Pages work’s fine when saving a document in .doc format, but as soon as you try to save it again (e.g. a simple change to it) you get presented with the following window:

Which is a right pain when you’re trying to do virtually anything with a Word Document, so your options are don’t save until you’re finished and hope nothing goes wrong, keep going through the process above to save the document, or keep on reading to find a simple fix.

It’s all in the .plist

In common with Apple’s other recent “mishap”, there are just a couple of things you need to change in a .plist file. It’s nice & simple and only takes a couple of minutes, or if you’re lazy you can download the file which I’ve posted below.

For the technically minded

What you’ll need

For the sake of easiness I am be going to using Property List Editor, it comes included with Apple’s developer tools, if you haven’t got this installed it is still possible to do so, simply using TextEdit, although that is significantly more complicated, and I would reccomend that you download the .plist file at the end of this entry.

Update (11/8/09): As has been pointed out in the comments the actual plist entries which you are required to edit has changed with updated versions of iWork, please bear this in mind and look out for it when you follow this tutorial!

1. First off, you need to open the Pages.app package, to do this simply browse to it using finder, then right-click and click “Show Packages Contents”.
   
2. Now a new Finder window will appear, this allows you to browse around the … Package Contents, although for now we’re only interested in one file, “Info.plist” (in the Contents folder). This is what appears to be Pages’ main configuration file, so by editing it we can adjust the behaviour of it.
3. I would recommend that you make a backup of “Info.plist” before you do anything, just in case something bad happens, to do this simply copy it to somewhere you’ll remember (like the Desktop). Now double click on the original file (within Package Contents) to open it with Property List Editor.
4. Now we’re getting somewhere, you will see a view of the properties associated, you need to expand the “Root” by clicking the triangle/arrow to the right of it, and then expand the “CFBundleDocumentTypes” in the same way. This gives a list of numbers, and you then need to expand 8 and 9, which will let you view something similar to this:



5. The properties which you need to change are CFBundleTypeRole, for both instances (shown above) change them to “Editor” (without quotes), you can do this by double-clicking on where it says “Viewer”. Now you just need to save the file (File>Save), close Property List Editor, and you’re good to go.
6. Now when you open up a Word Document using Pages and try to save any pages it should all work seamlessly, although you may notice a small progress bar like this:
   
   Which is nothing to worry about, it just let’s you know that all is working well.

Hopefully that was easy enough to accomplish, if not here’s the easy version below:

For the not-so-technically minded

Here’s a version of the above tutorial which accomplishes the same output but with fewer steps, just to make life easier for you

1. Follow steps 1 and 2 above.
2. Download the updated Info.plist from here: Info.plist, you may need to tell your browser to download it (right-click, Save Link As).
3. Copy the new Info.plist into the Contents folder of the Package Contents window. Now just close this and re-open Pages to have the ability to save Word Documents.

Conclusion

I think that it is rather odd that this support isn’t enabled by default, after all when you open a document the last thing you’ll want to do is save it somewhere else, as that’s what “Save As” is for. To me it is a completely illogical step for a user to have to take, and I can imagine there being many “.pages” documents inadvertently being passed around by unsuspecting iWork users. Although maybe this is Apple’s way of promoting the software, with the hope that people who receive these “weird” files will end up paying for software that they don’t necessarily need?

I hope that this post has covered everything, and that it is easy enough to understand. If you have any questions please leave a comment and I’ll try my best to help you out.

Update (6/2/09): Inserted link to the pre-built Info.plist, which I forget to add. Oops.

One of the “exciting” new releases at MWSF this year, iWork (aptly named) ’09. Seemingly a bog standard progression of the standard iWork line. Since I’m relatively new to OS X I’ve never really had chance to use it before, so with a new release now seems the ideal time to give it a go.

Also, worth mentioning, is that it has had quite a lot of publicity recently regarding a certain iWork ’09 plist file. But that’s a story that Google will tell you, so no need for me to repeat what has already been said.

I’m currently playing around with them at the moment, having no past experience mean’s they take a bit of getting used to, but so far I’m liking Keynote & Numbers, but favour Microsoft Word over Pages – simply not a fan of the DTP aspects of Pages’ interface. Anyone else had chance to play around? What do you think, and how do you reckon they compare to past versions?