I love Pages and use it for writing almost exclusively. In one of the recent updates there was a change to how you move the cursor, and it is beyond frustrating. I want the old version of the cursor landing where I touch. This new version makes it impossible to split to words if there was no space between when typing without spending time moving it around with the space bar. The space bar thing is cool but not at the expense of being able to touch the screen to move the cursor to a precise location. Then sometimes it chooses a word, sometimes it won’t. Sometimes I can it to pop up the menu with select and select all and sometimes I cannot. I use this on an iPad Pro and find myself frustrated on a daily if not hourly basis. This same thing applies to text messages and emails. I simply find it most frustrating in Pages because I use it so much. I would have given at least 4 stars and will amend if they this is fixed. Thank you!
I like the flexibility, the layout ability, and the templates. But, it is temperamental and buggy with simple word processing. I’m trying to use a book formatted document from a provided template. I pause here to say that it’s annoying to open a book template with an iPad in English mode, bearing an English title cover page, but with sample content totally in French...all of them. If I try to partially utilize the template’s formatting by altering the content slightly, the app erases it all and I have to totally retype it...negates the usefulness of the template. Tapping to place the cursor to modify text sporadically doesn’t work. When that happens, the only way to get the cursor placed correctly is to first tap into an entirely different place in the document and then place the cursor. The cursor placement method of holding the space bar and using it as a trackpad doesn’t work about 15% of the time with this app only. Text styles are annoyingly uneditable. Earth to app designers everywhere: While I appreciate your formatting suggestions, you need to recognize it is not your device, nor your document. Please do not impose your style on the rest of us by locking out alterations to a preformatted style. If, for instance, if I want sentence case instead of caps lock, that’s my call, not yours.
25 years ago I had a Mac Quadra 800; it had a blazing 33-MHz processor and a massive 500MB of storage. On it I used Word 5.1 for Mac, which was a lovely program before Word 6 became bloatware. Word 5.1 on that machine could anything that this version of Pages can do and more.
Eventually, I got a new Mac (I forget which one) and needed a replacement for Word (the then-current version remaining bloatware), so I got iWorks (or was it still Claris?); the predecessor to Pages was fine, and the drawing program was lovely. Then Apple upgraded the word processor to Pages — and it really was an upgrade — but alas lost the lovely drawing program.
Pages for the Mac really used to be a quality 5-star program, while the iPhone and iPad versions were inadequate. Then someone at Apple decided to make them identical, not by improving the iVersions but by emasculating the Mac version. The iVersions remain inadequate. They still aren’t identical.
Here are some of the things missing from the iVersion of Pages:
Set a default font other than the criminally-ugly Helvetica (the Swiss should be ashamed);
Insert a Layout break;
Control character spacing;
Find without having to find Find;
Find-and-replace;
Replace All;
Replace with a carriage-return/Paragraph.
And those are just what I needed TODAY. A comprehensive list would be quite long.
So, I don’t understand why people are so mad about lag. Most of the time, it has to do with their iPad being old, and I can confirm that since I use to have pages on an older iPad and it did lag, but it was the iPad not the app. I have an iPad that is from 2018, and the app works perfectly fine for me. I also really enjoy the fact that in pages, you can pretty much make a book/essay/something else with multiple people! When I do that, I FaceTime my friend and at the same time we discuss what we want to add and take away from the thing we are writing. So, in all, pages is amazing and the only way that it could not be good is because the iPad/phone the person is using is an older version. So for someone else that is going to get pages, if your device is old, or more then 4 years old I would get a newer device.
What every you’ve been doing Tim, it must not be anything to do with your software upgrades. Pages wasn’t great to begin with. What a miserable piece of software it is now. Moving the cursor by hand, hopelessly time consuming. WHAT HAPPENED TO THE MAGNIFYING GLASS CURSOR MOVEMENT! Who ever allowed it to change, fire them. Their execution of the change, complete failure. Selecting paragraph placement, indent, justified, whatever, constantly selecting the same thing over again and it still does change the placement. Character details, bold, italic, well that stopped working altogether. Select for bold face, toggle changes, start typing no bold face. Select it again, still doesn’t work. Your iCloud, don’t want it, my work doesn’t belong to you and you don’t deserve it. I want all, ALL!, my work on my drives, no exception.
