What are the most frequent of the frequent questions?

It is very difficult to tell what the most frequently asked questions are about Pages. Looking at Apples Discussion forums one can get one impression. Looking at this blog a different one.

This is a graph of the most common keyword categories that have led people to this blog this February 2008:



The most common keyword is about a missing function: autosave. One out of eight people who find this site with a search engine come here because they miss an autosave function.

The next keyword is about possibilities: applescript. That is actually good news - people want to extend and adapt the program for their own needs.

The following point, however, is again about a missing function: wordart. It may be questionable if it would make sense to include a word art module in Pages, but it is not questionable if it is an often wished for function.

The next one is again about missing functionality, but it is not missing in Pages itself. A lot of people ask for means to read Pages files on Windows or on Macs, where Pages is not installed. Most often, what they dream of is a viewer.

The following three points, rotations (of graphics, tables, text), attachments to mails and a mean to set a default font, are all available, but the user interfaces of Pages and Mac OS X are not intuitive enough for everyone to find the functions.

The last one in the diagram is password protection, something many programs offer from within the program itself. When it comes to iWork, however, password protection has to take place in an external program, Disk Utility.

There are plenty of other searches that lead to this blog - about fonts, typography, colour schemes, Japanese features, and so on.

My own wish would be that Pages one day will be so intuitive and powerful that this kind of blog has no purpose any more. However, that does not seem to happen any time soon.