What Apple's iWork Could Learn from Office 2008

iWork '08, Apple's latest attempt at an office suite, is an amazing piece of consumer software. However, Pages, the word processor and publishing application of the iWork suite has one particularly disappointing feature.

While there are many gripes about it's functionality from professional users who until now had little option for commercial Intel native office applications and software to read Microsoft's new XML Office formats iWork is an amazing piece of consumer grade software. Despite the irritating export for Microsoft Office compatibility and Numbers annoying import inconsistencies iWork is a solid suite for the average iLife user.

Pages introduces a new mode, specifically for word processing to accompany the long standing page layout view but this is a choice for the life of the document. Microsoft Word 2008 also offers similar range of options allowing the user to change between modes. One of my favourites, simply for aesthetic reasons, is the notebook view which gives very similar functionality to OneNote for Windows. What makes Word stand out is I can switch modes and the text is seamlessly re-presented to a format more appropriate to the mode.

If Pages offered this seamless movement between it's editing modes it would go along way to moving me from the rigmarole of word processing learnt from years of Microsoft Office use to the more creative page layout's available in Pages - or maybe Microsoft will save Apple the trouble and help it's users display a little creativity in their documents without ever taking them from the comfort of Word.