Blind and Visually Impaired Community
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Pages versus Microsoft Word for university homework (self.Blind)
submitted by Re1n1ngDarkFury
Wondering if anyone has completed their homework on a Mac, and if so, if pages is adequate, or if it’s better to still use Microsoft Word? Starting school in a week, and I have some concerns about formatting and all that… I need to read through the style guides, but just wondering how all of you guys went about putting your documents in an acceptable format. I’m fairly familiar with pages, but I haven’t used word in years. All through school, I had a PC with jaws, but I’ve been using a Mac ever since. I was reading an older Apple thread that suggested that sometimes pages didn’t accurately convert to Microsoft Word documents 100% of the time, and wondering if this is still the case? Also, if using word is more appropriate, looking for some resources to learn it with voiceover, as I just have a Mac to work with for now. Any tips would be greatly appreciated.
blind_cowboy 2 points 1y ago
If you are definitely using a Mac, and your not willing to boot camp Windows, then I would suggest pages. There are too many quirks with Word and VoiceOver. I haven’t used pages on a Mac, but I have used Word on one. Any document longer than a page or too will give you problems. Your smoothest solution will be Windows and Word.
Re1n1ngDarkFury [OP] 1 points 1y ago
Thank you. I will probably be switching to PC at some point in the future, but I don’t yet have funding for technology, so my old MacBook is all I have for now. When I do switch, do you have any suggestions on specific tutorials that would be helpful with using Microsoft word with jaws? Been a long time since I’ve been a jaws user, and though it will come back to me in part, I’m going to have to play catch-up pretty quick.
retrolental_morose 1 points 1y ago
The Microsoft word with NVDA training is very good, even if you aren't using NVDA.
Shadowwynd 1 points 1y ago
Word has an everything and the kitchen sink approach. If you need a tool to fillet live dingos while you type, I am sure Word has it somewhere. Which tools are important various greatly between users, but Word became the dominant wordprocessor because it was "2nd place / good enough" in every category. Pages and GoogleDocs have taken a different approach - put the 80% of most commonly used things in; and not worry about the edge cases where someone NEEDS an esoteric feature. For all the papers and homework you do, Pages should be just fine unless the university is using some MS-Word specific plugin. If your professor takes PDFs, I would export it to PDF or print things out; the professor probably doesn't have Pages (you could always ask) and as others have mentioned the formatting can get trashed converting Pages --> Word .docx files. Usually it is fine, your mileage may vary - I have found that plain documents are fine, once with lots of formatting and margins and graphics lined up in a certain way are almost certainly going to get mangled in the conversion.
Re1n1ngDarkFury [OP] 1 points 1y ago
This is very helpful. Thank you. Yeah, it’s going to vary by professor, I’m sure. I’m thinking that learning to use word might be easier just to save the hassle should anyone have a problem with PDFs down the road, but I would think that PDFs are a pretty universally excepted format…
matt_may 1 points 1y ago
I used Pages and exported to PDF or Word. As a VIP, Word is hard to navigate/too busy
CosmicBunny97 1 points 1y ago
Hey, I was a Mac user until a few months ago. Pages is fine. I found Word a little slow and clunky, even on a M1 MacBook Air. Just remember to export your documents to a Word file.
MacaroniGlutenFree 1 points 1y ago
I once tried to convert my Pages resume to Word. 2 pages long and it was a nightmare. I had used a Pages template to create it. But you really have to know which platform will be used for collaboration. If your school creates an Office account for you, and Microsoft Teams becomes your main collaboration app, you’ll be using Office on your Mac. It works fine for most programs. One day though, I guarantee that at least one program will force you to use Bootcamp or as I did, buy a cheap Windows laptop. I now work with an IPad and that cheap Windows laptop.
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