Email the Editor    Email a Friend    Print this Page 

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. 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.)

To compare Microsoft Word to Pages '08, I used each program to create the same four-page newsletter. 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.

Finally, I switched to each program's page-layout mode to create a more sophisticated, template-based version of the same document.

Text entry, simple formatting
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 used each program's default styles for the initial formatting and then edited those styles to alter the document's look. Both programs make all these initial steps simple.

In Word, I created each element of the document in Word's default paragraph style. To format those elements more distinctly, I then selected the styles I wanted to use from the Style menu in the floating Formatting Palette. I used Word's new Document Elements tool to add page numbers to the document's footers.

It's only slightly tougher to do all that in Pages. Again, I used the default style and typed my text, and then adjusted my paragraph styles. But I couldn't assign paragraph styles from a floating palette in Pages.

Instead, I had to open the Paragraph Styles drawer and choose the style I wanted from there. (I could also have assigned a keyboard shortcut to each style and applied it with a couple of keystrokes.)

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.

share: