Microsoft Word and Pixelmator

I've never used Word on Mac, but I absolutely love Pages and the whole iWork suite. You can create some truly professional documents using Pages.

Pages can open Word documents, but there's often minor formatting errors along the way. If you're handing in work, I'd just use PDFs so formatting problems shouldn't come up, but if you need to hand in Word documents I'd probably get Word.


With Pixelmator... Open it and find out?

 

For school assignments, just get OpenOffice or LibreOffice. They are free and have more features than you will ever need. Or better yet, learn LaTeX - this will allow you to create publishing-house-quality documents (it is also more convenient than any word processor once you get used to it). LaTeX does have a steep learning curve though

 

While libre office and iWorks are great alternatives, by not picking Word, you miss 2 large marks:

1) Compatability. Depending on how vigorous your school is, you may find that you need some of the more advanced features of Word, and they need to be 100% compatable. Likewise, Word has some amazing research features that I used more in highschool that I did in college, and you don't want to email your paper to a teacher only to find that the formatting is off or some font is missing.

2) Training. As much as you may not want to admit it, not many places are going to want to hire someone that can't use Word. You should know how to use it as it's slightly more advanced than Notepad.

 

Good points. But it also highly depends on the field of study and your job in general. If you are a translator, then there is no much chance avoiding Word. But most other fields should be flexible. Also, don't forget that Word for OS X ≠ Word for Windows as their UI differs. If you know one of them, you will still need to get some training with the other one.

BTW, I don't accept Word documents from my students. I demand PDFs.