Apple's Mac mini - Tempting PC Users Everywhere

Despite the lack of a spreadsheet application, Pages does have rudimentary support for charts - including a small spreadsheet-like tool that lets you input data for your charts.  The charts themselves look great and the default color schemes are worlds better than those produced in Excel, but if Apple expects iWork to succeed, they need a fully functional spreadsheet application out soon. 

As you can expect, Pages has the ability to import Microsoft Word documents, and so far, it's actually done a pretty impressive job of importing Word documents without any issues.  When I say that Pages supports importing of Microsoft Word documents, I mean just that. Even if you open a Word document with Pages, the application will simply import the document into a blank Pages document, instead of opening the Word document that you clicked on.

Much like Keynote, Pages can export to a variety of formats - PDF, Word Document, HTML, RTF and plain text.  Pages relies heavily on CSS for its HTML output, but it would be nice for Apple to include a simplified HTML export for people like me who just need something to produce clean, simple code without any need to preserve font styles.  To Apple's credit, Pages does an excellent job of making sure whatever it exports looks just like what you've typed in Pages. 

As a Microsoft Word competitor, Pages is unfortunately lacking in a number of areas - not because Word does things better, but because Word still has a number of features that weren't implemented in Pages 1.0.  There are no document tracking options in Pages to track changes by multiple authors to a document, there's no support for mail merge, no grammar check (which may be a blessing in disguise as I've personally never appreciated Word's grammar check), and as I mentioned before, no spreadsheet complement with which to interface.

The one thing that Pages does an extremely good job of is not thinking that it knows what you want to do.  Pages will not look at something that you're typing and suggest a different or better way of doing it. Personally, that's one of the biggest issues that I've had with Word since it started gaining in "intelligence".

As a publishing application, Pages does make creating flashy documents extremely easy.  Much like many of Apple's other applications, Pages accomplishes this simplicity by including a number of well designed templates that are quite modifiable. 

An example of a Pages template

Using Microsoft Word templates is taboo, since pretty much everyone has Word and can spot a Word template from a mile away (e.g. the resume templates), but one of the benefits of Pages is the templates that are unique enough that you do avoid that embarrassing problem.  Granted, if Pages catches on, the novelty and exclusivity will fade, but the one thing about Pages is that modifying, customizing and personalizing the templates is extremely easy.  Much like OS X, everything in Pages templates is drag-able, but unlike other applications, you can pretty much drag or resize anything without screwing up the pagination of your document or the layout of the template. 

Performance-wise, Pages does extremely well - it's just as fast and as snappy as you would expect an application to be.  The one exception seems to be when manipulating images in templates. Even on a G5, things aren't as smooth as they should be.  Hopefully, it's something that Apple will address in future updates to Pages. 

Right now, Pages has a great deal of potential, but it's not there quite yet as the clear (preferred) alternative to other applications.  Apple also seems to know this as they have built-in a comment submission system into Pages for suggestions and improvements directly to Apple. 

For what it does, it does very well, but it is the missing features and supplementary applications that hurt Pages the most.  It's an application to keep an eye on, but right now, Pages and the iWork suite just aren't at the same level of quality and superiority as the OS on which they run.