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Office 2004, OpenOffice, iWork - Best Word Processor for Mac?


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Office 2004, OpenOffice, iWork - Best Word Processor for Mac?
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Nico_from_Paris
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2005-02-27, 03:21

Anyone has some experience of those 3 softwares package ? what shall be used in my situation : Wintel world at work (word, Excel , PPT), mac at home. Need sometimes to work at home on wintel docs (word, Excel , ppt).

thanks

iMacG5 20" 1stGen 1.8 GHz- 2Go - OSX 10.5.2 - iLife'08 - iWork'08
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Brad
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2005-02-27, 03:41

iWork (it's not "iWorks") does not include a spreadsheet program. So, that takes that out of the equation.

OpenOffice is ugly as sin on Mac OS X and not exactly a top performer. Unless you're just strapped for cash, I say go with the real deal, MS Office 2004.

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Nico_from_Paris
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2005-02-27, 03:44

I feared that answer....

well, when one needs to go ...
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torifile
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2005-02-27, 12:27

I echo what Brad said. Office, in your situation, is the only real solution. But, as far as apps go, it's not TOO terrible. You know your finished product will cause no significant difficulties.
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screensaver400
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2005-02-27, 22:53

Check out NeoOffice... Its a java implementation (iirc) of OpenOffice designed for OS X. I've not tried it personally, but i've heard its a better alternative than OpenOffice.

http://www.neooffice.org/
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Brad
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2005-02-27, 22:57

NeoOffice is much better than the standard OOo install, but it's still a far cry from the level of quality, reliability, and native interoperability of other apps like Pages, Nisus Writer Express, etc.

It's going to be another year or two or more before the OOo suite really starts to take off on Mac OS X.

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Alcibiades
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2005-02-28, 11:45

I was wondering, I'll be getting my Mac this summer, and I'm going to be using it for a lot of essay writing at school (I'll be entering into my philosophy honours program) and I've never been a fan of Appleworks or Word. I've been looking at some third part products, and right now I'm seriously considering buying Mellel, since I have heard good things about the program, and its relatively cheap. However, it recently got a not so hot review from Mac World, so I wanna make sure I consider all possibilities (I'm on a bit of a tight budget, since right now all spare cash is going towards my powerbook fund). I know of programs like Nisus Writer etc. But I'm wondering what word processors people here use, and what they recommend. Thanks for your time.
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Brad
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2005-02-28, 12:04

Real men use LaTeX for typesetting.

I actually use TextEdit (free, part of Mac OS X) for the vast majority of my quick document typing. It's lightweight and offers plenty of font controls for basic work. Also, keep in mind that most Mac OS X applications will tap into the system-wide spell checker (not MS apps, though). So, that adds another boon to TextEdit.

Oooh... I just remembered a photo I took a while back of me and TextEdit.



Yeah. TE and I go way back.

I use MS Word on my Mac at work for "real" word processing, but I don't like it (big surprise!). It's slow. It wastes CPU cycles like there's no tomorrow (and thus shortens my battery life). It uses nonstandard keyboard shortcuts. Features are a pain to manipulate and menus are a pain to navigate.

Until Apple released Pages, my personal favorite at home was Nisus Writer Express. Pages definitely offers some nice additional features over Nisus and Mellel, but I haven't used it enough yet to decide if it'll become my number one word processor. It looks very promising, though.

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Baylor8306
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2005-02-28, 12:12

i'm looking for something other than MS Word for word processing, it slows my powerbook down so much when i open it, how does Pages compare for simple word processing? (letters, papers, general student use) i really want to get a way from Word...
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Luca
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2005-02-28, 12:30

I decided to merge the two very similar Office threads since they're mostly asking the same questions.
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Brad
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2005-02-28, 15:02

Quote:
Originally Posted by Baylor8306
how does Pages compare for simple word processing? (letters, papers, general student use)
From what I can tell, these are exactly the tasks the pushed the design choices when Apple created Pages. It should suit these tasks very well for you.
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nmkramer
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2005-02-28, 15:28

I'll throw in my 2 cents-

Pages is much more intuitive and friendly than Word. Take such a small thing as centered vs left/right aligned text.

