Pages and Word
Most people tend to compare Pages with Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac OS X. The following functions are present in Word 2004 but absent in Pages 2.0:
Visual Basic macros
Revision Marks
Comparison of two documents
Versions
Organization Charts
Linked and Embedded Objects
US Barcode printing
Master documents
Grammar Checks
Vertical Script and Japanese furigana
WordArt
Drop Caps
Intelligent caps formatting (like Title Case).
Autosave (which can be used to recover unsaved documents in case of a crash)
Native "Save" of RTF and Word format (Pages "exports" to RTF and Word format, but subsequent changes have to be exported again through a number of dialogue steps.)
Split document window
Multiple document windows for the same file
Italics and bold in fonts with no built in typeface for it.
Word count of a selection (available in Pages only using third party Services such as wordservice)
Hidden text
Different page orientations within the same document
Save and open RTF files with pictures (Pages opens and saves RTFDs which may contain images, but does not handle pictures embedded in RTF.)
Convert text to table
Pages has the following functions, which Microsoft Word 2004 lacks:
Save and open Pages files
Save and open RTFD files
Support for Mac OS X Services
Image Masks
Image Levels
Embedding PDF images
Snap images to Alignment guides
Text fit/wrap along a curved border
Copy/paste text formatting
Instant font size scaling
Customizable text shadows
Multi-language dictionary (Word has several language dictionaries, but for each part of the text, one has to decide which language it shall be checked against.)
Formatting previews (Apart from the Formatting Palette, the dialogues in Microsoft Word do not show previews of formatting changes until they are applied.)
Ligature control
Advanced typography features (glyph variants, ornaments, etc.)
Neither Pages nor Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac OS X has fully working support for right to left scripts like Arabic, Hebrew and Persian. Neither product supports the OpenDocument format.
Other functions that exists in both products are often implemented in very different ways.