Maria’s Guides

• Essential OS X DonationWare (my list so far)
  Good list with links for free/donation software for Mac OS users. On Arteliance.
  (tags: software free donation MacOS)

I try an experiment to see if I can stay productive without Microsoft Word.

Last week, in an effort to get my old 12″ PowerBook to run more efficiently, I decided to wipe the hard disk clean and reinstall Tiger with a clean install. After installing it, I got a little crazy and decided to upgrade to Leopard. So far, the machine works fine.

The computer does have a problem, however. Its aged and well-used CD-R/DVD drive has decided to be a bit picky about which CDs and DVDs it recognizes. It liked the Tiger and Leopard install discs, which are both DVDs. But it didn’t seem to like the Office 2004 disc, which is a CD.

(A real Apple fangirl might point out here that the computer has taste. But I wouldn’t dream of making such a statement.)

It’s a Bother

I can get Microsoft Office on the computer by other means. I can insert the disc in another computer and have the PowerBook access the CD via my AirPort network. Or I can create a disk image of the CD, transfer that to the PowerBook over the network, and install from that. Or I can put a disk image of the CD on an 80GB Firewire drive I have sitting around and attach that drive to the PowerBook to install. Any of these methods should work.

Or, if I want to get really radical, I can install the beta of Office 2008 on the PowerBook and let it become my official testing machine.

But let’s face it: it’s a bother. And this morning I began asking myself if it was worth it.

The PowerBook is in semi-retirement these days. It spends much of its time in my kitchen, where I use it to create my morning blog entry. I sometimes use it to look up something on the Internet when I’m doing things around the house. And, of course, I take it traveling with me, primarily because it’s relatively small and lightweight and old enough that I don’t have to feel too bad if it breaks.

But the real question is: Do I need Microsoft Office on it?

An Alternative to Word

I definitely need a Word processor. I’m a writer and I use the computer to write. (I use most of my computers to write.)

But Mac OS X comes with a perfectly good word processor: TextEdit.

Don’t laugh until you’ve tried it. The version of TextEdit that comes with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is a kick-butt little word processor. It supports all kinds of formatting, including basic text formatting, tabs, indentation, lists, and even named styles. It has built-in spelling check that can check spelling as you type and supports hyphenation. It can open and read all Word formats — including Word 2007 for Windows with its new file format (which Word 2004 for Mac can’t even do) — and can save to Word formats, Rich Text Format (RTF), and plain text format. That makes it possible to use TextEdit, even when the people you are sharing files with are using Word.

Clearly, this ain’t your father’s SimpleText.

Okay, so it doesn’t support cell tables and Word fields and its support for inserted graphics is rather limited. And there are some Word formatting options that TextEdit might simply choke on.

But do I really need all those Word features? Isn’t the ability to enter and edit text and apply simple text formatting what word processing is all about?

Do We Need All those Bells and Whistles?

And that brings up a point that’s been nagging at me for years — since Microsoft Office 6 for Macintosh came out, in fact.

My first Word book was the Macintosh Bible Guide to Word 6. The Macintosh Bible series of books was a short-lived seris of big fat books about specific software packages. I did one for Word, then did another for Excel.

I clearly remember installing and using the beta of Word 6. My first impression was: this sucks. Microsoft had decided to pack in a lot of new features. And, if I recall correctly, Microsoft had also decided not to use Apple’s built-in routines for drawing windows and dialogs. Instead, they decided to write their own routines to draw their own windows and dialogs. So not only did the computer have to deal with all the programming stuff for word processor operations, but it had to deal with all the extra Microsoft-brand programming for the interface — the same kind of programming that made early versions of Windows so sluggish to DOS fans.

The feature bloat and poor performance of Word 6 — at least in the beta stage; they managed to fix it up a bit for the release version — got me thinking about the features that should be in a word processor. Clearly, Microsoft had gone over the top. (And it continued to do so for most subsequent releases, although I do recall Office 2001 being a very good version.)

Today’s TextEdit is not too far off from Microsoft Word 4, which is the first version of Word I used (back in 1989). And frankly, it did everything I needed it to do to prepare my manuscripts.

And if you’re a Windows user reading this, you have WordPad (I think that’s what it’s called), don’t you? I’m pretty sure that these days that is Word 4.

Compatibility Issues

Today, things are different. Although I write all my Peachpit Press books in InDesign, Adobe’s page layout program, I still write each year’s edition of my Quicken for Windows book in Microsoft Word. My editors make extensive use of Word’s revisions feature, with each of them (and me) marking up the manuscript so it’s nearly impossible to read. I need to use Word to share files with these editors. There’s no way around it.

But that doesn’t mean that I need it on my little PowerBook. And it also doesn’t mean that you need it.

Other Alternatives for Mac Users

And then there’s the iWork suite of products. With the addition of Numbers, a good alternative to Excel, Mac users now have all the pieces they need to replace Office on their Macs. I have iWork around here somewhere, but I haven’t had time to experiment with it. I’d love to get feedback from users; use the Comments link or form below to share your thoughts.

Back to My Original Question

Do I need Microsoft Office on my semi-retired PowerBook?

At this point, I think the answer is no. Let’s see how long I can last without it.