In Word (for windows, never used it for Mac) we have Ctrl-R and Ctrl-L for left/right alignment. Thats easy enough, but what the heck? Ctrl-E for centered text? Where did Microsoft pull that one from?

In Pages, we have Cmd-{ and Cmd-} for left/right alignment. The braces "{ }" even LOOK like what you want your text to do. And the centered text? Cmd-|. Hell yeah. (To credit Brad, Text Edit does this too.)

Additonally, Pages makes creating a user template as easy as pie. In 10 minutes I had a fully articulated lecture notes template to use in my lecture-based classes.

And you gotta love making fake menus for restaurants that don't exist, such as "Nate's House of Love and Pancakes."

I don't wanna go on a rant here but America's foreign policy makes about as much sense as Beowolf having sex with Robert Fulton at the first battle of Antetum. I mean when a neo-conservative defenstrates it's like Raskalnakov filibuster dioxymonohydrostinate.
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Nico_from_Paris
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2005-02-28, 15:55

Thanks to Luca the thread merger master !
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Alcibiades
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2005-03-01, 15:16

It don't see why these were merged...he's asking which utility among 3 paticulars would be better for his editing needs, while I asked which word processor among them all would suit my essay needs. Whatever...


EDIT-Thanks for the info brad.

Last edited by Alcibiades : 2005-03-01 at 15:57.
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Brad
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2005-03-01, 15:23

Umm, hello? First post directly under yours. Did I not do a good enough job? Sorry.

You asked what people used and recommended. I told you what I use and why. It looks like nmkramer put in a recommendation for Pages up there too.

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Alcibiades
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2005-03-01, 15:55

Brad-What makes pages so good anyway? I havn't had the chance to use it at all, but from the reviews I read said Pages was a better layout tool for websites and magazine type articles, than it was a fully fledged word Processor. I apologize btw, your input was valuable, as I'm re-evaluating pages merit as a word processor. How is Pages stability anyway? My problem with Word and Open Office is their tendancy to not respond, then all out crash (and its not for lack of resources, I have a gig of dual channel ram, and a nice speedy AMD 3500+ processor running my windows machiene along). Stability is important to me, but good footnoting, easily manipulated line space and margins, and other similar text features are what I NEED in order to write effective papers.

I just wish there was a way for me to evaluate these writing programs right now, wait a second *eyes girlfriends G3 900 iBook left on his bed* hmmmm...

I think I'm going to download Mellel and give it a whirl right now, I'm sure she won't even notice that its there...

Sorry for being a prick, I'll try and keep myself checked from now on ;-)
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ezkcdude
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2005-03-01, 16:15

If it were up to me, LaTex and pdftex would always be my first choice. However, in the real world, I have to be "compatible" with all the other monkeys , so I use Word. Even if I migrate to Pages, I will save files as *.doc. Same goes for Keynote->PPT.
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Brad
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2005-03-01, 16:31

Well, I honestly haven't had a lot of exposure to Pages yet. Literally all of the reports I write now are technical papers that I write in TeX. Heck, I've actually grown to prefer writing in TeX! *high-fives ezkcdude*

Regarding spacing, Pages has a standard ruler setup where you can drag tab stops, margins, and paragraph intentions. You can set the units to inches, centimeters, picas, points, or percentage (of the page). You can set the origin to the left (default) or in the center. In the Text tab of the floating palette, you can set the character spacing, line spacing, and spacing before and after paragraphs. Pages also allows you to toggle ligatures and automatic hyphenation as well as adjust text tracking and baseline. When wrapping text around objects, you can specify the amount of whitespace. When using columns, you can specify each column's width and the gutter between each.

