pages (iwork) or word (office)

[USTgrad]

Maybe this is the wrong forum for this type of question, but I need some help and this site offers a good collection of students trading in a vast amount of word docs.

I recently switched from pc to mac, and I am having a hard time figuring out whether I should continue my use of Microsoft Office 2011, or use iwork '09 by Mac. I mainly use word for large documents up to 30+ pages (like many of you), and want to know whether anyone has any advice or preferences on either word or pages.

Most of the documents I exchange are in word format, and are submitted electronically. All my previous documents are in word format. Thanks for the help!

[Bukharan]

I did not buy Microsoft Office for Macs when I switched. I bought iWorks. So I can only speak about that programme.

It's good. It takes a little bit of time to figure out how Pages (the equivalent of Microsoft Word) works but when you do this, you will probably appreciate iWorks for being more flexible than Microsoft Word. iWorks transforms all Microsoft Word documents into Pages (if you choose to do so). You can also save your Pages documents as Word (but you can't edit it as Word) or as PDF.

When the document is transformed from Word into Pages, the most obvious problem is usually Fonts (e.g. Book Antigua needs to be changed to Palatino) and Margins. It is easily fixable though.

This is far as I can comment. I'd say that iWorks is great but it will probably take you more time to adjust your life to it than if you purchased MicrosoftOffice for Macs.

[anonacademic]

I did buy Microsoft Office for Macs when I switched, and I'm very glad I did. I am already familiar with it, so there are no problems there, but more importantly, it's fully compatible with PCs. I've found there to be far more PCs in the world than Macs and I would not want to risk incompatibility. I'm in an extreme backwater of a place, though, so these PCs are often rather ancient. In a more cosmopolitan place, perhaps this would not be a concern. However, you may be stuck sending all attachments as .rtf or .pdf files instead of .docx.

Then again, I know nothing about iWork, so perhaps this isn't the problem I'm envisioning. Still, no other Mac users I know use it.

[history_PhD]

Maybe this is the wrong forum for this type of question, but I need some help and this site offers a good collection of students trading in a vast amount of word docs.

I recently switched from pc to mac, and I am having a hard time figuring out whether I should continue my use of Microsoft Office 2011, or use iwork '09 by Mac. I mainly use word for large documents up to 30+ pages (like many of you), and want to know whether anyone has any advice or preferences on either word or pages.

Most of the documents I exchange are in word format, and are submitted electronically. All my previous documents are in word format. Thanks for the help!

I use both Pages and Word on my Mac. You can easily open .doc and .docx files in Pages and save documents as .doc and .docx.

On preview, inserting footnotes or endnotes is easy with Pages. It also appears to be easier to convert footnotes to endnotes and especially to format endnotes correctly. In Word, the default for endnotes is roman and not arabic numerals, which is a pain to change.

Disclosure: I've never written any term papers with Pages. If you want to be safe, I would probably use Word; if you have the money, I might recommend buying both of them. Apple also has a trial version of iWork that you could use. Since there tends to be a learning curve with switching to a new OS, it might be better to stick with Word for now?

[USTgrad]

Awesome! Thanks everyone. When encountering people who use either program, they swear buy it. I didn't know you could use pages for .pdf's though. That's great. Especially since UIC wants submissions in .pdf form. Interesting quirk. This mac in and of itself is a long adjustment process. Thanks for the input!

[rising_star]

Awesome! Thanks everyone. When encountering people who use either program, they swear buy it. I didn't know you could use pages for .pdf's though. That's great. Especially since UIC wants submissions in .pdf form. Interesting quirk. This mac in and of itself is a long adjustment process. Thanks for the input!

There are lots of easy ways to transform whatever file you have into a PDF format. For example, you could download Cute PDF Writer or OpenOffice, both of which will let you create PDFs.

[souslespaves]

you can also PDF straight from word for mac - PDF is one of the "save as" options.

[BrandNewName]

Not saying that I use illegal bootlegs of software , but there are torrents out there for Mac Word 2008 - definitely my favorite version of Word and my preferred processor. The newer version of Word (with its reorganized tab system) confuses me to this day even though I work with them on my university's computer system. So, for what it's worth, Mac Word 2008 is my recommendation - similar enough to older versions of Word that you still now how to carry out basic tasks, but with some redesigned features in the Toolbox (Citations, Scrapbook, and Reference Tools) that are particularly helpful for academic writing.

Oh, and the Save as PDF function for Word on MAC has changed my life. I PDF everything now!

[USTgrad]

Not saying that I use illegal bootlegs of software , but there are torrents out there for Mac Word 2008 - definitely my favorite version of Word and my preferred processor. The newer version of Word (with its reorganized tab system) confuses me to this day even though I work with them on my university's computer system. So, for what it's worth, Mac Word 2008 is my recommendation - similar enough to older versions of Word that you still now how to carry out basic tasks, but with some redesigned features in the Toolbox (Citations, Scrapbook, and Reference Tools) that are particularly helpful for academic writing.

Oh, and the Save as PDF function for Word on MAC has changed my life. I PDF everything now!

Cool! Thanks! I did end up going with Pages from Mac though. I was in a hurry since my final was due & my friend got me a discount. I'm used to it now. The only hassle is saving stuff as a separate word .doc so my profs can view it. Oh well!