I may get slapped in the comments by some diehard LibreOffice fans, but hey, I really love the concept of open-source software but LibreOffice really didn’t work for me. Nothing was where it should be but I could probably bear with it as long as the performance were alright.

WRONG! I installed this thing on my Mac and tried it. Duh, I would obviously use LibreOffice to type away my thesis, right? So the typical student-like scrooginess took over. Plus, I already paid for an Evernote subscription. But the same day I discovered Mendeley, a citation manager from Elsevier which is also free, has an iOS app, does the same job as Zotero and has awesome plugins for MS Word and LibreOffice. The guy showed us around the app and citation plugin that we could use within LibreOffice or MS Word and this thing was lit. Imagine moving those citations around, keeping them all in accordance with an assumed citation style, making sure everything is included in the bibliography section… Enter citation managers and the most obvious, free, open-source option: Zotero. Being a happy little university kiddo I didn’t realize bibliography can be a problem until one of the teachers explained to us how daunting the task of managing citations might be. That was right before the first year of my studies. I switched to a Mac a few years ago and never looked back towards PCs.

But before I get technical let me start with a short background story. That is, provided you know what Markdown is. If you have ever written at least one scientific paper you might have read the title and started wondering whether I’m a sane person.

Macdown convert