Wednesday, September 27, 2006


thanks to mary, josh & pages!

first a quick thanks to mary petitt of juan valdez, who so sweetly closed her coffee shop just for the nyc coffee meetup tonite! yay -- it was a private coffee party.

josh from urnex gave a great general talk on the importance of cleaning your home coffee equipment, and scaa-consumer-member-turned-pro norman v. of unclebeanz donated fresh roasted coffee as a door prize.

mary served her heirloom maragogipe coffee variety -- a first for many of our meetup members -- while josh handed out free cleancaf to all! so thank you mary and josh!

i have other interesting news, which i'll discuss later.

on to the mini-review of apple's iwork pages word processor. when i got my lovely macbook pro, i wanted to have a completely microsoft-free machine.

why? because microsoft products are vulnerable, end of story.

and while most word nasties don't affect macs now, i just don't want to open that door. i don't want to be vulnerable when someone finally finds the one exploit that works in the mac and pc versions of word, you know?

thus pages 2.0.1. it's gotten some pretty good reviews, and is said to be very compatible with word docs. since i'm not writing any books in it, just mostly letters, outlines and a few business memos, i thought it would be up to the task.

i don't really use spreadsheets very often, and i don't usually need complex tables. so pages seemed like it would work for me. how to test that supposed word compatibility?

ah! i thought and thought and came up with a plan. my company's business letterhead comes as a fancy word template document (.dot) -- this is an elaborately set-up layout with graphics, heavily positioned text, unusual fonts, locked areas, headers, footers, a european page size -- the whole 9 yards.

so i tried opening it in pages, saving it as a pages template, and working with it. i was pretty sure in fact it wouldn't work and would look a mess.

but! i sent the template to myself, dragged it onto the pages icon and lo and behold! pages popped open, saved the thing as a template in its own format, perfectly perserved everything unique about the layout, read all the fonts. . .and the document is just like in word.

completely editable, all the locked areas respected as master page parts, it's a 100% conversion as far as i can tell from quickly typing a memo in it. amazing!

i'm deeply impressed. of course the thing to do is now to make a file, save it as a word format (.doc) and then see how it opens in pc word. . .i'll give that a try tomorrow. . .

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posted by fortune | 10:08 PM | top | link to this | email this: | | | 0 comments