I decided to bite the bullet and buy myself a copy of Microsoft Office 2008. It’s been out for some time, and while I’ve found Pages to be a passable writing application, a couple of little issues have popped up that I thought Word might address. Turns out I was right, but I also realized that I’d been spoiled by certain features of Pages, and ultimately both apps have their problems.

I decided since I was shuttling back and forth between the two apps to figure out which one I liked better I might as well share my findings with the public (it’s the least I could do).

Please keep in mind that I primarily am interested in using a word processor for creative writing, so that’s where most of my focus is. Hopefully some of the comparison below will be applicable to your own writing interests, and if not I say: feel free to write your own comparison. Seriously, it will give me more time bitch and moan about Battlestar Galactica.

Text

If you put a Pages document and a Word document side-by-side the first thing that jumps out at you is how much better the text in the Word document looks. Observe:

Long story short: Pages doesn’t use OS X’s subpixel rendering to improve on-screen text, and Word does. Michael Fortin gives a good explanation of why Pages doesn’t use subpixel rendering here, but it’s of little consolation. The visual unpleasantness of the text in Pages can be fudged depending on which font you’re using, the font’s size, and the screen zoom setting, but in every case it’s always going to look worse than that same text in Word.

Given the purpose of the program is to write text having the text display poorly is absolutely brutal, and, truth be told, it was what pushed me over the edge in deciding to buy Office 2008. Apple may have foregone subpixel rendering for performance reasons, but for a program that is exclusively focused on text I think sacrificing performance for proper text rendering is not only reasonable, but quite preferable.

User Interface

That said, Pages really is much, much faster than Word. Pages launches faster, opens documents faster, scrolls faster, and feels generally more responsive than Word. Word 2008 feels about as slow as Word 2004, and, in fact, they both take the exact same amount of time to launch on my Mac Pro.

I’d also like to note that Pages is much less memory intensive than Word. On launch uses around 40 MB, while Word 2008 devours 180 MB. If memory is tight — on a laptop, for example — then this difference might have some real performance consequences for you. Personally, I’ve got RAM to spare, so this really isn’t a big deal to me.

In terms of how the apps look I prefer Pages to Word, hands down. Pages looks more “Mac-like” (which is not surprising) and I think Apple’s done a wonderful job laying all the controls out in a smart and sensible way. Word’s new Elements Gallery (the new not-quite-the-Ribbon UI feature) pretty much sucks. Though, to Microsoft’s credit, it animates beautifully. Other than that, the changes from Word 2004 are minor, and nothing worth blogging about.

Styles

Making proper use of styles is the key to working with a word processor like Pages or Word. Using styles allows you to independently manipulate the content and presentation, in much the same way HTML/CSS or LaTeX does.

Both Pages and Word make it relatively easy to access styles: Pages has a Styles drawer, while Word includes a section for styles in the Formatting Palette. Both work, though I found Pages’ drawer to be superior, because Word’s style chooser is a fixed height requiring you to scroll up and down to find styles, even when using relative few of them. Scrolling that stupid little list in Word gets real old, real fast. Oh, and it doesn’t seem to respond to my mouse scroll-wheel. Devastating.

While Pages makes selecting styles easier, Word takes the cake when it comes to modifying styles. Hover over a style in Word’s style list and an arrow appears that gives you access to the Modify Style menu (screenshot on the right). From there you can manipulate every conceivable setting of the style, including both where that style inherits its settings from and what style you want the subsequent paragraphs to be set in.

In contrast, Pages makes you modify all the text settings of a selected paragraph via the Text and Font inspectors, and then you have to choose Redefine Style from Selection in the Styles drawer.

The advantage to Word’s approach is that you can open up a new document at the start of a project and first define all the styles you’ll be using in the document right in the Formatting Palette, all without touching the actual document. Additionally, the ability to define inheritance using Word’s “Style based on:” setting (see screenshot) is incredibly useful, and allows you to easily change multiple styles by changing their parent. For example, you can have it so all your heading styles inherit from base “Heading 1″ style, and then if you want to toy with the heading font all you have to do is change the font on that first heading and all others will inherit the change. You can also have your document Footer inherit its style from the Header, and, again, you can easily keep the Header and Footer looking consistent as you modify the Header’s style.

