I've got both on my new Macbook, though I downloaded Office 2016 for 20 minutes instead of $220. Which one (Word or Pages) is actually a more powerful program? I'm a student and I'll be using either extensively.
That said, I used Google Docs all last year and I think I still will be doing so for 99% of the time.
As a student, there's nothing you'll be doing that can't be done in LibreOffice. You shouldn't have to use either the junk that Apple includes, or pay money for Microsoft Word.
I used Google Docs all through grad school. It worked pretty well. No worries about losing or accidentally deleting or anything. Consider Latex. It's a steep learning curve, but your documents will look so much better. They also look exactly how you tell them to. No more moving an image in Word and having your document explode.
As others have said, Word is going to be the best for compatibility. You will likely turn everything in printed or as a pdf, but every once in a while you'll have some professor who forces you to use Word either because they send everything as a .doc, or they want to give you feedback on papers through the Track Changes feature. Having said that, for long papers with lots of figures I'd really recommend learning LaTeX. The learning curve is terrible, but trying to deal with long documents in Word where you need to move pictures around a lot is an absolute nightmare.
Word. By far. I've been stuck in Pages for about a bazillion years but it's such a piece of shit. I hate giving M$ money but Word is a vastly superior program. Someone will pipe up about OpenOffice or some such. Ignore them. It's compatible with nothing, will blow up all your formatting and is such a pain in the ass to use you'll run crying to Papa Bill. Yes, Word is awful and bloated and yes, you can edit images in Gimp... but life's too short to suffer that much.
Word is the standard so you're better off going with it even if Pages can export doc files. I usually use Open Office and its doc files get weird formatting problems when I send them to people Word. Word files are required by a lot of people. I've had them be required for applying to art shows, resumes and submitting stories to publications. Word just makes life easier when you have to share files. I'd even recommend installing Windows through Bootcamp. I had a Macbook for years and the last time I tried to go to school the online software for classes didn't work on a Mac.
Since 90% of the computers use Office as a default, this is really good advice. All I could add is that maybe you want to make sure you can convert your files to PDF, that way your margins and fonts are locked in so your document will not only be able to be printed from pretty much any computer at that point, but you can be sure that it looks the way you want it no matter what computer you use to open it.
Huh, I've never met anyone who wanted a .doc instead of a .pdf - that's insane. It's pretty straightforward to make a PDF, at least with libreoffice - Just choose "export as PDF" in the "File" menu. I'd think it's similiarly easy in other word porcessors?
Yeah . . . But not really. Professionally and academically PDFs are pretty much an acceptable standard except for the most computer illiterate. Even your everyday phone can read a PDF without any additional apps. Like I said, the biggest benefit with PDF comes to when you want your files printed, because with few exceptions what you see on your computer that created the file is what you'll get, whether it's a report, a resume, blueprints, what have you.
Learned my way around Acrobat this summer at an internship. PDFs are dank.
It does, but you're better off using dedicated OCR software and then converting to PDF
Yep, it was a law firm so every paralegal's computer pretty much had OCR running in the background all day, while our client's targets were producing their documents to us. It's appallingly slow even with top-tier computers :(
Thanks! Ah, I would partition my drive but it's a solid state and I only have 250GB of storage in the first place. Half of it is used up already :'(
Powerful? Word, by a mile. I like Pages better for notes: its note taking template is very straightforward and automatically changes bullet points depending on how indented you are. 90% of all my notes are in Pages now. If you ever cooperate with others on anything you write (and you will), it's always Word + track changes. Maaybe GDocs if there are more Mac users / people that are good with computers. Also some of my must-have apps: Quicksilver, Caffeine (for keeping your screen on), iStat Menus, The Unarchiver for anything that isn't zip and Colloquy for IRC.