Tom Gorham
iWork’s applications are smart and powerful, but things could come unstuck if compatibility with Office documents is important…
Another small business switched to the Mac last week. Such moves are no longer the sort of rare event to generate headlines, and given that the business in question is a small book-publishing house, rather than a FTSE 100 conglomerate, it’s hardly surprising that the news passed unnoticed outside the confines of the office in question. And if I’m honest, I have to admit that I’m exaggerating the extent of the switch a little: it’s only the production side of the office that has dropped their ageing Dells for shiny new Mac minis.
Still, a switch is a switch, and it was interesting to me, as it marked the first time I had been asked whether iWork was a serious option for an office suite.
The reason for the query was that the PC side of the office had predictably standardised for a number of years on Microsoft Office, so to continue to share documents office-wide required a compatible program.
The default choice for Mac users in similar environments would be Microsoft’s Mac Office 2008. However, when it became clear to the group of switchers that a standard version of Mac Office costs more than £400 – almost as much again as the cost of the hardware – it was a choice that was swiftly reevaluated.
Certainly iWork’s £70 price tag is a convincing argument, but that isn’t all it has going for it. When each component of the suite is measured on its own merit, iWork stands up well to Office. Keynote is a much more polished application than Mac Office’s feeble PowerPoint, while Numbers and Pages, if not as feature-rich as their Microsoft equivalents, make it far easier to produce better-looking results and are integrated more readily with other Mac applications such as iLife. And as Snow Leopard now has built-in Exchange support, Mail and iCal offer a fine alternative to Mac Office’s Entourage for email and meeting scheduling.
The big problem facing iWork though, is compatibility. Working peaceably with the rest of the office was obviously critical. Apple makes much of the fact that Keynote, Numbers and Pages can export to their respective Office counterparts, but even though iWork 09 makes exporting easier by letting you save in a Microsoft-compatible format through the Save As menu rather than going through the Export option, it’s fair to say the transitions are rarely what you could call seamless. Keynote presentations lose their most crowd-pleasing transformations. Numbers documents are stripped of any visual appeal, with each table being converted to a separate, drab Excel worksheet. More tellingly in an office environment, a lot of calculations don’t make the transition.
It would be a tough to recommend iWork given those limitations, but I was saved by circumstance. It turned out that presentations are rarely shared across the office, and Numbers would only be required to occasionally open Excel documents, not the other way around. However, text documents were frequently shared across the office by email, so the ability to open and save in Word format was critical. Now, Pages reads Word documents. Although it may gripe about missing fonts, Pages happily opens and converts most of the Word files, including forms and files with tracked changes, that I’ve used with it. Granted, it chokes on embedded Visual Basic scripts in PC Word files, but then again, so does Microsoft’s own Word 2008.
It’s going the other way that’s a problem. Leaving aside the cosmetic problems – images in Pages documents with alpha channels won’t translate – the big drawbacks in Pages’ file translation is the lack of a crossplatform default file format when you save the document. Other word processors use cross-platform file formats by default: Nisus Writer (<strong><a href=”http://www.nisus.com” target=”_self” rel=”nofollow”>nisus.com</a></strong>), for example, uses rich text (RTF) as its default, so it can be shared with Windows Office users as is. But Windows, when presented with a Pages document, will choke.
It is, of course, possible to export a document from Pages into Word format, but how many times in the middle of the busy working day will the user forget to do that and send around an incompatible file to increasingly irritated Windows users?
It’s true that all is not lost if you do that. If you select the option in Pages’ Save dialog to include a preview in the document (an option you can set up by default in the program’s preferences), the Pages document appears as a zipped file in Windows. If you expand this and open the Preview.pdf file in the QuickLook folder, Windows users will see a perfectly readable representation of your Pages file.
But that’s a Heath Robinson approach more suitable for emergency use rather than an everyday solution. The only way I could think of to make Pages a better Office friend was to put AppleScript into action to automate the conversion process a little. I recommended a folder action script, which converts any number of Pages documents dropped into a chosen folder in the Finder to Word-compatible files on the Desktop. Use the script below so you no longer need to use Pages’ Save As button every time you want to share the document with an Office user: now you just drop the Pages file on a folder.
on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving added_items
repeat with i from 1 to number of items in added_items
set this_item to item i of added_items
tell application “Pages”
open this_item
set DocumentName to name of front document
set oldDelimeters to AppleScript’s text item delimiters
set AppleScript’s text item delimiters to “.pages”
set DocumentName to first text item of DocumentName & “.doc”
set AppleScript’s text item delimiters to oldDelimeters
set FilePath to (path to desktop folder as string) & DocumentName
save front document as “Microsoft Word 97 – 2004 Document” in FilePath
close front document
end tell
end repeat
end adding folder items to
When run, Pages opens the file or files that have been added to the folder and resaves them in Word format on the Desktop. As it does so, the Pages file extension is stripped out of each and replaced with Microsoft Word’s. This script only works on Pages 09, but if you want to convert Pages 08, replace the part of the script that refers to “Microsoft Word 97 – 2004 Document” and replace it with “SLDocumentTypeMSWord”, and it can be easily adjusted to do similar conversions for Numbers or Keynote.
To attach this script to a folder, save it to your Macintosh HD/Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts folder. Ctrl-clicking the folder to which you want to attach it in the Finder, selecting ‘Folder Actions setup’ from the pop-up menu and choosing the script you just added from the list in the resulting window. Once the script is attached, whenever a file is added to the folder, the conversion process will take place, leaving the original Pages file intact. In fact, you can use the same script from Pages’ Save dialog. If you save to this folder, it automatically creates a duplicate Word version on the Desktop, although the way the script is set up it will close the active Pages document when it’s completed.
That should make quickly converting files simple, but will it be enough to convince the switchers to iWork full time? Time will tell, but the fact that the switchers are currently a few days into iWork’s 30-day trial is surely a good sign.
