We’ve heard from a few users of 10.9 Mavericks, asking how they can get help from the first edition of this book, given that it says right on the cover that it’s about Pages in 10.10 Yosemite. We understand that not everyone wants to upgrade to Yosemite right away. Even so, with this book already covering three versions of Pages (Pages for Yosemite, for iOS 8, and iCloud), we felt it would be impractical to also cover Pages for Mavericks. Fortunately, if you are using Mavericks, you can still take control of Pages with this book. The rest of this article looks at the nitty-gritty details…
…Apple appears to have stopped developing Pages for Mavericks with Pages 5.3. If you are running Mavericks, you can update to Pages 5.3 and that’s it. Folks running Yosemite can update to Pages 5.5.1 at the moment, and as Apple releases more Pages updates, we expect them to be available in Yosemite but not in Mavericks. Further, if you have a Mavericks Mac and a Yosemite Mac (as many Take Control staffers do right now), you’ll find that you cannot open Yosemite Pages documents in Mavericks Pages (I get around this by working in Pages for iCloud on my Mavericks Mac; this requires iCloud Drive to be on, keep reading for more about that).
This ebook was finalized against Pages 5.5.1, but the differences between Pages 5.3 and 5.5.1 are minimal. You can certainly use the directions in this book for Pages 5.3 and all will be well. However, when it comes to interactions between the three different versions of Pages—Pages for Mac, Pages for iOS, and Pages for iCloud, if you are using Mavericks, some directions in the book do not apply, because Mavericks doesn’t work with Apple’s new iCloud Drive system for storing/syncing Pages files within iCloud.
For example, although you can work on the Web in the iCloud version of Pages from a Mavericks Mac, the files you create there are stored in iCloud Drive and thus are not available to Pages on your Mavericks Mac. And, choosing the Share > Share Link via iCloud command, which makes it so that multiple collaborators can work on the document at once in iCloud, results in an error message, because Pages 5.3 doesn’t work with iCloud Drive.
Now, if you never use Pages in iCloud or on an iOS device, or save your files in iCloud in order to move them between Macs, you don’t care about these features, so all you need to know is to skip the parts of the book that talk about them.
More about iCloud Drive
Pages in Mavericks does work with Apple’s older Documents & Data iCloud storage system (also known as “Documents in the Cloud”). At the moment, as it has in the past, this system allows you to sync Pages files through iCloud between Macs and iOS devices that are all signed in to iCloud with the same Apple ID, but only so long as you do not turn on iCloud Drive for that Apple ID.
As soon as you turn on iCloud Drive for a given Apple ID, the Documents & Data system no longer functions for that Apple ID. For a device signed in with that Apple ID that aren’t running iCloud Drive (such as a Mavericks Mac), the device can still access the local copy of any Documents & Data file, but syncing through Documents & Data ceases. If you, for instance, subsequently update your Mac to run Yosemite and turn on iCloud Drive, then syncing can resume, though if you’ve worked on files in the interim, you may experience sync conflicts. It is usually best to keep iCloud Drive off on all your devices until you are ready to enable it on all your devices.
For even more information, and a nice chart showing which apps work with which other ones with iCloud Drive on or off, please read Michael’s blog post, New from Apple: iWork Cross-Platform Incompatibility. And, Apple has a nice FAQ about iCloud Drive.
What Changed between Pages 5.3 and Pages 5.5
Pages 5.5 has grown a sidebar for displaying comments and tracked changes, and you can filter those comments and tracked changes by author. Pages also lets you insert inline images into headers, footers, and table cells. Also added are alignment guides for inter-table alignment and other table enhancements. Though Mail Merge has not yet returned as a user-facing feature, the update does provide AppleScript support for it (see this page at iworkautomation.com for more about using Mail Merge in Pages).
The Pages 5.4 update added Yosemite compatibility.