Macworld recently ran a story both in print and on the web about how well iWork holds up against Microsoft Office as an alternative office suite. The article used a simple conceit—choose a single project and attempt to use both programs to complete that project—to work out how well each program fared.
My piece of this puzzle was to compare Pages, iWork’s word processing/page layout application, with Word, Microsoft’s similarly configured tool and to see how well each program was able to create a basic, text-based newsletter, add complexity to the document, and finally, using each of the program’s built-in templates, create a complicated, graphic oriented newsletter.
This was by no means a comprehensive, feature-by-feature look at each application—a feat which would no doubt require several volumes to complete—but a look at one aspect of each program.