iWork in College? Good idea?

[russell2]

Cheapest I can get it at PennSate is $75...$9 my a$$. Guy must go to hogwarts or something.

They don't use Microsoft Office they use Office for Magic Wand OS...

 

[krayziehustler]

MS Office and Open Office both work better than iWork

 

[monokakata]

Still no where near $9 and im sure PennState has some pretty good connections...

Full Office 2011 at SUNY (State Univ of NY) = $25.

Buffalo area schools, but I'd bet it's the same everywhere in the state.

 

[mkelly]

I really, really dislike LaTeX as a recommendation, unless your field is dominated by it. It essentially ensures that collaboration is harder with folks who don't use it. Take your concerns with iWork and triple them. If you send work to someone who doesn't use LaTeX for comments, editing, etc, in all likelihood you're going to have them say "What the hell is this? .doc please."

I see what you're saying, but LaTeX does dominate the technical side of academia - especially when it comes to hard sciences like chemistry and physics. More often than not the people you are collaborating with in those fields *do* use LaTeX. If you aren't, you're the odd one out. As the original poster indicated, he/she is planning to go into chemistry, so LaTeX is a valid suggestion in this case.

Sure, you aren't going to use it for your standard English 101 class (well, maybe). But that's what iWork and Office are for (heck, for English 101 you can use TextEdit and still be OK).

 

[ctbear]

May I also suggest Google Docs if you're just writing papers and reports. Your documents are always on the cloud, and it's great for collaboration.

 

[kuwisdelu]

I see what you're saying, but LaTeX does dominate the technical side of academia - especially when it comes to hard sciences like chemistry and physics. More often than not the people you are collaborating with in those fields *do* use LaTeX. If you aren't, you're the odd one out. As the original poster indicated, he/she is planning to go into chemistry, so LaTeX is a valid suggestion in this case.

Yeah, LaTeX is pretty dominant in a lot of science fields, but there are a few that don't use it as much. (I still see a lot of biologists and some chemists using Office.)

IME, it shouldn't matter what you use as long as it's well-formatted and you're comfortable with it, since 95% of what you're turning in and getting will likely be PDF's anyway.

For what it's worth, I used iWork through my BS and MS in stats, and never had a single problem.

 

[AppleFanatic10]

Hello MR,

I am a college student, and I am getting a MBP for classes (big shocker I know)
but I was wondering if it would be okay to get iWork for college papers and other tasks instead of MS Office. I have heard iWork has issues with converting files when it comes to collaborating and I'm worried that if I get iWork then teachers and other students I'm collaborating with won't be able to edit drafts and vise versa. Plus I don't know how powerful iWork is compared to MS Office.

Help! What do you think?

I honestly think that MS Office will be better for you especially since your professors will likely be using MS Office. You won't run into any problems converting anything with it because its already in the right format. Another thing (this is just my opinion), iWork isn't that great. I find myself being confused when I'm using iWork.. To me it's totally different then Office. But if you really want to try iWork I would suggest you do the free trial that Apple gives you so you can be sure if it's something that you want.

 

[blipmusic]

I really, really dislike LaTeX as a recommendation, unless your field is dominated by it. It essentially ensures that collaboration is harder with folks who don't use it. [...] It's fine for final typesetting, solo work, or if your field uses it heavily, but it shouldn't be your only solution, especially as an undergrad.

Wow, I didn't see that coming.

Regardless of your subject/field, use what you feel most comfortable with, whether that is latex or a word processor.

I used latex exclusively as an undergrad and still do, worked and works fantastic.

I see undergrads struggle with their papers'/bachelor's thesis's structure, coming up with temporary solutions for cross-referecing etc. That is exactly why I try to introduce latex early on as I know many people around here who regret not taking the time to learn latex from the beginning.

Also, I don't get "if my field uses it heavily". Latex is great for any field. Mine is linguistics for, example, and it has saved me a great amount of time and struggle throughout my studies all the way from the first year - even for the simplest assignment.

Again, maybe it is that latex is more common where I currently live?

While I get the collaboration confusion, a non-compiled latex-document is just a plain text document and the compiled result is often a pdf. As a plain text document, it can be read on any computer in any notepad/preview-like app if you need to copy/paste text. In a way, because of the plain text format there's actually less cross-compability problems between latex <-> word processors than between word processor <-> word processor.

I don't mean to come off as a "church of latex" representative [EDIT: Crap, I totally do, don't I...? :/] but learning latex if you're in academia can be a great asset in so many ways.

Latex does however require some learning. You have the preamble (c.f. CSS) and your body text (c.f. HTML). But a simple document with a title, a few sections and a bibliography only has a few (and I mean few) lines in way of "code"; a simple preamble, title and section headers, a line or two collecting your bibliography-file. You'd have to construct a bibliography-file in any case and bibtex isn't any worse or better when it comes to entering data that first time. MacTex comes with BibDesk, which works quite well for that. The bibtex-document, as the latex-document, is also a simple text-document, not a database, though I'm not sure how EndNote stores its entries to be honest.

And a repeat: Regardless of your subject/field, use what you feel most comfortable with, whether that is latex or a word processor. If you absolutely hate working in latex via a text editor, a word processor might be the better choice. It should be noted that I have never been a coder and still love latex (well, xetex with OTF-fonts, rather).

There are dedicated graphical frontends such as Scribo (beta), Latexian and Latexmaker that might or might not help you out. Well, and lyx, of course. What's so good with using a text editor such as TextMate, though, is that I can create shortcuts, repeated words are just an esc-press away etc etc.

Anyway, a final repeat: use what you feel most comfortable with. Sorry for the latex preaching.

 

[Cave Man]

I guess I should have included my major. I am a chemistry major so the only real "heavy documents" i would have would be scientific writing, lab write ups, lab reports etc...

Well, as someone who works at a university, Pages is more than adequate. Just make sure you get Endnote to managing your citations. I have abandoned Word years ago in favor of Pages '11.

Of course and an occasional english paper or history paper on the side.

That would be "English".

Plus I think the simplicity of numbers would rock because making graphs in excel suckssss!

Graphing in Numbers is easier, plus if you have those graphs in Pages or Keynote and you change them in Numbers, it just takes a single click to update the same graphs in Keynote and Pages. The most awkward thing is error bars in Numbers; but even that's pretty easy once you understand how it's done.

American Universities are in the business of grubbing your money. If they can get by charging $500 for MS Office they probably would

American universities are not "grubbing your money." Almost all of the public universities are operating on bare bone funding because your states do not subsidize education as they did 20 years ago. Back then, about 60% of your tuition would have been paid by state funding. Today, it's perhaps 20% because of the "taxes are bad" mentality prevalent in the USA. Your state is particularly bad.