Using a bibliography in Pages on Mac OS X

Trog

Hi guys,

I had a look but didn't find any threads that answered my question.

I recently bought a shiny new MacBook Pro, and it's amazing. I'm used to using Windows but I'm already delighted with the change so far. One thing does have me miffed though:

I'm in my final year of college and I have essays galore this year, along with a nice big juicy thesis coming up. I bought the iWork package cos they told me it doesn't come with any Word processing software, and I've basically been shafted, because Pages has no facility to create an automatic bibliography or automatically add citation. The latest version of Microsoft Word does have this- I know cos I used to have to come all the way in to college and stay ridiculously late to use it.
I looked up the help section, and they want me to pay another hundred US dollars for a separate program to do this.

Does anyone know of a free download of either a supplementary software that can do it in Pages, or a separate word processor altogether?
Any help would be muchly appreciated.

Sad Professor

You mean EndNote? It might be on college computers, but afaik it's generally not included with Microsoft Word either.

silvine

Check out Papers and Bookend. The former is real easy to use and manages all you PDFS documents etc. The latter takes a bit more fiddling around with but it does all the references and bibliography.

Papers also give a student discount.

Trog

EndNote is the one it recommends alright. I'm not too savvy with computers so I don't know what type of thing I need, but on Word there's an option in the menu bar (under 'insert' I think), that says 'add citation', a pop up opens and you input the details of the book or article you're quoting from, and from then on you can just select that book and add a page number whenever you use another quote. Then when you're done, you can just press insert bibliography or something and it automatically gives you a standard bibliography.

I know it's hardly a significant feature, and I used to do it manually, but because there's so much work involved this year, something like this could save me hours and hours, literally.

Thanks for the suggestions, but I forgot to mention that I'd prefer if it were something free, I've already dropped a bomb on this laptop and I'm tapped dry at this stage. Is there anything like this or am I exaggerating the power of the interweb to myself?

Fysh

You could try Zotero and OpenOffice - I haven't used the combination or Endnote to be able to compare them, but a bunch of students at the university where I work seem to be quite happy with Zotero.

Failing that, have a root through the Wikipedia page on reference management software - there are a good few open-source offerings, so there might be something else there that suits you better.

Trog

Fysh wrote: »

You could try Zotero and OpenOffice - I haven't used the combination or Endnote to be able to compare them, but a bunch of students at the university where I work seem to be quite happy with Zotero.

Failing that, have a root through the Wikipedia page on reference management software - there are a good few open-source offerings, so there might be something else there that suits you better.

Bang on, I'll give that a try so. The wikipedia page looks great, a lot of words at once though... (Yeah, yeah, I get the irony, I'm writing a thesis...) Thanks for the help!


Edit: After looking at the OpenOffice website, I'm kicking myself for throwing 80 quid at the Apple shop just to get Pages- which is just awful. Thanks again!

Ham'nd'egger

Trog wrote: »

After looking at the OpenOffice website, I'm kicking myself for throwing 80 quid at the Apple shop just to get Pages- which is just awful. Thanks again!

Over time you will find Pages to be faster than most other word processing solutions. Also, if you have reports that use photo, it handles them with ease but TBH Keynote is the Crown Jewel of iWorks.