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Pages and postgraduate study

M

matt.r.barnes

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 24, 2010
4
0
Hi everyone,

I am about to start my masters this October and am unsure whether pages would be sufficient to complete my studies.

I am used to microsoft office/office for mac and have tried the trial for iwork. But would like peoples opinions in similiar situations.

Many thanks,

Matt
 
I haven't used it by Word 2011 looks pretty good (I'm a big fan of Ribbon). I've tried Pages and it's okay for light use but it didn't do very well when I imported some papers I wrote (which had tons of footnotes/endnotes and citations). Apparently Pages doesn't do both footnotes and endnotes (only one or the other).

(I'm an undergrad)
 
You want Mellel and Bookends

I've never used Pages, but if you're going to be doing any academic work that involves footnoting and the like, I highly-highly-highly recommend Mellel and Bookends. I had used Word all through my undergraduate work, but being a Mac man, was always looking for something better, more Mac like.

These two programs work brilliantly together. Plus not having to deal with Word trying to fix things I didn't want fixed and formatting things I didn't want formatted and corrupting files I didn't want corrupted, was worth the price. Having said that, the price for the pair is less than $100 with student discounts, but if you're serious about your academic work, it's worth it.

I had a few formatting issues with Bookends, meaning that it wasn't reading records correctly from online sources. I e-mailed the developer and he was in constant e-mail contact until the issue was resolved. The Mellel community is great as well. I know this sounds like a commercial, but I've got no interest in either company other than I really enjoyed using their software to write my dissertation.

I'm in the real world now, as a technical author, and we use Word for some unknown reason. I dream of my days hammering away on my iBook G4 running Mellel. No crashes, no formatting issues. Just worked. I'm feeling all nostalgic now. 2005, where have you gone?
 
I'm based in the UK, probably should of mentioned that beforehand.

I think office for mac might be better for me as I am writing academically and obviously need to footnote etc. And with office 2011 coming out soon compatibility should be much better also.
 
I wrote my Bachelor's thesis entirely in Pages. It worked 99%, there were a couple of very MS Office specific formatting requirements that were hell to do even in Word.
 
Leeds

I did my MA at the University of Leeds and am now working in Bedford. Although I did use a US card to buy the software, they are just downloads anyway, so location isn't a real issue.
 
Hi there just a heads up, if you plan on written academic material you are much much much better off using LaTex. An open source editor for LaTex called texmaker is the one I used for both my Bsc and MRes.

Pages is good enough for casual writing and might be good enough, confirm this with your faculty.
 
Office 2011 looks good but why don't you try NeoOffice in the meantime and see if that'll work for you. If you like it, then you just got a FREE MS Office alternative that does all of the same things.
 
xi mezmerize ix said:
Office 2011 looks good but why don't you try NeoOffice in the meantime and see if that'll work for you. If you like it, then you just got a FREE MS Office alternative that does all of the same things.
Click to expand...

Except NeoOffice has terrible compatibility with MS Office. If you're only going to be printing stuff and not really sharing them with anyone then NeoOffice might be okay, but if you're working together with someone else then forget about it.
 
KirkL said:
Except NeoOffice has terrible compatibility with MS Office. If you're only going to be printing stuff and not really sharing them with anyone then NeoOffice might be okay, but if you're working together with someone else then forget about it.
Click to expand...

How? I've never had any issues with compatibility.
 
I'm just finishing up my M.Sc. and having used both Pages and Word I would go with Word for heavy writing. I find the formatting easier (probably just because I'm used to Word) and I'm never worried about compatibility when I send stuff out to people.

For any presentations, however, hands down use Keynote, it blows powerpoint out of the water.
 
I agree Eggman. My only concern was that if I went to uni to do some work there might be compatibility issues with the uni's computers etc.

Having used microsoft office for a while and then office for mac since I bought a mac 4years ago, I'm swaying towards office 2011.

Thanks to everyone who put there opinion down, much appreciated. :)
 
xi mezmerize ix said:
How? I've never had any issues with compatibility.
Click to expand...

The major drawback with NeoOffice/OpenOffice is page formatting especially with Tables. I use NeoOffice/OpenOffice for all cross-platform work, but tables are constantly an issue.

I also use Mellel/Bookends for academic writing (it correctly handles Hebrew, which Word, Pages, etc. do not). A pleasure to write, and I have used Mellel for seven years now. And like the above post noted, it has never once crashed.

I have had excellent work with Papyrus, as well, and it is cross-platform. It handles Hebrew on a word basis, but not for two Hebrew words together.
 
Hi,

I'm an MSc Programme Leader and tutor at a UK University.

Please be aware that you will need to submit draft chapters to your supervisor and he/she may not have a Mac - but due to the UK HE CHEST agreement will almost certainly have MS Office. You could of course submit draft material as a PDF - but that is always a pain for your tutor who cannot easily embed comments and feedback like they can in Word's 'Track changes' function. You could print off paper versions for your tutor to scribble on but sometimes it is easier for us to do this electronically when sitting on a train etc - and think of the paper waste! You can also export as a Word document from Pages - but it never really 'looks right' in my experience. In my opinion you should use Word.

Note..that as a UK-HE student you are able to buy bibliographic software like Endnote at a heavily discounted price.
 
markcres said:
.... You could of course submit draft material as a PDF - but that is always a pain for your tutor who cannot easily embed comments and feedback like they can in Word's 'Track changes' function. ...
Click to expand...
Microsoft Word is not the end-all and be-all. Acrobat Pro is an essential application for academic professionals. The tutor using Acrobat Pro has a wide array of comment and mark-up options.
 
MisterMe said:
Microsoft Word is not the end-all and be-all. Acrobat Pro is an essential application for academic professionals. The tutor using Acrobat Pro has a wide array of comment and mark-up options.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, with the current financial cutbacks, we cannot buy another application (Acrobat) when we already have software that can do the job (MS Office). Nearly all UK universities are having their budgets cut to the bone - including IT equipment and software. It doesn't make too much sense to duplicate functionality when most students can buy MS Office Student Edition at a fairly low cost - it it does track changes and comment embedding very well.

p.s. I didn't say Word was the "end-all and be-all". It is a fact however that it is ubiquitous, fairly low cost and generally does the job quite well (no matter how much you might hate Microsoft or be an Apple fanboy these are facts).
 
Thank you for your comments markcres. I think I will have to go for the ms office option due to the whole compatibility issues.

I know that most universities if not all will use ms office and not iwork I just thought I'd check to see what other students/peoples experiences and opinions were on the matter. :)
 
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