New Pages 5 lacks functions of Pages 09

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I do a club newsletter in Pages '09. I went to Mavericks and the new Pages 5. What a mistake. Mavericks kept freezing my mid-2011 iMac. Pages lost dozens of functions. Any document closed in the new iWork suite are unreadable by the 09 suite. I exported everything (almost) to the old versions, and set the defaults to the 09 apps. Didn't work. I got a constant reminder to upgrade to Mavericks and iWork apps. I took all my Macs back to 10.8 (not easy). I'm waiting for Mavericks 10.9.3 for fixes. I "upgraded" my Macbook Air to 10.9.2. Pages 5 is getting some things back, but my next hurdle is linking text boxes. There seems to be an automatic function, but I can't figure out how to manually create the boxes and link them. Ideas?
 
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chscag

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You should still have your iWork 09 applications in a separate folder unless you deleted them. All you need to do is use Pages 09 and not the new Pages 5. Apple has removed some functions from Pages 5 which they are slowly restoring. In the meantime, continue to use the older version.
 
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iWork '09 can not be default

The problem is Pages 5 is the default for new docs, even if your do a Get Info, File Association change to Pages '09 (v4). If a doc gets opened by the new Pages (no Save required) it changes to Pages 5 default and not readable by Pages '09. I did Export all my docs to the old iWork docs, but missed one which was my password list (2 pages worth on a Numbers spreadsheet) which I keep on a USB flash drive only (therefore no back up) :-( I had to spend hours recreating it.
 

chscag

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Pages 5 will be the default for new docs if that's what you used to create the documents. That's understandable. If you allow Pages 5 to be the system default then what you stated will always happen. You can change the system default back to Pages 9 if you want. Just do a command i (right click, get info) and change the default back for all documents to Pages 9. Unfortunately, the documents you already edited or created with Pages 5 will be unreadable with Pages 9. So you've a choice to make.

The alternative is not to use Pages at all and download one of the free Office suites instead. LibreOffice is free and works very well.
 
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I did the Get Info>File Association thing to reset all .pages files to Pages '09, but any new document, or if you double-click any Pages file, it opens Pages 5. The only way around this is to right-click a .pages file and go below Pages 5 (default) to Pages 4.
 
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MacInWin

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If you "did the Get Info>File Association thing" properly, then double click should open a .pages file in the older Pages version, not Pages 5. And if you create a new document in Pages '09, it will be in that older format. What may be happening is that you didn't apply the change to all pages documents and that you are opening Pages5, not Pages '09 to create new documents. I put the new iWork apps into a folder and extracted from the iWorks 09 folder to Applications, then changed the icon on the Dock to point to the old version. After that I clicked on one .pages document and associated it with the older version, and applied that to all (password was required). I repeated for .numbers files aw wall. I DO have a view files that are in the new format, and for those I have to right click, open with and pick the new version.
 
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Pages 09 opening in 5

I can second MacInWin's info that if the file association has been properly changed, the files will then open in Pages 09 -- from experience many times of having to run an older version of software on one machine or another. I have noticed, though, that if the newer app is open but not the older, preferred app, then the default will be to the newer app.

You can also right-click and choose the program you wish to open in.

USA SmartMule
 
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chas_m

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Yes, as far as I can tell this ability has not yet been added back into Pages.

Please use the feedback item in the latest pages to send a report to Apple about this.
 

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