Pages is an amazing amalgam of tantalising features and poor implementation.

If all you want to do is open up one of the very attractive templates and substitute your own material you will be reasonably happy. Try to make it do anything serious or make major alterations or try to create your own material and you will be confounded at almost every turn.

Despite being a clean sheet in design, it has been patched and patched again to try and make it fill some of the demands of its users. The patches add features in odd and inconsistent ways, some of which work - sort of. What doesn't get patched is what is wrong with this program.

The first thing that got patched was what has become 2 modes, Word Processing and Layout. As it was a bit of a dog's breakfast trying to be a Word Processor and a DTP program at the same time, Apple split the 2. You diverge at the point of selecting a starting template, then can't go back.

Some features work in one mode and some in the other. Apple makes hardly any effort to let the user know which does which. Crazily enough the only master pages are in the WP mode. The Layout mode just makes predesigned sheets which aren't retrospective they are like photo copies of the layout. Despite showing options for facing pages, the pages ignore them except for headers and footers. You actually have to create Layout versions for each side and manually put them in the right order. If you have headers and footers they will twist from one side to the other irregardless of whatever else is on the page.

There is no layers, no direct selection tool (for Pete's sake, what millenium is this?) the master pages are primitive in the extreme and only exist for WP mode, there are no named colors that you can systematically use in styles and retrospectively change, no spot colors, no crop marks, no real support for commercially ready pdf files (there may appear to be but they fail), reflections, shadows and text over bitmaps are rendered at a ridiculous 72dpi. I could go on for ever, but there just isn't room.

Apple frankly lies about the MsOffice compatibility. It saves and opens Word format files but has so many problems it is better avoided.

This is classic Apple post Steve Jobs' 2nd coming, all style and very little substance.

It is hard to believe that this is the child of the company that virtually started the DTP revolution and wrote the book on User Interfaces.