I’m soon going to have to knuckle down and turn my Circus Ponies Notebook document, Chemdraw files, Chem3D Pro files and Excel files and charts into a 30-40 page document that’ll if done correctly along with some exams will get me one of these:

I took out a big “how to start a thesis in Microsoft Word 2007” tutorial from the university library. I’m flicking through, and the approach appears to be to create the template “correctly” ie the university style, then create multiple documents for each section with the same template. I look for half the stuff mentioned in Mac Office 2008 and computer tells me no. I also cannot locate RSC-style citations here, nor in the PC version when I was on campus today. The templates provided on the RSC website do not provide the type of document I require for this, even with some modifications.

I idly look at TeX-type solutions as well (you can analogise this to the average person’s idle wonderings about using that gym membership): again, nothing easily accessible for chemistry students, and not much time to pick up the syntax.

I’m now looking at Pages. This is concerning me. Do I trust this much work to an app that’s designed for “home use”? Will it import my plots in Excel correctly - I had a piece of work that required some Excel bits before and it cannibalised my plot. How on earth will I implement a biblography - there’s no Endnote support either.

Ideas, suggestions and other things will be warmly welcomed.