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29 Comments

1. 

   JQOswald

   Saturday, August 8, 2009 - 4:26 pm · Reply

   @John Doe

   My university gave us 30-day trials of End Note X2 and has offered earlier versions of End Note as well. I haven’t found End Note to be all that intuitive, nor as easy as just having a citation/bibliography generator in the program itself. I wish Pages would add this feature, and it would seem to me that this would be a feature Apple would be quicker to implement than MS since it enhances the user experience, but they didn’t. I hope they still do and haven’t given up on Pages or iWork or anything. I still have both installed on my laptop. It would be great if iWork did this. The full purchase price of iWork ($99) is less than Office for Mac even with the student discount ($129). I’m a doctoral student and use the citation files all the time in Word. I would switch to Pages exclusively right now.

   Also, I am typing this on my Macbook Pro 15 (last generation), which is currently syncing my iPhone (3G, only a year into my contract, not going to upgrade yet). Please don’t accuse me of being an MS troll only because I have an ease-of-use issue with one product. I also do prefer Excel because Numbers is clumsy with some things. Like I said, though, I have and use both and would gladly stick with iWork, but I’m not going to dump Office just because it’s an MS product when iWork doesn’t do everything I need it to. That’s just dumb and that’s the thing that gives Apple fans a bad name.

2. 

   Fitzo

   Saturday, August 8, 2009 - 5:51 pm · Reply

   The number one reason I prefer Word over Pages is the thesaurus. Apple doesn’t know what that is. Yes, there are many more reasons, but even though Word is a catastrophy with spaces, it’s still the numberwang. Wait, did I just say numberwang?

3. 

   Cubert

   Saturday, August 8, 2009 - 7:04 pm · Reply

   Fitzo,
   Hover your cursor over the word in question (no highlighting necessary) and then hit “Command-Control-D”. It gives you the definition of the word and an option to switch to a thesaurus.

4. 

   rws

   Saturday, August 8, 2009 - 8:12 pm · Reply

   Fitzo,

   What Cubert says works in more than just Pages. (i.e. Safari, Mail, etc.)

5. 

   @Micro Me

   Saturday, August 8, 2009 - 8:58 pm · Reply

   I’ll second your motion to fix the full-brightness-at-startup issue. What a pain in tharse.

   Maybe there’s an AppleScript that could fire up from the log-in items to turn it down automatically. I used one since System 8 until the Preferences pane came along to mute the start-up chime.

6. 

   @Mini Me

   Saturday, August 8, 2009 - 9:23 pm · Reply

   I found this script that works. But it doesn’t close the window at the end. Still, Cmd-W is faster than turning the brightness down.

   Save it as an application and add it to the log-in items.

   tell application “System Preferences”
   activate
   set current pane to pane “com.apple.preference.displays”
   end tell

   tell application “System Events”
   tell process “System Preferences”
   tell slider 1 of group 2 of tab group 1 of window 1
   set value to 0
   end tell
   end tell
   end tell

7. 

   yoshiTA

   Sunday, August 9, 2009 - 10:35 am · Reply

   Cubert+rws,

   thanks guys, knew about the dictionary, but can’t remember to have ever seen the thesaurus switch. One of the reasons I rarely use Apple’s dictionary is the lack of support for other languages. I’m switching between 4-5 different languages when I write, and have them all in Word. Oh well, in a couple of years…maybe.

8. 

   MotoBell

   Sunday, August 9, 2009 - 2:02 pm · Reply

   This MacDailyNews take of “Do you really need MS Office?” is really annoying. I am a mac addict/fan just like everyone else and have converted at least couple of dozen people from PC to a Mac.

   So please save the MS bashing all the time. IWork may be cool and awesome but I work in a very large company and use my MacBook Pro as my work computer – and whether i like, want it or ow MS office is the defacto standard and it just needs to work – 80% alternatives are not good enough – tried them all.

   I am ok giving MS a hard time for treating Mac Office as a step child over the windoes version. But having used iwork i can say I am very happy with MS Office and that is all I want to use

9. 

   matt

   Sunday, August 9, 2009 - 2:46 pm · Reply

   re: JQOswald and MotoBell -

   You guys got it right! I’m not a big fan of MS in general, but when your work(flow) requires things to be a certain way, waxing ideal about how everyone should use iWork is not at all helpful. Same goes with Macs in general. Ideally, we’d all be Mac users, but there are some unfortunate realities out there that dictate the necessity for Windows PCs. It doesn’t matter what WE would prefer, we’re sometimes simply at the mercy of necessity.

   In other words – MDN, and all Apple zealots who think that people like JQOswald are just MS trolls, take your argument to their bosses/instructors/CEOs/whoever makes the decisions. Take your argument to Apple so they can add the features JQOswald prefers in Excel. Just because MS does it one way and Apple does it another doesn’t mean MS is automatically garbage and Apple is automatically gold. I understand that it USUALLY works that way, but USUALLY does NOT equal ALWAYS, and it’s disingenuous to think otherwise.

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