Word also allows you to create a special margin under the Draft view called a “style area.” (The setting is under Preferences->View, set the style area in inches). This allows you to quickly see the different paragraph styles of your document. If you’re interested in retrofitting an old Word document that wasn’t made with proper styling then this style area will prove invaluable. Unfortunately, no such feature can be found in Pages.

Fields

In my previous post explaining how to set up a novel template using Apple Pages ‘08 I mentioned that Microsoft Word could handle setting up chapter headings much more elegantly because it has better automatic text generation features. I was specifically referring to Word’s Insert->Field… feature.

Fields are basically little bits of text that Word will automatically fill in for you, based on what you tell it to do. Dates, the author’s name, and page numbers are all examples of fields you might use in a document, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg — fields can also be used to dynamically generate content for you.

For example, let’s say in Word you’ve got your novel’s chapter headings defined under the “Heading 1″ style. Go Insert->Field… from the menu, and then select the field name StyleRef under the “Links and References” category (see screenshot). A StyleRef field will pull the content from the preceding element of that style and insert it into that field. So, if you choose “Heading 1″ as the StyleRef it will insert the current chapter heading into that field. Do that in a Header, and you’ve got a perfect Header that will always include the current chapter heading for every chapter of your book. Brilliant! ((I’d also like to point out that this is yet another reason to use styles.))

In contrast, as I described in my tutorial, in Pages you have to manually insert the correct chapter number every time you create a new chapter. This isn’t impossible, but it is annoying, and compared it how Word does it, it’s down-right primitive. This is because Pages has a very limited number of automatically generated text types to choose from, and nothing with the power of what you can do with Word.

Micro-Templates

While Pages lacks the Fields feature of Word, it does have the very nice ability to “capture” sections and pages as micro-templates. For example, you can create a “Chapter” section with a unique layout, custom headers and footers, and placeholder text which you can insert into your document. For a novel this isn’t that big a deal, but this feature makes Pages’ built-in templates extremely powerful and easy to work with. For complex documents with many distinct page or section types, like a newsletter, you can build some really amazing templates with Pages that are much easier and more robust for future use.

Viewing Page Layout

The major advantage to writing in a WYSIWYG word processor, versus something like LaTeX, is that as you’re working you can see clearly what the finished product will look like. As such, both Pages and Word feature a “Two Up” view of your document, which flattens out the document as if it were a book, showing you both pages side-by-side. The big difference between the two programs amounts to this: Pages shows you an accurate view of your document, and Word lies to you. Observe:

The screenshot above shows Pages (left) and Word (right) scrolled to the exact same part of the document, but they’re different. Pages is showing the correct layout — Chapter 4 of this document is supposed to be on the right. How did this happen? There is a section break preceding Chapter 4, and I have the document set to always start new sections on the right (see my Pages tutorial). Because Chapter 3 ends on the right, the programs are supposed to insert a blank page into the document, and they do, but Microsoft Word refuses to acknowledge that the blank page it has added is there until you go to print.

Let me be clear: with Word, what you see on the screen is not what you get when you print it out.

If you’re going to try and do a complex page layout scheme with Word then I think you’re either going to have to do the whole thing by hand, or you’re going to end up with a bit of a head-ache. Pages, on the other, shouldn’t slow you down a bit. When you’re in the “Two Up” view you’re looking at the finished product right there in front of you. What you see is definitely what you’re going to get.

Document Navigation

Both Pages and Word have have a Thumbnail view side pane that you can use. Pages handles the thumbnails a little bit better, in that if you click on one of the thumbnail pages a yellow box will highlight all the pages in that section, making it very easy to get a handle on how the section break-down of your document looks like (screenshot, left).

Not to be outdone, Word does have an extra “Document Map” view that shows the structure of the document you’re working on (screenshot, right). For a novel, limited only to chapters as sections, this isn’t a big deal, but it’s not hard to see how an outline-like map of a more complex document with multiple sub-headings would be incredibly helpful, and I couldn’t find an equivalent feature in Pages.

Change Tracking

I love document annotation. Seriously, if you send me a document I will annotate the bejesus out of it, smiling all the while. So for me, change tracking is not only a must-have feature, but it’s also one that I’m bound to use heavily.

Both Pages and Word allow you to track changes to a document, as well as add comments. In terms of user interface, Pages implements simple but elegant annotation “bubbles,” and has an equally elegant control bar that appears above your document. Word 2008 has the same old rounded bubbles that previous versions did, and I think they’re far less visually appealing. Likewise, the Reviewing toolbar is less elegant, and needs to be activated manually (unless you have it open by default).

