iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Exporting Documents

As you learned way back on The Document Warnings window, Pages does a great job at opening documents created by other word processors like Microsoft Word. Alas, Word and other programs don’t return the favor—while Pages speaks Word, for example, Word doesn’t understand Pages at all. If you want to share a Pages document with Windows users or anyone who doesn’t have iWork, you need to export the file, telling Pages to save it as a different file type. Other occasions call for exporting, too—you might want to save your file as a PDF to share a read-only version that anyone can open, for example.

Pages gives you a shortcut to save a copy of your file as Microsoft Word right from the File → Save As window, as you’ll soon see, but most export operations happen from Pages’ Export dialog box. Choose Share → Export to reveal this expert translator (Figure 9-3). Here you can choose one of four formats to save: PDF, Microsoft Word, RTF, or Plain Text. Each of these formats varies in how “true” the result will be to your original document—PDF will be an exact read-only replica, for example, while plain text will keep only the content and strip out all your graphics and formatting. Your results will vary according to your specific content and the export format you choose, but in general, the fewer graphics, columns, tables, headers, footers, and footnotes involved, the more accurate your exported file will be. When Pages runs into problems, it lets you know about translation ...