I opted for the iWork software rather than spending the money on Microsoft Office. The Apple word processor is called Pages, and it seems like this is going to be a better option than Word, actually. Apple has built a ton more features into their word processor than MS did with Word. Plus, you can still save your documents as .doc or .rtf or .pdf files.
The next phase is going to be to download Scrivener. That's probably a task for tomorrow. There are a great many video tutorials on this product online, and I've been spending some time this evening listening to a lot of them.
So, being a new user on both the Mac and the iWork Pages software, I'd love to hear comments from fellow users. Any tips, tricks, secret things you've discovered? I'm all ears.
I'm not sure if OpenOffice is available for Mac, if not you should either get Word or run manuscripts through Word on your PC before submitting anything. I ported a manuscript from my PC to Pages while I was on vacation and when I brought it back to the PC all the formatting was wrong, it printed crazy half pages and stuff when I tried to print it out.
ReplyDeleteFantastic choice. I've had my Macbook Pro for a year now and wouldn't trade it for a PC. As for OpenOffice, I'm not a fan of it, but Microsoft Office 2011 is supposed to come out soon. The beta is already out there and from what I've seen it's as close to Window's Word as one could get. I honestly can't work with iWork. It's not bad, it's just not very 'fancy' and formatting documents is a pain. For a while, I had VMWare Fusion installed with a Windows virtual host to be able to work in windows and to play Windows based games. Hope this helps.
ReplyDeleteI've been a Mac devotee for years now and my partner is even more so than me. I think between us we have 6 Macs around the house and our various offices.
ReplyDeleteOffice for Mac is great, and because I use my computer for work, where all the other computers are PCs, it works really well for sharing documents etc.
I guarantee once you've used a Mac, you'll never go back to a PC...
So glad to hear you went Mac, Mike. The higher initial purchase price will be easily repaid to you in light of the Mac's longer lifespan, lack of Windows-forced hardware upgrades, and virus-free operation.
ReplyDeleteI use MS Word heavily on a PC at the office, and Pages at home on the Mac. There are probably some heavy-duty tasks that Word is better equipped for (doctoral thesis with heavy equations and footnotes, maybe?), but for everyday writing and publishing I find Pages a far simpler and easier-to-use alternative. Being a fan of defined typographic styles, I have learned how to use and made peace with Word's latest version of styles, but far prefer the way Pages handles defining and applying styles.
My one criticism of Pages: I'd like to be able to zoom in and out on the current page via mouse scroll-wheel (an MS Word for PC feature I love), and I'd like the option of seeing the zoomed-out page centered on a neutral background (again, like Word)--not constantly upper-left justified into the document window, as it is now.