The differences in appearance have functional implications, as well. Word sticks little arrows at the points of insertions or deletions which can make it difficult to see how punctuation has been changed. Pages also includes the author and date of a comment or change in the body the bubble, while Word has a separate bubble header for that info. This is important because, in the case of comments, the author info is part of the comment, and the only way to “hide” that info (to save space or just for aesthetics) is to delete that text from the comment. In Word you can simply choose to toggle off the bubble headers from the Preferences dialog.

I really like that Pages keeps comments and changes much more visually distinct than Word does. It makes it much easier to tell them apart, and I think it’s just prettier the way Pages does it.

Pages also has an advantage in allowing you more flexibility in how you can view the various changes to the document. With Word you can choose to view the document as “Original Showing Markup” or “Final Showing Markup”: in the case of the former you get to see any text that’s been deleted, and in the latter text that has been added, but you can’t view both at the same time. By default Pages will show you all the changes — be they deletion or insertion — and you can choose to toggle the deletions off if you choose. Word does include a separate itemized list of changes (Review Pane), as well as the ability to view the original and the final documents (before and after all changes), however Pages lets you export all the changes as a new document, which is really nice.

File Sizes

This is really a trivial point, but I think it’s interesting to compare the file sizes between .DOC and .PAGES files:

So the original .DOC format is the largest, with the new OOXML .DOCX smaller than that, and Pages generates even smaller files than either of them. To be clear, this document is a 50,000 word novel that ends up being around 108 pages. No images or tables are in the document, but it is fully and properly styled.

But, seriously, what’s a couple hundred KBs among friends? Not a whole lot if you ask me.

Conclusions

The word processor situation is a mess, partly because both apps are so good, yet also bad. Each app has areas where it excels, and areas where it fails (sometimes hard). Word has a much more robust set of features, but screws up the simple stuff like proper WYSIWYG page layout. Pages looks nicer and properly shows you what your page will look like, but the text looks absolutely terrible.

I think the problem is for any one type of document you might make each app has its problems. If you’re primarily interested in writing a novel then Pages’ proper page layout will be very nice, but you won’t have the wonderful dynamic fields of Word to help set up your document, and vice versa. It makes choosing which app to use a strictly personal — subjective — decision.

Here are my (current) thoughts on how I would make the choice between the two apps:

* For simple documents — letters, short stories, maybe a résumé you only need to update every year or so — I’d definitely go with Microsoft Word over Apple Pages. Pages is faster and prettier, but the actual text looks like ass, which is totally unacceptable.

* For longer documents that aren’t structurally complex — such as a novel, thesis, or report — I’d write it in Word and then, when it’s all done, I’d move it to Pages for finishing. Word simply has too many features that are useful for building the document — such as its vastly superior style options and fields — that it makes it difficult to consider doing a large project like that in Pages. Also, in Pages you’d spend a lot of time looking at ugly non-subpixel rendered text. Ick!

* For design heavy layouts — such as a brochure or a newsletter — I’d go with Pages, no question. Pages’ ability to capture pages and sections as micro-templates makes it a no-brainer for these kinds of tasks. Do it once, capture it, and you’re golden.

* For copyediting (where either app could be used) I’d go with Pages. While the lack of separation between author/timestamp and content is annoying, I think Pages has otherwise implemented commenting and change tracking better than Word has. I really like the way comments are visually distinct, and I think also like being able to see both deletions and additions to a text together with full markup. Honestly, Word’s change tracking/comment system could really use an update.

It should be noted that Pages will import Word documents without a hitch (at least no hitch that I’ve come across), while Word will not open a Pages document. Pages can export to .DOC, however, and that can be opened by Word (obviously). Just FYI.

I have to say, I’m really happy Apple introduced iWork, and especially happy that Pages ‘08 is as good as it is. I think the competition will push Microsoft’s MacBU to work harder, and hopefully some of these problems — like the ridiculous un-WYSIWYG-ness of the layout view — will go away in subsequent versions. On the Pages side, Apple needs to catch up to Word’s amazing auto-generated text features. When you start working with Word’s Fields you’ll feel like a magician, and you’ll realize that you can can cut a lot of corners by having Word fill in information for you.

Both apps have room to grow, and it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.