Pal has his first Apple Mac Air somthing. What form . . .
 

. . . should the on-board word processor take. i.e., what is the extension?

He's sent a file called aircraft test.pages


I've got somewhere. I renamed the extension .zip and it unzipped.


I'll leave this here in case anyone needs to tread this path.

Okay. Got it. What a kerfuffle.


How to Convert Pages, Numbers, and Keynote Files So They Open in Microsoft Office

The answer is, to export the pages file as an MS Office file (on the Mac).

Or, get MS Office for Mac and have a decent text editor :E

MS Office for Mac is not worth the money. It is not the same as Office for the PC, poorly translated, poorly implemented and nobody at MS is capable of providing support.

Kludge.

That is a surprise! Mmmm, one was starting to look at Mac, but having invested money and time in learning (about 10% of) Word, I'm not about to downgrade.


When I got the zip open, there was a LOT of detritus. Three folders - Two called Desktop, and in the second of the two was the .docx file However, in one of the others, there was a _XXXX.docx file of 1k or less.

I asked him if he could learn (I'd sent him that link) to just send the one relevant file to folks. That was pushing it a bit as he's only just learned to open the lid.

(lifelong mate, and retired captain of a lot of big iron.)

Those would be . files used by OSX to organise everything!

Yeah, I think PC is the way to go if you want Office

(Disclaimer: I'm running Ubuntu so I'm in no position to comment really ;) )

I've used Office on a Mac for several years now. No problems so far. Yes there have been some implementation issues but both Office 2011 and Office 2016 are beyond the initial teething troubles and perform fine.

Loose Rivets: it's no use telling him to send just the one file. That is not an option in Pages. Actually, the Mac suite of Office programs (Pages, Numbers and Keynote) is a very capable set of programs. It may take a while to get used to them if you have used Office for a long time, but they don't disappoint. They all offer the option to export to an MS Office file, so ask your friend to deliver this file (the link you posted explains this, it is just like the 'save as' option we know from Microsoft).