I must admit that I haven’t continued to try Pages repeatedly over the years, but it has never worked well for the kind of quick collaboration we need. It’s possible that there would be ways of simulating what we do in Google Docs with some combination of Pages and iCloud Drive folder sharing, but without any reason to switch, we haven’t attempted it.
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I’m just not that fond of Pages. It’s OK, but if I need a full-fledged word processor, I’ll always launch Nisus Writer Pro preferentially. Now there’s an enjoyable word processor!
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Pages has vastly more power, particularly in terms of page layout and long documents, than we need for TidBITS articles. Sometimes you can just ignore all that, but other times, it actively gets in the way. Google Docs is much more suited to article writing.
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Having Google Drive collect all our drafts in a single place has long been helpful. Again, this could perhaps be simulated via iCloud Drive, but iCloud Drive gets stuck periodically, which might be an issue in heavier use. (I’m down on Dropbox now that they require a $9.99 per month payment just to have it work on more than three devices, regardless of how much space you need.)
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The few times I have used Pages for collaboration, it hasn’t been as tight as Google Docs. Files can be open or closed, there are occasionally messages about sharing, you sometimes have to explicitly share documents rather than just having them in a shared folder, and so on.
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To tease that point out a little more, one of the things I like about Gmail is how it is truth. You don’t check for and wait for new mail to come in—it’s either there or not. Google Docs is the same way—the document is truth. With Pages, I presume that the original document that’s shared is truth, and everyone else gets a copy of that. Regardless, changes have to flow from one copy of Pages to iCloud and back down to all the other copies of Pages that might have the document open. That can be fast, but it’s never going to be as fast and seamless as Google Docs, where the document you’re looking at is the only one that exists. You can even see people editing in real time in Google Docs, moving the cursor and selecting text and that sort of thing. That’s not a big help, but it show just out tight Google Docs is.
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I quite like the way Google Docs looks up URLs when you select some text and hit Command-K. For selected company and product names, it’s almost always spot on, which saves some time from copying and pasting the URL.
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Grammarly doesn’t work with Pages. That’s not the end of the world—we could run it in WordPress when we publish, but I like running it earlier in the editing process.
In the end, while I suspect Pages could do what we need, it’s not clear to me that it does much of anything better than Google Docs, making it hard to put the effort into a switch.