Despite the fact that Mac use is skyrocketing in Academia, we still get the short end of the stick where it counts on campus and in many ways, the software world in general.
Three big “fer instances” come immediately to mind. First off, my campus, like so many others offers the free Ruckus music service to its students. I know, I know, but when Ruckus first came out it wasn’t available to just anyone. Of course, Ruckus makes use of our favorite Windows Media DRM so Mac users are out in the cold here (which, isn’t too bad - the service sucks.)
Secondly, this semester we’re moving to Outlook Exchange for our academic email. This is worth noting for two reasons: 1) our campus IT department cannot manage to keep ANYTHING working all the time. The old email was a nightmare, but the school insists on making us use it. 2) So far, the implementation has been a disaster and I know more than one person who has already been screwed - a few weeks into it. Why they didn’t just use the free Google services instead of charging us an arm and a leg for this crap is beyond me. And yeah, all those neat features Exchange servers can do is pretty much lost on Mac users.
And thirdly, our ‘official’ computers have all been updated to Office 2007. Now, I can’t say much bad about Office 2007, if you’re using Windows it’s a damn nice improvement and I’d suggest getting it. However, the new format is not compatible with older versions of the software and the new Microsoft Office for Mac has just been delayed - and no, they haven’t even released a converter. This is the biggest issue of the three, and has to be dealt with by any students using a Mac.
So, what to do?
Well, I was pretty happy to wait a bit longer and get Office 2008 when it came out, but this new delay is unacceptable - an entire semester isn’t an option. There are some free alternatives - OpenOffice (which currently requires X11 to work and is slow as snot), and NeoOffice which depending on a few variables can be either very slow or pretty fast. But it’s not an interface I like working with.
There is also a few other word processors out there for the Mac, all of which have their ups and downs, including iWork ‘06 which most Mac users have installed on their Macs by default.
I must admit, I was not particularly happy with iWork ‘06. Pages ‘06 kind of sucked. And I never really do presentations, so Keynote while a nice piece of software was lost on me.
But, this all changed with the recent release of iWork ‘08. Pages has a word processing mode that works great, plus it works with Office 2007 documents. Included in this package is Apple’s new “Numbers” software, which is essentially a fancy Excel - and also works with Office 2007 documents, and the new Keynote is pretty fine too (I’ll post some tips for it later - I’ve been using it all day, and not for presentations.)
So, what I’m getting at is - you Mac using students, iWork 08 is a damn nice piece of software and should keep you from having to bother paying for a more expensive Office 2008 whenever Microsoft bothers to release it.
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