December 8th, 2007

Filed under:
Technical Writing, Technology
12 Comments »

There Are No Frickin’ Cross References in Apple’s Pages?

We’re spending the weekend putting the final touches on our ebook, and planning our marketing push. I’m doing the final layout work on the book, and one of the last things on my list is adding cross references. You know, sentences like “for more information on Facebook, see page 46″. We’re using Pages 2.0, part of Apple’s iWork ‘08 suite. I started clicking around the menus to finding the cross reference functionality, and couldn’t. You know why?

Pages doesn’t offer cross references.

I am seriously underwhelmed. Cross references are a pretty basic feature for word processor software. After all, Microsoft Word has had them for about 15 years. Apple wants me to use Pages to make “newsletters, reports, proposals”, but they want me to hard code the frickin’ page numbers?

It’s not an enormous pain now, but it will cause serious angst every time we update the book. Once we introduce a few paragraphs of new content, every cross reference will be wrong.

I’m extra disappointed because Pages has otherwise proved an excellent, reliable tool with few bugs, and a real improvement on alternatives MS Word (on reliability) and Framemaker (on usability).

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Comments: 12 Responses so far

Derek K. Miller
December 8th, 2007
2:43 pm

That’s an amazing omission. There’s a feature request!

[Reply]

Derek K. Miller
December 8th, 2007
6:51 pm

P.S. You can send feature requests at the Apple website.

[Reply]

Kevin
December 9th, 2007
12:22 am

I’d avoid cross-references. Tech writers use them all the time, but it’s actually annoying for the reader when the writer says “here’s something really interesting…oops flip to the other end of the book for the details.” Maybe Apple knows this?

[Reply]

darren
December 9th, 2007
2:06 am

Derek: Thanks for that, but I’m afraid Apple doesn’t inspire much confidence as the sort of company that responds to feature requests. They’re great at a lot of stuff, but I don’t feel submitting feature requests to them is worth the effort.

Kevin: Yeah, I’m removing most of them simply because I don’t want them to be wrong in the future.

[Reply]

Gabriel Radic
December 10th, 2007
2:48 am

Damn… I’m in the same boat you’re in. I’ll look at the Bookmark feature before considering switching to Word.

God I miss FrameMaker on the Mac.

[Reply]

lenny
May 7th, 2008
11:12 pm

Pages does support cross referencing. The app calls it “bookmarks”. Select some text, bookmark it. Then create a link. Just did it earlier today.

Also, Pages will automatically number your pages too.

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Nagysaman
September 24th, 2008
12:25 am

BOOKMARKS ARE NOT IDENTICAL WITH CROSS REFERENCES!!!

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Duane
September 26th, 2008
10:31 pm

Bookmarks are just hyperlinks within in the document itself. They have very limited use. A cross reference pulls the page number or article number and can be used to reference another place in the document. Apple has added a very bare bones TOC which does pull the page numbers in, but only for TOC’s.

I am with Darren. Until Apple adds this functionality I will stay with my old version of Word for anything but short one off documents I do at home.

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Darren Kelly
October 26th, 2008
2:49 am

I am also rather underwhelmed with some aspects of Pages (and esp. with Numbers).
Absolutely incredible shortcoming !
I’ve recently moved to Mac (from Linux KDE, although I known Win well) and although I am fan of many aspects of Mac OS X I keep bumping into the same problem with many basic Mac apps, namely:

I keep hitting the point where if I want to do real IT, real computing, and use real intelligence, a given Mac app simply does not offer it. So I give up and move back to a better known app.

So now I have to move to OpenOffice anyway. Might as well have started my work in it. Keeps happening.

[Reply]

Darren Kelly
October 27th, 2008
6:52 pm

BTW I am always grateful for users sharing their specific experience with apps like this, comforting to google and find a similar experience confirming mine.

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Gwyneth Llewelyn
July 29th, 2009
6:21 am

Aww, I was just googling for a solution to this, and found your site to learn there is none. Well! I guess I’m out of luck then. Granted, for such a cheap product (iWork is cheap!), I can’t expect miracles…

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Mark Turner
September 27th, 2009
5:15 am

Like the previous poster, I was Googling for an answer to this when I found your blog post. Apple often chooses to leave out basic features in order to meet a ship date (as any iPhone owner will tell you), but Pages is now at version 4.0.2 and still lacks cross-references. Shame!

I hate to say it, but I hope MS doesn’t abandon Mac Office just yet. Apple has a long way to go if they’re going to offer a serious alternative.

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