Apple Rage
I've been a user of Apple's iWork suite for quite some time. Because Pages wasn't as feature rich as MS Word, I actually preferred it over the feature rich MS suite. Pages did everything I needed it to do as a writer and made creating basic page layout documents a snap.
But today I realized that in Pages 5 they stripped out something I used heavily in my work life: Mail Merge.
I have a ton of documents setup to use Mail Merge from various sources. Every year I would simply update the sources and hit merge. Done.
I starred agape at the notice that said "Mail Merge is not supported. Your Merge fields have been turned into plain text."
How could one of the basic features of any word processor be stripped out of their productivity suite? Have they really just given up to the point of no longer caring? Have they reached the levels of hubris that Microsoft reached in the 1990s?
Is Steve Jobs rolling over in his grave? I don't know the answer to that - his mind was a mystery to everybody.
Along with the fact that OneDrive is far more useful than iCloud in many ways, this is the last straw for me regarding Apple's iWork software. I will now only keep it installed on my devices so that if I receive something from somebody in iWork format I will be able to read it. Aside from that, I'm going back to Microsoft Office.
What the hell, Apple?
And before anybody says that you don't like Apple because they make all the choices for you, don't forget that Microsoft and even Übuntu (and other Linux flavors) do the same thing, just in different ways. The fact that Apple has stripped out functionality is reminiscent of some of the functionality that was stripped out between Windows 7 and the original Windows 8 release.
My hope is that Apple will add that feature back in, but I'm not going to hold my breath on it right now. Anyway, with OneDrive and MS Office, I feel pretty good about getting things done at this point.
My only wish now is that I could incorporate MS Word into Scrivener easily.
But today I realized that in Pages 5 they stripped out something I used heavily in my work life: Mail Merge.
I have a ton of documents setup to use Mail Merge from various sources. Every year I would simply update the sources and hit merge. Done.
I starred agape at the notice that said "Mail Merge is not supported. Your Merge fields have been turned into plain text."
How could one of the basic features of any word processor be stripped out of their productivity suite? Have they really just given up to the point of no longer caring? Have they reached the levels of hubris that Microsoft reached in the 1990s?
Is Steve Jobs rolling over in his grave? I don't know the answer to that - his mind was a mystery to everybody.
Along with the fact that OneDrive is far more useful than iCloud in many ways, this is the last straw for me regarding Apple's iWork software. I will now only keep it installed on my devices so that if I receive something from somebody in iWork format I will be able to read it. Aside from that, I'm going back to Microsoft Office.
What the hell, Apple?
And before anybody says that you don't like Apple because they make all the choices for you, don't forget that Microsoft and even Übuntu (and other Linux flavors) do the same thing, just in different ways. The fact that Apple has stripped out functionality is reminiscent of some of the functionality that was stripped out between Windows 7 and the original Windows 8 release.
My hope is that Apple will add that feature back in, but I'm not going to hold my breath on it right now. Anyway, with OneDrive and MS Office, I feel pretty good about getting things done at this point.
My only wish now is that I could incorporate MS Word into Scrivener easily.
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