Apple Pages and academic work: Can it do it?

Published on September 15, 2005 By cactoblasta In Personal Computing

Hey everyone. Quick question to everyone (anyone?) who has Pages - has anyone ever tried to use it to do any serious academic work? What I need is a program that can handle a anthropological thesis - 60-80 pages of text with embedded tables, graphics and footnoting without giving my 1.2Gb iBook a heart attack (okay, okay, I accept that as a near certainty anyway but humour me) or forcing me to spend half my time fixing formatting errors and the like. It also needs to cleanly export to PDF for printing.

I have NeoOffice but it runs so slowly with docs less than three pages long I dread to think how slow it's going to be with anything longer.

I've read plenty of articles on the net but they seem to focus on the needs of business (for which surely pages isn't the answer, but I digress) or soccer moms (leaflets etc). Has anyone ever tried to use it for what I'm doing? If so, how did it go?

Cheers
cacto.

Comments

Island Dog

on Sep 15, 2005

I don't have a Mac yet, so I can only offer a suggestion. Have you tried Openoffice? I haven't tried it on a Mac, but the Windows version can handle your tasks I believe.

http://www.openoffice.org

GraveDigger

on Sep 15, 2005

NeoOffice is OpenOffice for Mac OS X - unfortunately it's based upon the 1.14 version (which is much slower than the 2.0 beta version, at least on my 600 mhz iBook.) If it's slow on your newer iBook then I hate to imagine what it would be like on mine.

There's also a X11 version of OpenOffice that is based upon the 2.0 release, but it looks like it might be more trouble than it's worth to install. I'll probably wait until they come out with the 2.0-based version of NeoOffice.

cactoblasta

on Sep 15, 2005

I know OpenOffice and NeoOffice are good - I use OpenOffice on my pc in Oz instead of Word precisely because it's free and does everything I need - but speed is an issue on my iBook. I'd like to be able to know what I've just typed/dropped into the doc within 10 secs of typing it/placing it. I really loathe that "type a whole page and then wait for it to appear" kind of deal.

I haven't given the X11 version of NeoOffice a look-in, mainly because it's a hundred megs to be downloaded over an excrutiatingly slow internet cafe connection, but if anyone has found it faster then maybe it's worth a shot.

Jafo

on Apr 30, 2006

I'm just going to kick these back to Joe User.

They are no longer 'relevant' and are being 'revived' by some invasive 'bot' that needs removal/exclusion.

cactoblasta

on Apr 30, 2006

Yeah. I think the guy's just running through the top few hundred blogs and commenting on a random article. Clever idea but bloody annoying.

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