Pages (Mac) vs. MS Office vs. Google Docs

College Life
1

<p>I’m a Mac user who usually uses Pages. I’m guessing I’m the only one in my English class that does. The college campus itself uses PC’s, not Macs. I think my instructor suggested that I use Google Docs so that my work is unaffected by a problem with my computer, should one arise. Recently, I have saved my English work in a Pages format on Google Drive. However, I just got into a situation today where I printed out some completed work but forgot to bring it to the campus. I had to download the assignment onto a computer at the campus, upload it to iCloud.com (I don’t know why, but a portion of the assigned work was already on iCloud.), then reprint it.</p>

<p>I have the Google Drive app on my computer, so I can easily upload my files to Google Drive by saving them to a Google Drive folder on my laptop.</p>

<p>Also, I can access Microsoft Office for free, because one of my parents purchased it for home use.</p>

2

<p>Get it. I’ve been a Mac user for 22 years, but even I know that Microsoft Office is the de facto business standard. </p>

3

<p>You can save your Pages documents in MS Word format and import and edit Word documents in
Pages. So, it shouldn’t be necessary to upload to Google Docs. Just email the Pages document (saved in Word format) or copy it to a thumb drive. You can download the emailed document on a PC or open it on a PC. Pages will do most of what you need for the typical English paper, unless you need fancier formatting, e.g., tables of contents.</p>

<p>On the other hand, if your parents have a copy of MS Office, you might as well use it, it saves some steps. The current version of MS Word is much more stable than previous versions. It has some features not found on the Windows version, just as the Windows version has some features not found on the Mac version. <a href=“Pages - Compatibility - Apple”>https://www.apple.com/mac/pages/compatibility/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>I’m soon to retire and can’t wait to live a Microsoft-free life, but if you’re still in school or working, it’s pretty hard to avoid using MS Word. Even though hard drives are huge these days, I still hate relatively frequent multi-MB updates you have to install with Word (even with the Mac version). </p>

4

<p>Get Office for the Mac. Works like a charm.</p>

5

<p>get office , the auto grammar correct is a lot better on word , like alooooooooooooooooot better than pages , used pages for an essay once got a 70 due to grammar errors that weren’t picked up by its system , then opened up the something on word and the errors showed up</p>

6

<p>I’ve used several different word processing programs, and Office is by far the best one. I couldn’t even imagine ever using anything else. </p>

7

<p>Have you looked at LibreOffice? It’s free and open source and runs lighter than Microsoft Office does. I actually prefer LibreOffice Writer to Microsoft Word as it handles outlines more flexibly and doesn’t have that ribbon. PowerPoint and Excel, unfortunately, still outperform their open-source equivalents, but open source software is definitely good enough for most users. </p>