Merging

Pages and the Mac Lawyer

June 20, 2008 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

Any lawyer using a Mac or thinking about switching to Macs has to wrestle with the Word Processor Question: what can possibly replace Word or WordPerfect? For Word users, it may be a no-brainer since Word has a Mac analog. But WordPerfect has been the trusted workhorse in my office since the days of DOS (and, without taking sides in the Word v. WordPerfect wars, I can say without equivocation that WordPerfect has no peer in the field). So, faced with the prospect of leaving something that has served us so well for so long, what’s an attorney to do?

Ben Stevens at The Mac Lawyer is switching his office to Pages after another bad experience with Word. As I’ve been preparing for the move to Macs, I’ve worked with Pages, Word 2008, OpenOffice and NeoOffice. (BTW, Erik Schmidt at MacLawStudent did a review of Pages and some other word processors earlier this year. Jeff Kabbe at Apple Briefs discusses the word processors he uses here. ) I also dabbled with Sheepshaver and an early version of WordPerfect for Mac, but it was far too complicated to set up, much less rely upon, as a dependable office word processor. I own and love Scrivener. I’m using it catalog all the stuff that needs to get done as I prepare for the transition, but it’s strengths are not suited for general law office work. I even looked at TextEdit . . . briefly.

Well, a couple of days ago, the folks at Marketcircle made up my mind for me. They released version 3.7.4 of Daylite, a beta version that includes merging support for the iWork suite of programs–Pages, Numbers and Keynote. As you know, I’ve settled on Daylite as my practice management program. This latest release seals the deal.

Pages has always been a stable, elegant program. I’ve been using it for non-business purposes since I bought my MBPro last November. But the only game in town so far as merging with Daylite is concerned had been Word 2004 (and now 2008). I bought a copy of Word 2008 earlier this year and created some simple merges with it, but I really didn’t (and still don’t) like the interface. And, of course, it’s Word.

Fortunately, my practice does not require a lot of collaborative word processing so I am not married to Word. As the federal courts move to PDF, the format of a word processing document has become less important. What IS important in my practice is the ability to get data out of my practice management software into a word processor. With this latest version of Daylite, that requirement is now satisfied, and I couldn’t be more pleased.

Pages does have a funky format, saving a document in a package which contains other files, and this means that the minimum file size is at least 80k. By comparison, a comparable Word document is 24k, and a TextEdit doc is only 4k. Considering the storage capacity of today’s computers, this isn’t a deal breaker. Besides, we are scanning most of the paper in our office; we can delete the Pages doc once the scanned version is in the client’s folder.

Now that I can merge Daylite info with Pages, I’m pretty excited about the possibilities this opens up for my practice. I’ll talk more about that in future posts.