Q: Using part of iWorks instead of Microsoft Offcie

Unless your school set the requirement, you surely can use Pages.

Anyway, you can export Pages documents as MS Word documents if needed.

Read below:

Pages - Official Apple Support

Import and export different file formats with Pages - Apple Support

Pages is a bad match for Word, exporting/importing changes things and it can be unreliable.

If you want to avoid Microsoft's subscription, use LibreOffice [free] which opens and saves directly to .doc/x Word files or to .odf open document format and is much safer in the long run than Pages, which is an invitation to eventual tears.

Peter

Well, my son and daughter both use Pages/Keynote for their college's assignments and they are doing well.

No issue at all.

Only <10% what MS Word offers are been used, and for school is an overkill.

I recommend you use Office if that is what your teachers are using.  Doing well at school is hard enough without having to worry about the potential incompatibility and stability problems which could arise by using iWorks exporting to Office formats over the next 4 plus years.

Check with your college to see if they participate in this Office 365 Education plan. Otherwise, I would recommend Office 365 Personal, which would get you Office 2016 for Mac, and allow Office applications on an iPhone, and iPad. This meets your critierion for continuous updates. You can spend that $6.99 per month in one visit to Starbucks, or most any other coffee shop.

There is a high likelyhood that your faculty are required to use a current release of Microsoft Office on Windows, or Office for Mac, just like most corporations. If true, then they are opening, creating, editing, and saving Microsoft documents in their native document format. No one has time to battle document conversion and incompatibility issues.

Apple's Pages, Numbers, and Keynote were never designed as clones of their Microsoft counterparts. You can never work in the native Microsoft document formats, as everything is translated on open, or export — to and from Apple's own proprietary document formats. Apple does not guarantee 100% document interchange accuracy, and features that could be required to complete an assignment — may actually be absent from the less complete Apple applications.

Use Pages. It's soft, clean, and fast. Enough for college student..

MS-word for mac is very laggy and heavy. Not smooth.

But don't forget to export .pages as .docx for future proof and sharing. Apple don't guarantee its compatibility.

Not sure about Numbers and Keynote since Excel and Powerpoint are "de-facto" business software.

Pages '09 may be fast. Pages 5 definitely is not.

Apple doesn't guarantee compatibility, because you are not going to get it. Also you are not going to be able to rescue your files when something goes wrong because Pages 5.x files are incompatible with everything else AND unparseable.

I would not be gambling my education on software that Apple has no particular regard for itself. Nearly every Apple employee I have spoken to does not use the iWork Apps, and uses MsOffice instead.

Personally I recommend sticking with Pages '09 which is fast, or for better compatibility and security LibreOffice [free].

Peter

I don't see an issue at all for college use.

Here in Australia, iPad is even recommended and encouraged in schools and colleges from grade 5 onwards.

Here in Australia, as anywhere, I wouldn't trust Pages 5 as far as I can throw it.

Does anyone actually use Pages 5.x as opposed to merely play with it?

Not many seem to even know what they are using let alone notice what it doesn't do and its many many problems.

Peter