I've been sent a friends CV to look at, but it's arrived as a zip file. I'm not sure if he zipped it, or if my Windows machine recognized the .pages extension as an archive. Is it easy for anyone in here to make it into something I can edit? Or at the very least a pdf, so that I can see it?

Similarly, how to I give it back to him in an editable format?

Thanks for your help.

IIRC .Pages 'files' on Macs aren't actually files at all, they're folders which have a particular flag which makes the OS treat them as a multipart file. I suspect whichever email client your friend uses is smart enough to know that any other OS isn't going to understand that bit, so it's put the (actual) folder in a zip when they sent it to you.

As far as I know, there's no way to work on the contents in anything other than Pages. There are, I suspect, two choices

1) Get them to save the document as something less proprietary, like PDF or RTF
2) If they have an iCloud account, upload the file to iCloud then you can use Pages On The Web - IIRC they can invite you to collaborate on the document using the web interface and they can still open it in Pages on their Mac. Details here.

Jon

Thanks Jon. I was worried that would be the case.

You would think in 2014 that the two biggest OSs would be able to exchange documents without all this agro. Oh well.

It's got nothing to do with the OIS and everything to do with application-specific formats.

Of course if you use a particular application's native file format no-one without the same application on their computer is going to be able to read it.

My bug-bear is Windows users who send Office format files and expect everyone to be able to open and read them. Yes, Office is available for the Mac and there are free alternatives if you don't want to shell out for the "real" thing. However IME half the time the people sending the files would have been better off copying and pasting the contents of the file into the body of the email where it would be quicker and easier to read for the recipient and the resulting email would still be considerably smaller than the .docx attachment. I've also found that if anyone has done anything remotely complex in Word it will only display properly in the same version of Word running on the same OS as that of the original document. Even viewing it under a different version of Windows can be enough to make serious changes to the format of the document.

If you just want to send someone some text stick it in the body of the email. For pretty much everything else make a PDF.

You'd be amazed how many times, when doing IT support, you ask people to send you a screenshot of whatever is causing their problem and they email you the screenshot inside a word document..

If you email me the pages doc I'll convert it to PDF for you if needs be.

Totally agree. I suppose I wasn't thinking about it. And yeah, the accidental arrogance of office users is legend. I just assumed that if you can use any piece of software to "save as", you ought to be able to just convert or import.

Will do Jon. Thanks.

IIRC that's partly down to the way that Windows handles screen shots compared with the Mac. The Mac always generates a file whereas Windows "print screen" command goes to the clipboard from where it needs to be pasted in order to be seen.

Users could paste it straight into the body of the email message, but many can only work the way that they have been taught which is to use Word - that's certainly what I learnt when I did a basic IT course on Windows.

Yep, I receive a lot of Word documents with screen shots as email attachments. Often from developers!

What is really annoying is when they have to extend the documentation. Instead of turning on track changes, they make a copy of the document, cut out the bits that aren't relevant too their changes, then leave it up to me to try and work out what they have changed and where it needs to be integrated into the original document.

What?
*laugh*

Mark

Bloody autocomplete.