I'm sure there are probably other "spacing" features that I'm leaving out. I haven't even used Pages for more than a few hours.

Footnotes? Hmm. I don't do a lot of footnoting, but there's certainly a Footnote item under the Insert menu. Exactly what kind of footnoting capabilities are you looking for?

Pages is surprisingly good for a "1.0" release. Even more pleasantly surprising is how well its features are documented in the help pages. At first I thought it looked like a half-finished app targeted at kids and soccer moms. After customizing the toolbar and toggling a couple of preferences, though, I'm finding it to be a very capable application.

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staph
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2005-03-01, 16:44

Quote:
Originally Posted by Alcibiades
I think I'm going to download Mellel and give it a whirl right now, I'm sure she won't even notice that its there...

Sorry for being a prick, I'll try and keep myself checked from now on ;-)
I've now written two theses in Mellel, and this would be my take:

• Mellel is very strong for plain academic word-processing — it has a truly excellent implementation of footnotes, styles and multiple non-Roman languages; once you've set everything up, you can just sit back, relax, and everything works.There are some weirdnesses with getting styled text from Bookends into footnotes… apparenty Jon from Bookends has this fixed for the next version.
• Mellel is very typographically strong; it's the only non-Adobe application on the Mac to support the extra features of Opentype fonts (discretionary ligatures etc.)
• Mellel handles long documents pretty well; my longest document written in it was about 80 pages long, and didn't present any performance problems that I noticed. The outliner function makes long document navigation/reorganization substantially easier as well.
• The Mellel developers (there are only two, Ori and Eyal Redler) are very responsive, and generally fairly willing to take suggestions on board; have a flick through the forum at http://forum.redlers.com to get a feel for where they want to take the program.
• Mellel is not particularly strong if you want to have lots of images in your document. Some of the more egregious issues are, however, fixed in the next (unreleased version), including cropping and baseline shift. Frankly, if you're writing a philosophy thesis I'm guessing your requirements in this regard are pretty basic.
• Notably missing features include: hyphenation, columns, widow/orphan control, and an open file format. These are slated (probably) for version 2, the next version after the one currently in development, although I wouldn't guarantee any one of them. The Redlers have stated that they'll be moving to an XML file format for 2, with an open, non-licence-fee inducing DTD posted on their website.

The Macworld review I think largely missed the point of Mellel's strong implementation of styles; at any rate, the problem they point to is partly ameliorated in the next version.

Oh, and the next version gives you the option to use an Aqua interface. It should be out possibly this week, more likely next.

Last edited by staph : 2005-03-01 at 16:56.
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Alcibiades
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2005-03-01, 18:23

Thanks Staph! I actually downloaded and used Mellel for a bit on my girlfriends laptop, and was very impressed (for what little I used). Everything is well organized, and where you would expect it to be, without the clutter I find in other document editors. I let my girlfriend (who is honouring in Enlgish) try it, and she's considering paying the fee and getting it as well, as it represents what we're looking for in a document editor.

Brad-I'm going to give pages a shot when I can, I actually might try to see is someone has a version is residence I can give a shot, though most people here don't even know what the difference between a Mac and a PC is...maybe someone will have one.

Thanks for the input!
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Luca
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2005-03-01, 18:44

It might be nice to know which of these programs can read and output to MS Word (.doc) format. If you're just printing stuff out to hand in, then it obviously won't matter... but Word has become a necessary evil for me. I have a web class and all the assignments we get are in Word format. I could probably submit them in .rtf format, but I'm not sure if Word handles those in exactly the same way that TextEdit, Pages or Mellel does. Even my non-web classes benefit from Word. If I'm working on a paper and have to leave my computer at home, I can easily just email it to myself and download it in a computer lab on campus to finish it up and print it out. Every computer in nearly every lab on campus has Word installed, and I can't count on submitting papers in some other format and being able to edit them.
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Bryson
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2005-03-01, 18:51

Much as you might hate the M$ machine, Word 2004 is a really, very very good piece of software. In fact, the whole of Office 2004 is a real jump on from Office X, which in itself was pretty good.

