You know, I landed it as part of the (what do they call it?) iWork package, which I wanted for the Keynote update (to use in place of the execrable Powerpoint on those occasions, a couple of times a year, when I deem it politic to dazzle the management with a powerful dose of White Man's Juju), and glanced at it, but didn't form a clear impression. I'm accustomed to using full-featured (or whatever has passed as full-featured at various points time past—obviously the Aldus state-of-the-art page layout software designed to run on a Motorola 68000 in 1987 will not hold up well, featureset-wise, against today's MS Word) page layout programs, having put aside with regret Claris' old MacWrite Pro, which did everything I wanted from a word processor, after it died of neglect. I started using PageMaker in 1987; from about 1989 forward it became my principal composition and formatting environment until I migrated to InDesign about five years ago.

All this by way of saying that I don't spend much time with word-processing software that "also" does page layout: most of what I've seen over the years has tried to help by second-guessing me, and given that I've now been doing what they used to call "desktop publishing" (a term I was pleased to see expire: if only "webmaster" will follow it soon to e-nomenclature Valhalla!) for about half my adult life, I no longer need that kind of "help." Moreover, I've yet to warm to the UI conventions, particularly with respect to font handling, that are shared rather intimately between Keynote and Pages. I do not assert that these conventions are necessarily inferior (although I suspect that they might be), but approaching them with the advantage, or with the burden, of twenty years of contrary memory muscles does not dispose me to be receptive.

At some point this year I'll try to make time for Pages, and I'll report my findings should you still be interested by then. It may well be an optimal environment for fairly effortless page layout at the sacrifice of some flexibility. Since at my professional level of expertise I can already wield the dedicated layout tools without breaking a sweat, using software that very obligingly stays out of my way, it's unlikely that the novice-friendly Pages will ever become my principal or even occasional application for this purpose. But you may have better things to do with your Mac attention dime, and Pages could be just the thing for your purposes.

cordially,