Disaster averted....
Monday, April 6, 2009 at 12:32PM Had a call this morning from a neighbour whose teenage daughter needed to pass in some coursework to College by 12 noon. Following an all night session producing the final bits of graphics for a project, she was struggling trying to print it out as their printer had decided to pack in!
Talk about bad timing.
As ever the good Samaritan, I said no problem and told them bring the work round for me to print off.
They are not a Mac family but the documents were in word format, so it shouldn't have been a problem.
A few minutes later, the USB stick was in my Mac Pro, I fired up MS Word for the Mac (yes, I still have a copy installed for such eventualities) and loaded the document.
Oh dear!
The formatting was all over the place.
I tried to resize some of the components but it wasn't looking too good.
As time was of the essence, I took an executive decision to close the document without saving and fired up Pages. The formatting looked slightly better (!) but still needed work but I was able to drag, resize and basically pummel the document into shape in a few minutes.
Now baring in mind, this was a native MS Word document, why was it easier to correct using Pages?
Just sayin'
Reader Comments (5)
Is your Mac bias showing? Or is it an anti-Microsoft bias?
Your post indicates that the only thing about Pages was that it rendered the original document's formatting slightly better than Word (which version). You do not state that you reformatted the document in both Pages and Word and therefore have a comparison. Rather, you state that you reformatted it in Pages.
Arguably, the better way to do this would have been to use Google Docs, which is OS agnostic.
Ouch!
I was just saying that it was easier to re-format in Pages that in the original application. I clicked around in Word and nothing much seemed to be happening, not allowing me to reformat it. Clicked on the same elements in Pages and able to resize, change the font, etc.
Now I have to say I'm not a Word expert (or Pages expert when it comes to that), so had I had more time to experiment or drill down into the menus, I most likely would have been able to reformat the document, it was just easier in Pages.
Now don't get me started on the new Microsoft laptop ads...
BTW, the documents contained lots of embedded images so Google docs probably wouldn't have been the way to go.
In situations like this I've found that asking the person to save the document as PDF can alleviate many of these cross-platform/version problems; often the issues are down to different versions of Word doing things differently rather than the underlying OS.
Of course this assumes the version of Word can produce PDFs ...
Glad you got it sorted anyway!
Ouch!!!
I hope no wording was changed ;D
JOKE
@DonMc "Now don’t get me started on the new Microsoft laptop ads…"
I like the ads, not because I am Windows or Microsoft fan (actually I am agnostic on OSes as there are things about each one I can despise) but rather because they are tweaking Mac fans' noses the same way that the "I'm a PC, I'm a Mac" ads tweaks Microsoft's nose. Both campaigns are incredible distortions of reality.
Leo Laporte mentioned in last week's Security Now podcast that someone once told him that "brands are the refuge of the ignorant." I would agree with that statement when it comes to computers. Tools should be chosen because they are the correct tool not because they are shiny or appeal to our vanity.
BTW, I did not intend to sting you in my original comment just to point out that your post reveals your inherent leanings toward the Mac world. I would not be a fan of your work if you didn't have that passion.