Unfortunately, it turns out that M$ do do something well.

(Disclaimer: I've not used Pages yet)
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torifile
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2005-03-01, 19:29

Quote:
Originally Posted by Bryson
Much as you might hate the M$ machine, Word 2004 is a really, very very good piece of software. In fact, the whole of Office 2004 is a real jump on from Office X, which in itself was pretty good.

Unfortunately, it turns out that M$ do do something well.

(Disclaimer: I've not used Pages yet)
Functionally Word is good. But it's buggy piece of software. Very buggy. But it's as feature-rich as they get.
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Brad
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2005-03-01, 19:35

Well, it certainly took long enough for Mellel to get Word import/export capabilities. I know for a fact that 1.7 didn't do this (it was one of the reasons I preferred Nisus), but it looks like the current 1.8.2 does.

I created a moderately complex Word document with various numbers/bullets, section and page breaks, headers, alternating odd-even footers, embedded image, tables, paragraph-level styles, and character-level styles. I think that's all. Anyhow, this is typical stuff that I'd be doing at the office in MS Word. I didn't even touch on spacing stuff (except for indenting a few things).

So, we have...

Mellel 1.8.2:
It throws errors right from the start. It claims I don't have a variant of Helvetica. Weird. The import is horrible. Almost none of the styles are preserved, the tables all vanish, numberings vanish, headers and footers vanish, and it probably lost the image but I'll never know because... it hangs as I try to scroll past page 1, pegging my CPU for a minute until it finally crashes.

Mellel importing verdict? It sucks. Badly.
Nisus Writer Express 2.1:
Nisus preserves the fonts and stylings correctly except for the double-strike and all-caps. Odd-even footers separated correctly, but changing headers/footers at a section break didn't work correctly. It preserves tables, but the cell spacing is a little off. Bullet lists are mostly preserved, but number lists are lost. The image imported! Section and page breaks appeared to work.

NWE importing verdict? It's okay for light work, but it'll cause headaches with complex documents.
TextEdit 1.3 (v202):
It loses the tables, lists, breaks, and the image and generally looks like what Mellel produced (except TextEdit didn't give me errors and a crash ). I suspect Mellel is using OS X's basic doc importer and that explains its funky behaviors.

TextEdit importing verdict? Only for use as a last resort or it you want to just pull the text out of a Word document.
AppleWorks 6.2.9:
What can you expect for an app that hasn't had a real update in over five years? Actually, it's pretty good. It gets most of the font stylings right that are possible with such an old app (no all-caps, substituting double-strike with single-strike, no subscript, superscript wasn't small). It got the page and section breaks okay. It got the odd-even alternating footer. It got the header that changed at the section break. It mostly got the number and bullet lists, but the indention was a little off in one place and one of the numbers was incorrect. It imported the tables, but the spacing was a little off and the borders weren't all correct. It lost the image.

AppleWorks importing verdict? It's about on par with NWE, getting a few more things right and a couple things wrong. It'd work well for mildly complex documents.
Pages 1.0:
WOW. I am genuinely amazed. Apple's Pages imported the document perfectly, as far as I can tell.

Pages importing verdict? omg teh win!!1
I should add that NWE is actually up to 2.1.1 now, but I didn't realize when I did this test. Since it claims to improve Word compatability, I may update and report again later.

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Alcibiades
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2005-03-01, 21:13

I don't need to import Word documents fortunatly, I just need a piece of software that allows me to construct long, elaborate documents in a stable working environment, which word does not give me (on long documents, its tendency to crash skyrockets). I'm going to play with Mellel some more, and see how I like it, though I am impressed so far. I wonder if 1.9 will improve the importing feature any, guess I'll have to wait and see.
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naren
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2005-03-01, 22:51

Quote:
Originally Posted by Brad

Pages 1.0:
WOW. I am genuinely amazed. Apple's Pages imported the document perfectly, as far as I can tell.

