Thursday, May 29, 2014

Pages, The Most Under-Utilized App Ever

I am a huge fan of Pages.  I haven’t used Word in over five years now and I can honestly say that there is no huge gaping hole in my life.  Quite the opposite!  I can do things in the Pages App that my fellow Word users have no idea how to do.  When people ask me, “what’s the difference?” or they say “so it’s like Word?”.  I have to remind myself to close my mouth so the flies don’t get in and breath in ten seconds to calm myself.  
Seriously, Pages is an application that allows you to create the most beautiful documents with layers of shapes, texts, videos, links, and graphics.  It is so intuitive it only took 10 minutes for a group of 4th graders to start creating a newspaper article on it!  
The best way to think about working in pages is to understand layers.  If you’ve ever worked in Adobe’s tedious Illustrator you understand layers.  If you haven’t you just have to think about layering up shapes with colors and texts to create pretty documents.  One of my favorite things to do with Pages is to create a document, PDF it, load it up to Google Drive, and then share it out via Twitter or shared settings.  
While Google is awesome, it is still lacking the amazing formatting options available in Pages.  It doesn’t matter if I am creating on my iPad with the Pages app or on my laptop in Pages. Furthermore, with the latest OS updates, you can now share a link to your working document and collaborate in real time with whomever you invite. It is as simple as drag and drop, resize, turn, mask, and type. Text boxes work best if you are working with lots of graphics and the paragraph styles drawer lets you optimize formatting easily and quickly.  Sorry, Word, but you are just never entering my work flow in the future.  Oh and Google, you could learn a few tricks from Apple on this one!

Written by Jenny Krzystowczyk
@jennykbps

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