Best s/w for starting Uni.

Latte Other Software & Development
21

Very cool. 8)

I think you’ll like Notebook (I’ve liked all the programs like it I’ve tried) and Word will do just fine, despite the dislike most of us have towards it. :smiley:

Regarding bibliographic software, the honest truth is you probably don’t need it for undergraduate study, it doesn’t really come into it’s own until post-grad work. Depending on your workload, and how much you have to balance, you may be better off manually entering citations for the first few papers you write and then switching to bibliographioc software if you want to after you have a better understanding of what’s involved. I say this for 2 reasons: (1) starting uni throws up a lot of new things to have to deal with. In addition to new knowledge, concepts and challenges to existing ways of thinking, there are all the various university procedures to learn, plus the pragmatics of getting around campus, the social demands, learning the expected standards of academic writing,understanding the specific details of the citation method of your school (MLA, Harvard, APA, Turabian, etc). Plus whatever else I’ve forgotten! If that sounds overwhelming, don’t worry - everyone goes through it and it doesn’t last long. (2) Learning how to cite and format by hand allows you to become familiar with the method and then subsequently check the software for mistakes (it most likely will make mistakes, especially for uncommon citations). As a tutor, I’d rather my students know what they were doing before trusting a computer to do it for them (same applies to spelling and grammar :unamused: ).

Regarding EndNote:
If your university actively encourages Endnote, it may actually be free for you as a student. For example, my university provides Endnote for free to all its students and staff. It may not be the “best” (very subjective anyway) but the price is unbeatable!

There’s an awful lot of advice provided here by many good-hearted souls. Take from it what you will, and remember that whatever you end up using will probably work for you, and will probably change while you are studying. There’s no such thing as the “perfect” approach - tweak and change your way through. Imperfect has worked for most of us!

Congratulations on gaining entrance to university. Enjoy your degree. And remember: pizza is for now, learning is forever. Balance the two. :wink:

22

Very cool. 8)

I think you’ll like Notebook (I’ve liked all the programs like it I’ve tried) and Word will do just fine, despite the dislike most of us have towards it. :smiley:

Regarding bibliographic software, the honest truth is you probably don’t need it for undergraduate study, it doesn’t really come into it’s own until post-grad work. Depending on your workload, and how much you have to balance, you may be better off manually entering citations for the first few papers you write and then switching to bibliographioc software if you want to after you have a better understanding of what’s involved. I say this for 2 reasons: (1) starting uni throws up a lot of new things to have to deal with. In addition to new knowledge, concepts and challenges to existing ways of thinking, there are all the various university procedures to learn, plus the pragmatics of getting around campus, the social demands, learning the expected standards of academic writing,understanding the specific details of the citation method of your school (MLA, Harvard, APA, Turabian, etc). Plus whatever else I’ve forgotten! If that sounds overwhelming, don’t worry - everyone goes through it and it doesn’t last long. (2) Learning how to cite and format by hand allows you to become familiar with the method and then subsequently check the software for mistakes (it most likely will make mistakes, especially for uncommon citations). As a tutor, I’d rather my students know what they were doing before trusting a computer to do it for them (same applies to spelling and grammar :unamused: ).

Regarding EndNote:
If your university actively encourages Endnote, it may actually be free for you as a student. For example, my university provides Endnote for free to all its students and staff. It may not be the “best” (very subjective anyway) but the price is unbeatable!

There’s an awful lot of advice provided here by many good-hearted souls. Take from it what you will, and remember that whatever you end up using will probably work for you, and will probably change while you are studying. There’s no such thing as the “perfect” approach - tweak and change your way through. Imperfect has worked for most of us!

Congratulations on gaining entrance to university. Enjoy your degree. And remember: pizza is for now, learning is forever. Balance the two. :wink:
[/quote]
Thanks for the advice! Studying part-time and living at home will hopefully remove some of the stress for me, because I want to get a degree, but don’t like the idea of Uni itself that much. (I can’t eat pizza either!). Thanks for the advice on learning referencing techniques-in fact I have been studying them carefully for a while, and think I can probably do them ok, but would like s/w to keep everything together and save time.

My Uni offers a small discount on Endnote, but it still costs about a hundred pounds odd, so I think I’ll probably try bookends.

Thanks for such a thoughtful and detailed response, I really appreciate it!

23

Good choice !! :smiley:

24

Hi there,
anybody who manage to use Scrivener and Zotero in such a way that you can take advantage of the write&cite feature that you would get using Word or OOo Writer?
The alternative would be Bookends, but as a macuser, I really have hard time to accept it’s ugly interface.

brunus

25

Interesting. I use Bookends without such problems. On the other hand, I took one look at Zotero and fled 'cos I couldn’t stand the interface! I really don’t like Firefox either!

Mark

26

Just to note: Bookends won’t give you “write and cite” functionality either. Scrivener and Zotero can work with RTF scans, which is essentially what Bookends does. For what it’s worth, Zotero also has a new more Mac-like look (if you use it on the Mac, that is…)