To Mac or Not To Mac

I have a Mac.  I was actually convinced that I wanted a PC but my parents talked me into getting a Mac and I figured that as long as they were footing the bill, I might as well upgrade.  Overall, the Mac is better.  It runs smoother, has fewer problems, is easier to customize for student use, and generally exceeds expectations.

However.  There are some things about it that I hate.  Whitworth is a PC school.  All of the professors have PCs and the libraries are also all filled with nice little banks of PC Processing Power.  That means that anything that I submit online has to be re-formatted on a Windows or requires several extra steps so that the professors can read it.  I bought Microsoft Office software that is on my computer but it is angsty and doesn't actually have blank templates that would work for writing papers (they are all fancily formatted specials with pictures and annoying colors that I can't use - I think my professors would flay me alive if I submitted a paper on the "Business Document 1" format which includes colored side-bars, graphs, and automatically inserts footnotes when I try to parenthetically cite things).  So I have to use Pages which itself has many drawbacks.  Pages doesn't have an option to change the language for Spanish or Swahili papers so I have to turn off the spell-checking software or the little red lines make me suicidal.  Then I have to transfer the papers to a PC to spell-check them before I print them.  Pages doesn't have a built-in dictionary or thesaurus.  Pages doesn't have very accurate proofreading software (it likes to underline random words like "mash" or "create" and tell me that they are underlined because I should "Never Hyphenate" them.  Thanks, I think I knew that "ostrich" doesn't have a hyphen in it, pages).  Pages doesn't have a way to stop it from spellchecking certain words (Whitworth IS A WORD, you freak).  Pages has shortcuts for accents but they are accents in the wrong direction so I still have to look up the letters in symbols and insert them manually (I tried to turn in a paper with backwards accents in it and my professor handed it back to me and told my not to write things in French.  Gee, thanks).

I think that if I wasn't a student, I would have zero problems with my Mac but here, at a PC school, I am incompatible with their programs.  So I guess my advice is so get whichever operating system your school uses (look for pictures of the library on the website).  It's just easier that way.

PS: it is entirely possible that I am simply a computer fail and that there are easy ways to fix all of my problems with my Mac.  I don't care, the point is that I haven't been able to figure it out which is itself a problem with the system because I have tried many times.  It would help if the tech support here wasn't limited only to Windows (they laughed at me in the library when I asked if there was anyone who could help me format my Mac).  *Sigh*