I had to use the standard formatting tools to adjust existing paragraphs, and then open the Styles Drawer and choose to either create a new style or redefine the current style.
Once my edits were complete, every paragraph in my newsletter using that style updated to reflect the changes I’d made.Editing Styles: Because of Word’s style-formatting tools, modifying and creating styles is easier in Word than it is in Pages.Įditing and updating styles isn’t as easy in Pages. Word then opened a window where I quickly chose the text color, font sizes, indents, bullets, and other options. Word’s styles editor makes it easy to go beyond the default styles: From the floating Formatting Palette, I opened the Styles palette, clicked to the right of the field displaying the style of the current paragraph, and chose to modify that style. (I could also have assigned a keyboard shortcut to each style and applied it with a couple of keystrokes.) Instead, I had to open the Paragraph Styles drawer and choose the style I wanted from there. But I couldn’t assign paragraph styles from a floating palette in Pages. Again, I used the default style and typed my text, and then adjusted my paragraph styles.
It’s only slightly tougher to do all that in Pages. I used Word’s new Document Elements tool to add page numbers to the document’s footers. To format those elements more distinctly, I then selected the styles I wanted to use from the Style menu in the floating Formatting Palette. In Word, I created each element of the document in Word’s default paragraph style. Both programs make all these initial steps simple. I used each program’s default styles for the initial formatting and then edited those styles to alter the document’s look. I started by creating the basic newsletter layout: title text, volume and issue numbers below that, a headline for my main article, body text for the article itself, and a page number in the page footer. I created my basic text and layout in each program’s word processing mode, and then added a variety of paragraph styles and some design elements, including columns, callouts, drop caps, and graphics.įinally, I switched to each program’s page-layout mode to create a more sophisticated, template-based version of the same document. To compare Microsoft Word to Pages ’08, I used each program to create the same four-page newsletter. Our questions: Which program is better at each stage of the job? What are their strengths and weaknesses? Which jobs (and which users) require which tool? (And for our experts’ take on alternatives to Office and iWork, see Word Processing Alternatives.) Is Apple’s iWork a viable alternative to Microsoft Office? To find out, we asked Jeffrey Battersby–our go-to expert on word processing programs–to use Word 2008 and Pages ’08 to create the same project, progressing from the basics (text entry and formatting) to more-advanced features.
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