Working With OS X

It comes with appleworks, iLife, and a 30 day trial of iWork. You school, or wherever you're buying it might add in iWork but it doesn't come standard with the purchase of a mini. (see bottom right of linked page.

 

To make presentations etc.,personally I recommend Microsoft Office, and you can get the student edition which is very reasonable.

 

You have to install it first, so if you already know you don't want to use it do nothing. If you do use the trial version, yeah just dump it out when you're done with it.

 

Keynote 2 (A part of iWork) is a great application. The only thing I'm worried about is that you won't have anyplace to play it (Unless there's a Mac in your school).

Keynote feature PowerPoint exporting, but you lose a lot of the good feature in Keynote.

If there are Macs at your school, go for iWork, if there are mostly PCs at your school, then go for PowerPoint. And I don't think AppleWorks is very good, unless you're doing really simple stuff, but you'd have the same compatibility problem.

 

Try NeoOffice

For documents, spreadsheet, presentation:
http://www.neooffice.org/
I like it better than MSOffice and it's free

 

NeoOfficeJ seems to be quuite buggy, try OpenOffice as well, as their new version out is brilliant!

::20ROGERSC::

 

For school, Office is pretty great. Since many of my Professors will post their lectures online as powerpoint presentations and word documents, it just makes things easier. I know you can do this with OpenOffice as well, but it's nice to have the real thing, even if it is by Microsoft.

 

While AppleWorks may be an ancient program, it does it's job wonderfully and extremely stably - something Microsoft, and even Apple (as in Pages, while a great app, it's still buggy for lots of folks) have failed to replicate with iWork (Keynote 2 is superb though) and MS Office.

 

As a student, I can tell you you're really going to want MS Office. OpenOffice is ugly and a pain to use. MS Office for mac is really a great product. Its worth the money plus you avoid the frustration with either Appleworks or OpenOffice.

 

I completely agree with Heb1228. Just get Office.

 

From the people I know who have both, Keynote (part of iWork) is about the best presentation software you'll fine, easily blows away PowerPoint (3D effects and transitions, whoo), AND it can save to PowerPoint's format. Only problem is that iWork doesn't have a spreadsheet, so it might be better to just get Office.