Should I get Pages or Word for high school

Ask your teachers if they require your work to be as MS-compliant as possible. If yes, buy Word.

Max,

Most of us here like Pages and hope that it will do the job for you. At 20 USD Pages is not a big risk to try it and if necessary you can go ahead and get Office Student Edition or try a free Office Clone like Libre Office. You will probably come to like Pages, but if it doesn't do everything you need, spring for Office.

Jerry

I edited a document in MS Word using pretty and tiny circle bullet points. When I open it in OpenOffice on my MBP, the circles are now triangles.

The moral, in my experience (limited thoug it may be) is tha MS will likely try hard to match even the tiny details across OS boundaries. I have not used Pages, so cannot comment how har they work to match even tiny details.

But I may yet be completely wrong, and others who know more and will come to defend you from my poor advice may help.

Hi Max

Congrats on your new Mac.

We're expecting Pages to be updated at the end of the month when Apple releases OS X Mountain Lion (10.8).

Apple don't preannounce products, so we're not sure whether this update will be to Pages '09 or a new Pages '12. If it's an update to to Pages '09 it will be free. If the update is a new version (Pages '12) we'll have to buy it at full price (about $20). NB Because Pages is so cheap to buy Apple don't do upgrade pricing.

I thought you might like to know this before you purchase Pages now, just in case there's an entirely new version released in a few weeks and you wonder why you've got to buy it again at full price.

Dale