I have switched from Microsoft Office on my Mac OS X system to Apple’s iWorks package, which works great except every so often someone complains that my files are in .pages format, not .doc, which is what they want to see. I can’t see how to save a file in Pages as an MS Word doc file, but I know it can be done. Help?
Dave’s Answer:
I also migrated on my Mac from MS Office to iWorks and haven’t looked back in the eight months or so since. Certainly Keynote is a huge improvement over PowerPoint, and my Keynote presentations look so much better I am kind of embarrassed it took me so long to switch, but Pages is a splendid replacement for Word too, and so far, for me, offers 100% of the functionality and capability I need.
Even better, as I bet you’ve found out, you can open .doc files created by Microsoft Word in Pages without a problem. Saving Pages docs in Word format, however, isn’t quite as obvious as you may imagine, because it’s not a “Save As” it’s an “Export”.
Let me show you…
Open up your Pages document, then choose “Export…” from the File menu:
Chose that and you’ll see that there are a bunch of formats you can create:
The default is a PDF document. Easy, straightforward. Click on “Word” and you’ll see:
No options, just click on “Next…” and you’ll be able to type in the doc name you desire:
Enter a good name, add “.doc” if you think it’ll make it easier for the recipients, and click “Export”.
That’s it. Done. Now you have a “.doc” file on your computer that’s a Microsoft Word friendly version of your document. Not too bad!
