Comment by isametry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by isametry | Hacker News Reader

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Before the original commenter answers: I'm gonna guess collaboration with others. The reliability of being able to send anyone the original file, them being able to open it with all Word-specific features and content, and e.g. sending it back with inline comments.

I've also dabbled with Pages lately, and I don't think I've found any features for now that I desperately miss from Word. Now granted, this is just my workflow, which I believe is fairly basic. But the thing is, most people's workflows are basic. I'm gonna guess that about 80% of people wouldn't miss anything by switching from Word to Pages.

It's a typical example of collaboration lock-in that you'll encounter in so many other areas. It's the reason why so many people are forced to use Adobe apps or Visual Studio.

The most important feature of Word is that everyone has it.

Ahh okay. So if you’re serious enough about writing that you regularly collaborate with, e.g. an editor, then Word is the default choice for that.

But nothing about that applies to the writing process itself. You could be like George RR Martin and write in WordStar for DOS and then convert the files over to Word before you send to your editor. The main issue there is how often you need to correspond (which may be seldom for a novelist like Martin).

Well yeah, I assume they referred to "writing" as in the entire workflow, including drafting, reference, revisions etc.

Because otherwise, I have zero idea what that sentence was supposed to imply. If "serious writing" actually means "typing words in a serious manner" in the original comment, then I don't really have much to say, except that OC is probably spewing utter nonsense.

As a university student it really is quite unfortunate. So many students use MacBooks that come pre installed with a word editor capable of collaborative editing, but choose word regardless! Luckily I seldom had professors who required submission in .docx, but even for that, Pages has an option to export as .docx.

> Before the original commenter answers: I'm gonna guess collaboration with others.

Since a free iCloud account gives you access to the online version of Pages, collaboration with others seems to be covered, including simultaneous editing.

You can export to Docx within Google Docs, this is bad take. I use Google Docs and Libre Office since I can't run Office.

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