Tom Gorham
Pages may not come with as many features as Word, but by using services that are already built-in to Mac OS X, you can improve its functionality.
If I’d been given a pound for every time someone has told me: ‘Pages can’t do that’ or ‘Pages is missing feature x’, it’s fair to say that I’d almost – almost – have enough to afford a full copy of Microsoft Office. The comments are that common.
We iWork users have to face an uncomfortable truth. While for most of us, iWork applications do everything we need at a fraction of the cost of better-known alternatives, not everyone shares this rosy view of the suite. For those who rely on particular esoteric features, or those happier to compare products by feature count, Pages doesn’t hold a candle to Word.
There’s no doubt Apple has sacrificed some features in order to make Pages easier to use. But if there’s a feature in Word that you can’t live without, then you’re probably not going to wait until iWork 11 in the hope that Apple will add that feature to Pages. You’ll just stick with Word. Or will you?
What may convince dyed-in-the wool Word advocates to switch is a feature that isn’t even part of Pages. That’s Services, which is built into Mac OS X. Services can extend the functions of Pages and many other Mac OS X applications almost limitlessly as they allow the functions of one application to be made available in another.
Before Snow Leopard, services had a bit of a bad reputation. All built-in services, and those added by third-party applications, were always available from the same menu, even if they weren’t relevant to a particular application. The result was that the Services menu inevitably became so cluttered as to be almost useless. Nobody I knew used it.
But Mac OS X 10.6 has changed all this. Now services are contextual, so only those services relevant to the application or context appear. And Mac OS X 10.6 comes with a number of genuinely useful built-in services, including an image capture option that lets you import a picture to a document directly from your iPhone, or take a screen grab from within Pages and embed it directly into the current document. Or select any text in a Pages document and create an email or a new sticky containing that text.
But my favourite built-in service is ‘Add to iTunes as a Spoken Track’, which converts any text selection to an audio track using Mac OS X’s built-in text-to-speech engine and drops it into iTunes. As someone who spent far too long designing an AppleScript to allow Word to do exactly this, the ability to do it in a fraction of the time from within Pages is next to priceless.
It’s with third-party services that the value of Services becomes apparent, and allows Pages an opportunity to catch up with Word’s features. To take an example, one gripe I’ve sometimes heard from Word fans is that Pages lacks the ability to print a selection of text. That’s true: in Word I can select the option to print only selected text from its Print dialog box, which makes printing off part of a document simple. Why this feature has never made it to Pages is beyond me. But the beauty of services means that you can add it in a matter of seconds by downloading the free Print Selection Service from schubert-it.com, drag it to your user’s Library/Services folder, and you’ll now have the ability to print any selected text.
My favourite service, and one I think every Pages owner should download immediately, is WordService from Devon Technologies (devon-technologies.com). WordService adds all the handy text handling features available in other text editors. For example, while Pages includes standard case conversion tools, such as converting text to all caps, small caps, or title case, WordService can automatically capitalise sentences in selected text or set all text to lower case. It also cleans up text, cleaning up line endings or removing all links from a document.
Best of all, it deals with one of the banes of my working life: documents where the author has clumsily attempted to organise columns using spaces rather than tabs. WordService quickly converts these to tabs with a quick menu command. When I’m working back in Word, I miss that feature.
Other excellent text manipulation features include the ability to add a permanent date stamp to Pages. I know Pages can do this itself, but it’s all too easy to adjust its default setting so that the date updates every time you open the document. This service adds a simple text stamp that doesn’t update.
What about equation editors, another missing Pages feature? There are services available for this too, such as LaTeXiT, a maths equation editor. Here, there’s a bit of a caveat: you’ll need to install LaTeX (available from www.latex-project.org), a typesetting application, and have an understanding of the language it uses, to benefit from it. But even here a solution is at hand, even if it doesn’t technically rely on services. You can use Grapher, Mac OS X’s little-known, built-in equation editor to create the equation, and once you’ve entered the formula, right-click it to copy it as a PDF, Tiff or even as text to Pages.
You don’t need to rely on others to add your own features to Pages. A Snow Leopard benefit is the way you can build your own services using Automator. You create a ‘Service’ workflow, which accepts text or files from the active application, and drag various actions to create the workflow or simply record your own actions in real-time. It’s strikingly easy to use. Within a few minutes, I’d created a workflow that appended selected text to a text document: much quicker than cutting and pasting from discrete areas of the source document.
While I’ve talked about the importance of services to Pages, the beauty of this Mac OS X feature is that it’s available across all iWork applications – and in fact to all Cocoa-based programs. But when comparing Pages to Word 2008, one of the most pronounced ticks in Pages’ column is that Word doesn’t understand services, and can’t use them.
After showing people the benefits of services, it’s difficult to convince them of their value. The real problem lies in remembering to access the menu option in everyday work. While the service menu is always in a consistent place – under the application menu – it’s often difficult to remember the availability of a service if its kept away from similar functions in other menus.
What saves the day is the ability to attach a keyboard shortcut to any service to trigger it. You can set this up in the Keyboard preferences pane. Under its Keyboard Shortcuts tab, select Services from the left-hand pane. Under the right pane, click the ‘+’ button and in the resulting window, select Pages from the drop-down applications list. If your setup is like mine and Pages lives inside its own iWork folder, you’ll need to select ‘Other…’ from the bottom of this list and navigate to the Pages application within this folder. Enter the exact name of the service and a keyboard shortcut to assign to it, which you can then use within the program.
