Exporting from Pages to Word messed up my manuscript

Exporting from Pages

Choose File › Export To › Word. Current versions of Pages write a .docx file. Open the result in Word and scroll through it before it goes anywhere.

What usually goes wrong, and the fix on the Pages side:

• Fonts change. A typeface that ships with macOS may not exist on the editor's Windows machine, so Word substitutes another. Setting the body in Times New Roman or another font both systems have avoids it, and it is what most submission guidelines ask for anyway.
• Chapters run together or headings turn into plain text. Style chapter titles with a heading paragraph style instead of bold text, and start each chapter with Insert › Page Break rather than a stack of empty lines.
• Spacing jumps around. Paragraph spacing and indents set by hand on individual paragraphs travel less reliably than ones set in the paragraph style. Select all body text, apply one style, and update that style.
• Floating objects move. Text boxes, shapes, and images placed to float rarely land where they were. For a manuscript, set images inline with the text or leave them out.
• Leftover markup appears. If you used tracking in Pages, accept or reject every change and delete stray comments before exporting, so the Word file opens clean.

Repairing it in Word

If the file is already out the door, reset styles rather than fixing paragraphs one at a time. Select everything and apply Normal. On Windows, Ctrl+Q then clears paragraph formatting set by hand while leaving italics alone. Avoid Clear All Formatting and Ctrl+Space on a novel: both strip italics too. Finish by reapplying Heading 1 to the chapter titles. Try it on a copy first.

In Tabularia

Tabularia cannot open a .pages file; the import guide asks for an exported copy first, and DOCX is the one to pick. A paragraph in a Word heading style becomes a chapter at level 1 and a heading inside the chapter below it, while bold lines that only look like titles stay prose you can restyle later. Footnotes Pages wrote into the Word file arrive as footnotes. Anything it has no place for, such as a table, is left out and named in the import review rather than dropped silently.

Going to Word from Tabularia takes one step, since the DOCX export writes chapter titles in Word's own heading styles and leaves out review markup and comments. It does not add headers, footers, or page breaks between chapters, so set those in Word if the recipient needs them.