Pages, Notes, and Law School

[craigatkinson]

I'm going to be attending my first year of law school in the fall and I'm trying to decide which word processor to use to take notes with. I'm leaning towards pages since it's native to intel and I already have it loaded on my machine. Does anyone have any tips on using pages for taking notes that might come in handy, or reasons why I should use a different program for taking notes on a mac?

 

[j26]

I use NeoOffice in law school and have no problems with it. It's fine to use, Windows compatible and free.
I haven't tried out Pages, but I gather that spending a bit of time setting up templates is well worth it.

 

[webcookie]

I use the notebook part of Word.

 

[swindmill]

I tried using Pages for some time, but because I like to take notes in a outline format, I've gone back to Word. Pages doesn't seem to have anything similar to the Tab/Shift-tab controls in Word for doing a quick outline indent/un-indent. As fast as you'll be typing, it's really not practical to go to the menu bar with your cursor every time you need to indent or un-indent. As much as I'd like to use Pages, I'd recommend using Word. You should be able to get a fairly cheap copy of Office through your school.

 

[gauchogolfer]

You might look at OmniOutliner as well, I believe it still comes pre-installed on new Macs (it was on my PB). It's pretty powerful, easy to use, and you can do some nice linking to other programs and file formats with it.

 

[swindmill]

I wouldn't mind giving OmniOutliner a shot, but it almost seems too feature rich. Also, my PB came with OO 2, and the upgrade to 3 is $20. I'd like to hear from people who use this for note taking - any advantages it might have over Word . . .

 

[Sox]

I really enjoyed using the notebook function in Word. If your prof will allow it, recording lectures directly into the notes is a tremendous study aid.

 

[IJ Reilly]

I'm going to be attending my first year of law school in the fall and I'm trying to decide which word processor to use to take notes with. I'm leaning towards pages since it's native to intel and I already have it loaded on my machine. Does anyone have any tips on using pages for taking notes that might come in handy, or reasons why I should use a different program for taking notes on a mac?

You might try setting up styles for all of your outline indents. Requires only a click to apply.

 

[craigatkinson]

This sounds good, but I don't know what it means. Could you explain and give me directions on how to do this?

You might try setting up styles for all of your outline indents. Requires only a click to apply.

 

[IJ Reilly]

This sounds good, but I don't know what it means. Could you explain and give me directions on how to do this?

Sure.

Start with a blank page, open up the Styles Drawer from the Styles icon (or View/Show Styles Drawer). You'll probably also want to show the rulers (cmd-r) to make setting the tabs/indents easier, but you can also use the Inspector pane for this. Now you can create styles by setting the fonts, indents, etc as you wish. Hover over the triangle for the currently selected style in the drawer, click and hold and you'll get the option of either redefining the style with the current selection or creating a new paragraph style from the selection. You can also make your styles reflect lists (Arabic, Roman, bullet, etc). Click on the tiny icons on the lower-right hand corner of the Styles Drawer to reveal the options (for character styles too).

For insuring consistency, I'd start with one base paragraph style, and then make changes from that one and save each of them as new styles, such as "indent 1", "indent 2" etc.

Style handling is one of Pages' real strengths. Whenever somebody says that Pages "isn't a word processor" I know they haven't discovered styles.

Good luck -- let me know how it goes.

 

[nbs2]

I use the notebook part of Word.

That is what I used. It worked out pretty well....