TIM!, Apple is a rich company, preview the performance of your software before you send us updates. Apple is headed for very poor performance and has been for years. It’s your software and it’s your fault.
I began to use this app as a writing tool when google docs malfunctioned. I saw that it was already downloaded on my phone, so I kept it and began to write my books in it. I can’t believe how amazing it is! You can write books, letters, school reports, and even resumes! I’m in the middle of writing a book called The Masked Four, and I’m still working on the title. I could jot anything down in this app on a blank page, and I haven’t experienced any glitches. This writing app is a must-have, and it helps your spelling and it’s always the app I come to when I want to write my books. I hope to print and publish these books someday in the future, and it would mean the world to me if the developers supported that. My author name is Heather Soukie, and I’m looking forward to writing more books! Thank you! Five stars all the way!
So far I’m really digging a lot of what’s on offer here, but typing on an iPhone is critically flawed. In word processing mode, he app still behaves a lot like a page layout tool, showing you a page with wide margins and zooming into the text to type, automatically. The problem with this is the zoomed in view is pointless for long form text: you see a couple of words to either side of the cursor, and fragments of the rows above and below. You can’t actually read more than a few words before where you are. Most of the time you literally can’t see the the beginning of the sentence you’re working on. You can zoom out to type, but any cursor manipulation dumps you back in the claustrophobic view.
It’s a sad truth that despite all its other powers, on an iPhone it’s actually easier to type long form text in notes than it is in pages. I hope they come up with a view designed for typing someday.
Alright, there are a tremendous amount of complaints about this application. Keep that feedback coming in so developers can remedy such flaws you may stumble upon. Although, what most people fail to appreciate is the simplicity the developers have created in this application. They have created a way to construct beautiful documents with minimal experience needed by the end user. By that, I applaud you! I would also like to point out the extremely helpful “Pages Help” guide within the application settings. Finding a solution in the “Pages Help” section are easy to sift through the categorized sections, providing simple instructions, and are written in simple language that anyone can understand.
Nothing is perfect, though this application is a huge step forward than Microsoft Word when comparing simple user interface and functionality.
Thank you developers!
3 stars (on mobile) because if you want to quickly turn images into a pdf, this works fine, but if you want to do anything else or anything slightly fancy on mobile (like delete a page) it’s kind of useless.
Tried forcing myself to use this app again and it is still kind of useless. I am using this on an iPhone X. After arbitrarily adding an extra page to the end of the document, it now refuses to delete the page. It is frustrating that the app actually fails to do simple tasks like delete a page. For whatever reason it will not let me select just one page to delete and tries to delete all the pages. Yes I’m using thumbnail mode. I generally only use this app to make a quick pdf with several images, but the app’s inability to do a simple task like delete a page drives me insane. You would think something as simple and rudimentary as deleting a page would not have any issues.
I’ve been a loyal Apple fan since the Apple II days. I’ve almost exclusively used Apple software.
Pages has always been a bit of a clunker but I stayed with it. But recently it felt to be more of a struggle than it was worth. Even the old AppleWorks version was better than the current version. So I think this is it Apple. I’m gonna to have to ditch Pages for ..... Microsoft Word or some other word processing s/w.
In the same vein - Apple seems to have lost its sense of mission. Where is the killer instinct for really great products and services? Or are you content to tweak a little here and there and tell us we ought o excited about the new issues? Like your iPhone upgrades. There was just a little too much of a money grab that felt like we were being taken for granted. So nope. I ain’t gonna give you my money.
BTW is Maps still a thing with Apple? Or are you guys gonna dump that sometimes soon? Hate to say it but I just turn to Google maps without even thinking. That’s how irrelevant Apple Maps is to me. And millions of others.
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