A client of ours has a simple request.  They needed to copy the content of a web page, via cut and paste, then edit it by removing some unneeded portions, then print it.  Guess what?  You can’t do that on a Mac!  

Before the switch to Mac, in Windows, they would load up Firefox or IE, select a section of the web page with the mouse, copy it, paste it into Microsoft Word, delete a few rows from the table, change some text and print it.  All of this was to eliminate some unneeded data on the page which caused the print to span more than one sheet when printed.

Now on the Mac, same thing… select, copy, paste into Pages ‘08 or Microsoft Word and POW! Junk! A mangle of unformatted, misaligned, table stripped data.  What a mess!  A quick web search reports that because Apple had so much trouble getting Pages to act as an HTML editor in the ‘06 version, that they removed the capability entirely from the latest ‘08 edition.  Then why doesn’t MS Word work the way the Windows version does?  Don’t know.  Just doesn’t.  

So now the only option is to paste the page into Dreamweaver, a real HTML editor, and do it the right way.  That’s fine and all, but the average office worker doesn’t have and doesn’t need a professionals HTML editor just to do something they have been doing for years in Windows.  

The only option that “kinda” worked was to paste it into TextEdit in rich text mode. However, when printed it is very small and doesn’t fill the page and it still can not be moved from there into a Pages or Word document for presentation.

They can’t be the only one who has ever used web content in a printed document.  Sure, copying text is fine, but if that text is in a table…good luck.

I really hate hearing, “the Mac can’t do this…”.

Got any ideas? I’m all ears.

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PC to Mac Switch, iWork