Mac office or Pages for daughter's school work?

Question

Mac office or Pages for daughter's school work?

My daughter needs more for her school assignments and creative projects. She is interested in animation and likes to enhance photos and images she finds. as a secondary school student(12yrs-13yrs) she needs to produce homelearning projects also. We have imac 10.5 with OX. I had been recommended macoffice because it was assumed we would find it difficult to work on apple at home and pc at school , this doesn't appear to be the case,daughter does both no problem but as I am not great with computer there are things she might struggle to do. i am planning to get some instruction from the apple store recently opened in our nearest city. What would people recommend?

iMac, Mac OS X (10.6)

Posted on May 10, 2012 2:04 AM

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Answer 1

May 10, 2012 3:43 AM in response to karenfrombrampton

If she's working on both platforms, stick with Office Home & Student.

Pages is great, but Windows can't read it, and exporting to Office doesn't retain all the formatting, so you may as well start with Office in the first place.

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Answer 2

mdrox

Level 1

0 points

May 10, 2012 3:51 AM in response to karenfrombrampton

As in the school she would be working on windows, which cant read pages' files, it would be better for you to macoffice. Even I have macoffice and it works great.

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Answer 3

dwb

Level 7

32,920 points

May 10, 2012 4:28 AM in response to karenfrombrampton

Kids typically adjust very quickly to the idea that "this is a word processor and they all work pretty much the same", it is adults who tend to think that Macs and Windows computer must be very different. (They are but not in the operation of software generally.) Having worked for an Apple reseller my advice has pretty much been this simple: If you are going to create documents and print them (or save as PDF files) it really doesn't matter what you use. If you are going to be sharing files - especially if you are going to give your files to others - get Office.

As others have noted, while iWork can read Office files (and write them) iWork's native file format isn't compatible with Office. Further, when an iWork document is exported to Office the results are often not identical.

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Answer 4

May 10, 2012 7:30 AM in response to karenfrombrampton

The only problem I see is, opening Pages documents in MS Word. Pages, Numbers and especially Keynote leave the MS apps for dead, so just keep your daughter on the iWork apps and show her how to save them as MS Office compatible documents.

Alternatively, get her to save her finished work as PDF documents. That way she will keep the original excellent iWork documents and not lose anything in quality by opening them in that 'other' software.

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