Pages importing verdict? omg teh win!!1
Now I'm interested. I must try this out.
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autodata
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2005-03-02, 01:57

Nice comparison, Brad. I actually did a short google search and didn't see anything that comprehensive.

Alcibiades, you obviously just want to get Mellel, so just get it and be done with it. That said, I finished a philosophy degree not too long ago complete with long papers in word and had no problems after MS released the first update or two to Office X, but I finished the degree soon after. I've found word import to be very important in every university program I've been involved in. However, I'll be getting pages soon and have largely moved to TeX
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Hassan i Sabbah
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2005-03-02, 04:25

There's also Mariner Write. Which I used for, oh, a day.

I've found that once you turn off everything apart from the Formatting Palette, and I mean everything, Word can be almost pleasant to use. I make big documents and this approach works for me even if I need some of that beef that Word undoubtedly has. It's over complicated, fussy, and a show-off, but once you set your defaults you can ignore the clutter and get on with it. I've found that you don't need to dip into Preferences Hell in order to tap the app's beef. The menu bar should be enough.

gibberish
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staph
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2005-03-02, 05:47

Quote:
Originally Posted by Alcibiades
I don't need to import Word documents fortunatly, I just need a piece of software that allows me to construct long, elaborate documents in a stable working environment, which word does not give me (on long documents, its tendency to crash skyrockets). I'm going to play with Mellel some more, and see how I like it, though I am impressed so far. I wonder if 1.9 will improve the importing feature any, guess I'll have to wait and see.
To clarify, and this is from the respective horse's mouths:

• Mellel uses the OS X standard (read TextEdit) .doc import engine. Expect it to suck. Brad's error with Helvetica is probably because Mellel attempts to do font matching (this is actually important, because they expect you to be using weird non-English fonts in many circumstances). The Redlers did, however, write their own RTF import engine. If you want to get stuff from Word into Mellel, RTF is far and away your best option. Don't even bother with the .doc import. I would expect this to improve with 10.4, for obvious reasons. There are no changes to the import in 1.9 (RTF or .doc) that I can see, or that the seed notes have mentioned. There's been talk about support for images and headers/footers being added as a matter of priority, but no timescale mentioned.

• Nisus uses the Abiword convert engine (and they've even made some contributions to it, last I heard). It's import should be no better and no worse than Abiword. In my very brief experience, it can sometimes be a little unstable if the background process it spawns for the convert hangs. YMMV.

• Appleworks depends on MacLinkPlus. You can buy this seperately (in a substantially updated version, no less), if you really want.

• F**k knows what Pages is using, but hopefully it will get rolled into the OS, sooner rather than later. Alright, that wasn't from the horse's mouth. Bite me.

• Brad forgot the free Abiword (see his review of Nisus import) and NeoOffice/J (pretty damn good import, to be frank). They're both ugly, but good enough to convert word documents to something a bit more open for further viewing. Moreover, they're free, so you've nothing to lose but bandwidth.

For what it's worth, Word compatibility is not my primary concern when picking a word-processor for long, academic document production. Not being Word is.

Alcibiades: if you and your gf get a family pack, it might actually turn out cheaper for you… last time I asked Ori about it, he was fine that people who were sleeping together should count as a "family"

Oh, and the forum is quite active, and full of language experts, classicists, theologians and philosophers — not to mention the developers themselves. They're generally very responsive and helpful.

Last edited by staph : 2005-03-02 at 06:01.
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FreakyT
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2005-03-02, 08:20

Quote:
Originally Posted by Brad
It's going to be another year or two or more before the OOo suite really starts to take off on Mac OS X.
Actually, no. The OpenOffice team halted development for a non-X11 port of OpenOffice.

Besides, OpenOffice is rather bad on all platforms.
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