its 2025- what is the pages-word conversion status?

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gloriastitz Author

Level 1

8 points

its 2025- what is the pages-word conversion status?

hi,

Its 2025... is there a good remedy for remaining foibles converting pages -> word??

Seems it's an old issue that still haunts people.

I love pages. It's very supportive of books, especially long ones with images!!!

Which word does *not* do a good job on. Thank you apple for making such a

great product!!!

However, when working with a pages->word conversion, strange things happen.

In my case, it seemed to eat opening double quotes, and occasionally change

font size for a while and then reverse back. Upon close inspection, I'm told that

the opening " is changed to a different glyph, which is hard to spot using pattern

recognition so it had to be manually spotted and changed. This meant 3 of us had to scrutinize

the document for these errors, and correct them in the word version, before it

could be finalized.

I noticed comments appear in 2021 about this type of issue. One suggestion was

to upload pdf to google drive, and export as word. I tried this. Alas, the document formatting

was completely trashed upon opening in google drive.

Any fresh ideas??

Many thanks!

MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 14.5

Posted on Jun 2, 2025 12:54 AM

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Answer 1

VikingOSX

Level 10

120,587 points

Jun 2, 2025 5:51 AM in response to gloriastitz

Since Pages was never designed to be a Word clone, there will be features in either application that do not survive the document translation process, whether on opening a Word document, or exporting to same. Apple has never promised the accuracy of the translation process, nor should one assume it.

Apple's Quick Look of an exported Word document from Pages can be deceptive and only after the document is opened in a recent version of Word will one know what did not translate well.

The Pages product team never describes in new updates to Pages what changes (if any) have been made to the translation engine so it remains the same old enigma. Whether it remains stuck on Word 2013, or newer Word features is unknown.

The long standing recommendation in the Pages community is if you want a Word document to appear correctly, originate it in Word to eliminate the document translation gremlins which creep in with translation from another application.

Provided you have Word v16.31 or later, you might experiment and export to PDF from Pages and then open that PDF in Word. It will be converted to a Word document and that conversion may be more faithful to Word than exporting to Word in Pages. This too is not perfect and you will need to closely inspect the result for misdeeds.

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