only that, they are deliberately styled so as to appear to be the same thing to the end user. There are layers of crud like this all through the Office product.
