Apple Pages (for OS X)

The first clue that Apple's Pages isn't a traditional word processing app is its name. You can use it to create school essays, letters, even books, just as you do in Microsoft Word or the open-source LibreOffice, but its real strength is in producing the best-looking pages you've ever printed or saved in electronic formats like ePub or PDF—though the current version also has some surprising design limitations that weren't in the version that Apple shipped six years ago. Whether you prefer Pages to Microsoft Word or LibreOffice—or an expensive high-end page layout app like Adobe's InDesign—depends on what you want out of it. For the vast majority of Mac users, Pages is all the word processor you need, and has the advantage of effortless file-sharing with Pages for iOS and with Apple's iCloud online storage.

Pages is part of the iWork suite that also includes the Numbers spreadsheet app and Keynote presentations app. All three share the same abilities to edit text, create tables, and import graphics, though each app has additional features suitable for documents, worksheets, and presentations. All three apps exist in three different versions: one for OS X (reviewed here), a slightly feature-reduced version for iOS, and another slightly feature-reduced Web-based version accessible at iCloud.com. Starting in February 2015, Apple made the Web-based version available free to anyone with a (free) Apple ID, even if you don't have an Apple computer or device.

Design
As you'd expect from Apple, all three apps ship with visually stunning design templates, and Pages comes with a gallery that you can use as the basis for your own flyers, pamphlets, certificates, postcards, newsletters, letters, reports, and brochures. Apple's design skills extend to the deepest level of the apps, providing elegant built-in styles for text, tables, charts, and shapes.

Disappointingly, you can't change the overall look of a Pages document by changing its template after you've created the document. Unlike Microsoft Word or LibreOffice, where you can change the underlying "theme" of a document, Pages only lets you modify individual text styles, not the underlying template that contains the styles. What's slightly puzzling about Pages' lack of support for replaceable themes is that the underlying technology has always been part of Keynote, where you can change all the styles of a presentation with a simple change of theme.

Document Creation
Pages is the only full-featured page layout app that lets you create documents in two different modes—a traditional word processing mode and a "page layout" mode. Both modes let you insert pictures, tables, and other design elements in addition to text, but they handle text entirely differently. In Pages' traditional word processing mode, as in all other word processing apps, when you finish typing the first page of text, the text automatically overflows to the next page and then the page after that.

In page layout mode, each page can contain one or more text boxes, but all text is enclosed in its own text box, is limited to the page that contains the box, and can't flow from one page to another. However, unlike Pages' word processing mode, you can drag whole pages forward or backward in a document, so that the page you created as page 3 now becomes page 2. This is an ideal feature when designing (for example) a newsletter, a menu, or any folding leaflet where you want to decide what appears on the outside or inside.

Interface
Like the other iWorks apps, Pages has a spacious easy-to-use screen layout, with a button for switching on brightly-colored screen tips that guide beginners through basic operations. Optional sidebars at the left and right give easy access to different kinds of controls. The sidebar on the left displays page thumbnails or comments or both. The sidebar on the right serves as an Inspector panel that controls document layout and formatting for text, pictures, and other media. Like a traditional Inspector panel, it shows different options depending on what kind of page element is currently selected—text options for text, image options for images. But unlike a traditionally cramped and cluttered Inspector panel, Pages offers a roomy panel that's easy to navigate and understand.

I use Pages to create terrific-looking single-page documents like certificates and one-of-a-kind gift cards, and printed letters. But for any document longer than a page or two, I prefer Microsoft Word—either the OS X version or the Windows version running in VMware Fusion or Parallels Desktop—because Word gives me an option to use an editing window that doesn't exactly reproduce a printed or PDF page.

When I'm writing a paragraph that happens to start on the last line or two of page, I don't want to be able to see the paragraph as a whole, not broken in the middle with the bottom margin of one page, the top margin of the next page, and any page number or text that might be in the page header or footer. Microsoft Word and LibreOffice give me a "draft view" option that hides page breaks and most formatting, and Word for Windows has the best option of all—a view that lets me edit pages with the same formatting they will have in print or PDF, but without the page headers and footers visible, only a horizontal line showing a page break.