No CFO on the planet will ever approve of a statement prepared on anything other than Excel.

Except it's not Excel, it explicitly says "Microsoft Word".

Right, because if you use Excel you're probably not firing up Pages to do the quarterly report.

It's almost certainly an excel spreadsheet exported to word to touch up and then printed as PDF.

You’d think, given it was touched up by Apple designers, they’d have exported the Excel sheet to Pages instead.

Just because you're in the finance division of a bicycle company doesn't mean you can't drive a car to work.

I meant that you’d think everything that comes out of Apple—including their finance division—would go through a central design and branding department, which would apply one central toolset to all inputs, regardless of what tools the originating division used.

This is certainly true in other companies that try their utmost to achieve a certain aesthetic at all times, e.g. Disney, IKEA, etc. The same companies that put their invoices, their products’ warranty cards, and probably the UX of their ERP system through their design process.

This is not an invoice, it's a financial document. Investors who read these are not impressed by fancy fonts or flowery graphics, the numbers on the sheet are the most important thing.

I’m not talking about fancy fonts or flowery graphics. More like having an eye for readability by correctly aligning the text in each column to allow scanning, having correct inter-rowset vs. intra-rowset spacing, and, even more important, working with the originating writers (in this case accountants) to ensure that textual columns are rephrased (but not in a way that changes their meaning!) if they take up so much space that they’re wrapping—and, in fact, reducing their size enough to ensure that a numeric or currency cell never wraps, which would perhaps even confuse an analyst into misreporting figures.

If you’ve ever seen the tables in a Dungeons and Dragons sourcebook, they’ve been put through this layout process. It’s nothing fancy—it’s just making sure that people can scan the bloody thing, and put their eye on the right numbers even with just a quick glance. It’s an attempt to reduce reading-comprehension errors, basically.

If you’d do it for a game with nothing on the line, why not do it for a company with perceived (and therefore real) equity value on the line?

These are some very closely held numbers, they're not going to send them to marketing to make pretty before they are released.

You know that even breaking news stories at a newspaper go through the layout department, right?

I’m not really sure what you think would look different about it if they used pages.

It wouldn't let people know it was prepared by Microsoft Word in the PDF info.

That sounds like a great way to get the formatting messed up.

How a newspaper, magazine, or book publisher works:

1. a writer creates content (which can sometimes just be figures like a table);

2. an editor reviews the content;

3. the editor passes the content to a layout artist + typographer to fit the text into one or more spreads, manually tweak padding and add page breaks where appropriate, and style it to fit the house style;

4. and then, crucially, the editor signs off on it again, ensuring that the layout process hasn’t changed or misconstrued the meaning or importance of the text.

This is likely exactly how e.g. Apple’s keynote presentations are made. It’s likely how their website and printed materials are made. It’s how any modern publishing workflow works, in fact. So why shouldn’t it be how their financial statements are made?

To do anything else is to invite error—both brand-messaging error, and semantic error. Whoever pasted the Excel sheet into Word and formatted it probably was probably doing so with much less oversight and auditing than a real publishing workflow would introduce. They could have introduced errors, not just of formatting, but of meaning (by e.g. cutting off a column of the report in the final PDF, even though the preview looked okay, because it went past the bleed of the margin.)

Financial people aren’t supposed to have to care about things like margin bleeds, and everything else that goes into preparing a “proper” PDF; that is the job of a publishing department. Financial people have an exacting eye for ledgers, but that doesn’t make them experts on editing non-tabular data. As soon as their tabular data is on a page, a publishing editor is what is needed to ensure the result is correct. And it is much better still if the publishing department is the one who puts the tabular data on the page. It is strange, to me, that Apple is not having them do it.

(All that being said, probably Pages wouldn’t be used, since Pages isn’t really an Apple-scale desktop-publishing software in the way that Keynote is an Apple-scale presentation software. Apple, internally, probably uses “real” desktop publishing software—Adobe InDesign, or Microsoft Publisher—for all this kind of work.)

At least they used the Mac version of Word! It's prepared on a computer running macOS 10.13.6.