iWork 08 and Academic Papers
I am a graduate student in the divinity school at Wake Forest University. Last semester was my first semester with a Mac. We receive lectures from professors in either Word or Powerpoint format. I was able to successfully load all of these files properly in iWork 08. Also, in some of our study groups we use revision tracking to track who added what to a study guide or lecture. That loaded and displayed correctly. Then I added my own revisions, exported the file as a word file, and loaded it in word. All of the changes displayed correctly. For my last test, I converted my papers to iWork, made a few changes to test footnotes, etc. and exported to a word file. Again, all the formatting was correct in the word file.
Now, none of these files have graphics or tables in them. They just do not get used much in divinity school.
I think you will do just fine with Pages. I would at least try it for your first semester since there is a new version of Office coming out in August and the current version has to run under Rosetta on Intel Macs (in other words, it's slow.) If you run into problems, you can definitely use NeoOffice, which is free. But I was really impressed with the tests I ran using iWork '08.
Hope this is helpful.
I am a graduate student in the divinity school at Wake Forest University. Last semester was my first semester with a Mac. We receive lectures from professors in either Word or Powerpoint format. I was able to successfully load all of these files properly in iWork 08. Also, in some of our study groups we use revision tracking to track who added what to a study guide or lecture. That loaded and displayed correctly. Then I added my own revisions, exported the file as a word file, and loaded it in word. All of the changes displayed correctly. For my last test, I converted my papers to iWork, made a few changes to test footnotes, etc. and exported to a word file. Again, all the formatting was correct in the word file.
Now, none of these files have graphics or tables in them. They just do not get used much in divinity school.
I think you will do just fine with Pages. I would at least try it for your first semester since there is a new version of Office coming out in August and the current version has to run under Rosetta on Intel Macs (in other words, it's slow.) If you run into problems, you can definitely use NeoOffice, which is free. But I was really impressed with the tests I ran using iWork '08.
Hope this is helpful.
). iWork is really a good deal for us students ($40), so even if it doesn't work out, it isn't as big of an investment as buying Office ($150-$200, since we don't know the pricing for 08).
