In going about my back-to-school duties, I composed a History & Physical for our physical diagnosis class. The reports are getting easier, now that I have a template and know most of the relevant negatives to include. Anyway, I created the document in Apple’s “Pages”:http://www.apple.com/iwork/pages which is suitable for my needs. I like its focus on the Styles drawer that allows me to easily define document styles that I can apply quickly, and I much prefer its handling of graphics and text over Microsoft Word.

Still, most of the world still lives in Microsoft Office, so my preceptor requested that I send the report as a Word file. Pages can export to Word, so this was not a problem. Within thirty minutes of my email, he had a reply with comments in the file. Figuring that Pages might not support these annotations, I went for Word. Now, I’m not a heavy Word user, so this feature was new to me. When the document opened, I saw highlighted phrases and initials and numbers in brackets at the end of each highlight. I clicked on one of these once and nothing happened. Maybe a double-click? Ah, ha! The actual comments appeared. Being computer savvy, I can usually deign the basic interactions required for some not-so-obvious interfaces such as this. Many other users, however, probably do not faired so well.

After suffering through all that I hate about Word, I decided to try the document where it was created, in Pages, which reads Word files, too. What I saw was a marvelous transformation of the same information into a human-readable format. This is what Apple does best: They take what should be a simple idea (making comments on specific sections of text) and present the user with an interface that is both intuitive, visually stunning, and markedly superior to the competition.

Take a look for yourself.

Microsoft Word:
!http://www.sensoryoutput.com/wp-images/postings/word-thumb.png!

Apple Pages:
!http://www.sensoryoutput.com/wp-images/postings/pages-thumb.png!

I do not have the latest version of Office, but I’m willing to bet money that the interface is still very similar. And who loses with this sort of crappy interface? The users do.