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pages monterey Form letter

Is there a way to write form letters on Pages? I used this routine for 25 years, then with iWorks, now the suite is free of costs, but much worse than before, overly simplified


As Pages is much more comfortable to format, placing images etc. or for general use – rather than the now overly complex MS Word (...I have used for decades) with much too many "canned food features" – I wrote a letter and appendices using my OT Fonts. When I export this as docx, the whole formatting completely "derails" (Fusszeilen, Kopfzeilen, Zeilenabstand, Zeichen Schnitt etc.). If I use "Calibri" as a font, it somehow works, but it is not 1:1 with pages.

Why the heck gave Apple up the very useful (Serienbrief or Form letter)? Only to be compatible with primitive iPhone tools?


iMac 27″ 5K, macOS 12.1

Posted on Jan 30, 2022 3:18 AM

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Posted on Jan 30, 2022 3:48 AM

You can make template.

Create a custom template in Pages on Mac - Apple Support

You can use mail mery to fill in some attributes

https://www.macworld.com/article/224773/how-to-create-mail-merge-documents-with-pages-and-numbers.html

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7 replies

Jan 30, 2022 5:43 AM in response to CommunityUser_0919-74

Its been over eight years since Apple introduced Pages v5 in Oct 2013. It was not a port of Pages '09, or benefited from that source code pool, being an entirely new application that at that time lacked over 100 features that were in Pages '09. Pages v11.2 on macOS Monterey still does not offer native mail merge features, and the linked Macworld article that IIIaass provided was written in 2015 when that third-party Mail Merge for Pages was first offered from the Mac Automation site.


As the author of that Mail merge solution no longer works for Apple, and may no longer be supporting his Mail Merge side project for Pages, it is a caveat emptor whether it will or will not work with current and future Pages versions. The author of that tool is its sole source of support.


There are features in Pages and MS Word that are incompatible with one another and both applications use a different document layout engine, so it is not a huge leap to perceive that some documents translated from Pages to Word will not appear the same. Apple does not guarantee that translation process and I very much doubt that they are taking pains to keep that translation feature current with new updates of MS Word.


As we are all fellow users, and the Apple product teams do not participate here, I cannot speculate about past or future tense internal Pages product team decisions.

Jan 30, 2022 6:43 AM in response to lllaass

Custom templates don't do the job! One can only share documents using iCloud...

Sorry, the website is from 2015!


Recent versions of Pages – or any post Sierra versions – do not allow Mail Merge, Form Letters or Serienbriefe.


Instead, we have to use the overly "clubbered", complex, user ignorant MS Word.


Frustrating also that formatted Pages douments are not correctly exported as *.docx: there are discrepances with font sizes, font cuts (depending of the used font), line and paragraph spacings, footnotes, header formatting etc. Once upon a time, Pages was a very useful all round text program, easier to use than any competition. Too bad, the slimmed-down version is of limited use.

Jan 31, 2022 12:12 PM in response to VikingOSX

Sorry, I used Pages 09 for many years, it sure has been "downgraded" for most heavy users (Mail Merge/Form letters are missing. Therefore, thousands are forced to use MS Word/Excel!


O.K., it was stated somewhere on an Apple website, that changes were made to be more "compatible" with iOS/iPadOS. At least some "improvements" were made again (e.g. double sided "layout").

Nevertheless, I still prefer to work with Pages and Numbers, rather than Word or Excel, as both programs are easy to use. With these documents I can feed InDesign for professional layouting.

pages monterey Form letter

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