Today, a co-worker asked if I could open .pages document. Of course, I thought. Send me the document. After all. I have iWork installed on my MacBook Pro.
See. Even though we have just entered 2010, the latest version of iWork is iWork ’09. And, my version is iWork ’08. Surely, a version of iWork that was released the year before the current version can open all .pages documents.
Nope. In the perfect world, I could use an older version of Pages to open a .pages document created by a newer version of Pages. Granted, everything might not look perfect, but at least I will have some access to the content. Sort of like the way that users running Lynx can still access the Internet. Sure, you can’t waste time watching YouTube videos or playing Desktop Tower Defense, but you can read articles on the New York Times.
Yeah, it’s not a pretty sight, but at least it works. So, for a product with such low market share, how can IWork afford not to be minimally compatible between versions. I’ll take a stripped down text only viewable copy over not being able to access the document entirely. The only way around this mess is to install a 30 Day Free Trial of iWork ’09. Not going to buy it though since I’m sure iWork ’10 version is just around the corner.
4 responses to “Pages: You Need a Newer Version of Pages to Open This Document”
I’ve run into the same thing. It’s very annoying. Is there now viewer software available? Damn you Apple! I’ll never by iWork now!
Hey so the quick way to get around this is just downloading the file and then change the file extension to .pdf and you shouldn’t have much trouble. You can’t edit it but there is a way to copy text from pdf files if you need to so you can work from there. Hope this helps.
Kelly your comment was very useful but I think you forgot to add that the information required to open the document needs to be changed – or at least it needed changing on my computer. Just for reference after changing the file extension to .pdf press cmd I, and in the pane which reads “Open with”, select Preview or Adobe. Now it works.
Or, right click the document and Open With Preview. Worked perfectly for me.