One of my chief complaints about was its very limited mail-merge capabilities. So limited, in fact, that you could only use it with Apple's Address Book app. This made Pages useless in business environments if you wanted to merge data that you didn't also want to store in your address book.

Pages '09 can now merge data stored in Numbers spreadsheets. I've done some initial testing, using data stored in an Excel spreadsheet, opened in Numbers, and formatted in the way that Pages requires for merging data in Numbers, and have found that it works great. There is some minor formatting that you need to do to the spreadsheet before it's ready for import, but overall I found the process to be seamless.

Other changes

There are many more new features or enhancements to Pages '09, including a new outlining format, which lets you quickly create an outline and then convert it to a full-fledged document. Paragraph styles are used to create each topic and subtopic, and--once converted--each paragraph heading reflects the hierarchy of the original outline. Bouncing back and forth between the two formats is as simple as a button click and it's easy to limit how much text you see in the outline view.

I mentioned earlier that Pages' full screen mode displays a live word count just below the bottom of the page. So too does Pages' main document editing window. This may seem minor, but it's this and several other small changes in the new version that makes it seem like Apple has listened to what Pages users have said about the program.