Pages 4+

Everyone I know dislikes Pages and dismisses it as an over-basic Word Processing app. This is completely wrong. We use it for the creation of complex 100+ page books, brochures and other documents, collaborated on by people in multiple countries with a deep feature set rivalling all the most popular DTP apps. It’s truly incredible and there’s nothing to compete with it’s powerful combination of graphics, word processing, layout, collaboration and other tools. Affinity Publisher is great but no collaboration. Word is great but no graphics and horrible interface, and so on. But there’s a major design flaw which is the cause of Pages’ poor ratings: When you open the app, it’s stuck in basic WP mode. To change it to DTP mode you have to dig deep into menus and go to Document Options/Document Setup/ and then switch off “Document Body”. It’s the most idiot, poorly described menu option I’ve ever seen! NOW you’ve switched from basic WP to a mega-advanced collaborative DTP app. So many features are there but not obvious because of Apple’s (beautiful) ways of replacing thousands of complex menus with touch-based or contextual menu-based options. APPLE: DO YOURSELF A FAVOUR: WHEN THIS APP OPENS, HAVE A BIG SWITCH ‘DTP OR WP’.

I have been happily using this app for years, but the latest iPad version is a constant pain.
The first issue is that all the pages docs stored on my iPad were wiped on updating and only docs saved in cloud storage were usable. I have no idea why this happened so I tried restoring them from a back up on my MacBook and still they wouldn’t open. The app just kept freezing. I finally gave up and deleted and reinstalled Pages hoping this would fix the issue.
It did allow me to access cloud storage in Dropbox, etc but still keeps freezing or crashing completely and now has a number of conflicted versions of the same document which you then have to start working out how to manage - in 30 mins, I managed to acquire 13 different versions of the same document on both the iPad and in Dropbox! This means having to go through and delete the majority. Not sure if working through google docs or similar is proving as frustrating.
It’s great for apps to work alongside cloud storage, but only if access to the documents is consistently good, without that, the glitches make it pretty worthless as a way of working and if I had lost anything really important, I would have been very angry. I’m lucky I keep back ups. If you use pages on iPad at the moment, make sure you have back ups of anything really important or you risk losing it. The last freeze once again stole all the docs on the iPad itself so nothing appeared in the menu.

Okay, further to my 1 star review yesterday I’ve had a call from Apple, fantastic. Though they didn’t know where print and export had gone either! Between the call handler and myself we checked everything. We found a work around, in the recents screen and we could select and export and print there. Not ideal but okay. Then we opened a different document and at the top left of the screen where the filename is I spotted a down arrow, and touched it and woohoo the export was there and so was Print! Even the apple support lady did t know it was there as the help section said it was in the 3 dots or the usual export square with arrow button! So it’s there folks just not where it’s meant to be! Fantastic support from Apple and between us we figured it out, the support lady is putting a urgent request for the help section to be updated to reflect the new strange location of the export and print options. They were stunned it wasnt there and even her supervisor couldn’t figure it out either so it’s great we now know what’s happened and that it’s not gone it’s just in a really random place.