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.
How about NeoOffice?
April’s last blog post: How to use Gmail to Prevent Blogger?s Regret
How about it? What is it? Why don’t you tell us about it? I’ve never heard of it.
NeoOffice is a reasonably stable version of the OpenOffice.org office suite that has been engineered to run natively on Mac OS X.
The main reason I use it instead of OpenOffice is that I am always forgetting to use Ctrl instead of Cmd within the X11 environment. So far I have mostly used its spreadsheets for things like personal record-keeping. So can’t vouch for it for large projects. Nor can I vouch for it with Leopard as I still using Tiger.
April’s last blog post: How to use Gmail to Prevent Blogger?s Regret
Thanks for this info and the link. I’ll try to check it out later in the week.
You don’t need MS Office. Neo Office works very well. We are a community newspaper (twice weekly) and I’ve weaned the entire office off of MS Office (even the Windows machines) and into a) Open Office (Windows); Neo Office (Mac) and for a real, small, fast, kick-butt word processor, try Bean. The writing staff here mostly use Bean.
I use Bean for writing and Neo Office to open MS Word files that have (complex) formatting and/or graphics embedded in them.
Since we are heavily reliant on the Adobe Create Suite here, I am finding that machines are far more stable with only one suite of bloatware (Adobe’s) rather than two (Adobe’s and Microsoft).
I’ll be looking at iWork in the future, but right now, Neo Office is doing the trick for us.
I agree entirely about Adobe’s software being bloatware. I recently installed Photoshop CS3 and InDesign CS3 and could not believe the amount of garbage installed with them. In fact, I think that Adobe is now worse than Microsoft when it comes to installing additional, unwanted software on a computer.
I’m going to give these products — Neo Office and Bean — a try. Thanks so much for the additional information.
Maybe if more of us start weaning ourselves off Office, Microsoft will get the idea and make a return trip to reality.
Or maybe not. ;-)
The best arguments FOR using Word: 1) version history (Word can record changes) 2) Able to do very complex formatting (like for a scientific journal), if you don’t mind pulling out lots of your hair in the process (Word does lots of stupid things, like numbering tables the way IT wants to)
On versioning: Leapard now has Time Machine, at the system level.
On formatting: Maybe you don’t need that. Also, some journals do it for you now.
Not a fan of Bean. Maybe it’s progressed since I tried it.
NeoOffice is getting there, but still has performance issues for me. It’s a port. Given that it does way more than I actually need, I rarely open it, except to translate OpenDocument files into rtf. Maybe TextEdit could do that for me just as well, I haven’t checked. Anyway, I rarely feel like it’s worth waiting for it to launch to access more features than I need, to pick up a thread from your post. Haven’t bothered to bring it with me into Leopard.
There are various legacy word processing programs from the OS 9 days that are still being updated – Nisus, Mellel, etc. Too expensive for me, given TextEdit and the fact that when I need features that Word has it’s usually because I need…Word. Ie., to interact with others who use it. Some nice interface ideas, etc, but, to the extent that these programs have not been killed by Word’s ubiquitousness and refusal even to condescend to translate their file formats, these programs are now killed by iWork, which does what they do and is very compatible (by design) with Word.
iWork is what I would pick if I wanted to replace Word. The version tracking and comments features interacted seamlessly between Word and Pages in my brief testing. I’m sure that there are issues, but it’s actually remarkably smooth, especially if you’re old enough to remember the Word v. Wordperfect days.
Or you might just, as you mention, use TextEdit.
Personally? I installed Word, because I have it and I’m used to its feature set, even though it’s slow on my intel machine. I don’t use it for most of my writing, though – I prefer to draft things in a text editor and then format them later, in Word or with LaTex or whatever. TextMate is nice, TextWrangler is free.
If I was starting from scratch with my software collection, though, I would be tempted to go with Pages. It’s good stuff. Give it a try.
Tom B:
For versioning? Try plain UTF-8 and Subversion…
Consider this another vote for NeoOffice. I don’t use it as my primary word processor (I use Pages & TextEdit for 95% of things) but I keep it installed for the rare occasion I need a bell or a whistle.
Mellel II is also a great word processor and relatively inexpensive considering its richness in features.
Have you tried using one of the writing programs instead of a word processor? There are several on the Mac.
Ulysses from The Blue Technologies Group
Scrivener from Literature & Latte
CopyWrite from Bartas Technologies
My favorite is Scrivener.
CopyWrite supports change tracking.
I updated my laptop to a MBP this summer and decided – really just for want of the experiment – to try and live without Office. I installed iWork ‘08 and that’s it. So far it’s been a perfect solution with no problems – Pages imported all my old Word docs without a single hitch, and Numbers had no problem with my Excel docs either. Going in the opposite direction, I was successfully able to Export As Word and Excel docs and move them back into Office on other systems. At this point I doubt I’ll ever use Office again.
[...] Maria Langer has been setting up a 12″ Powerbook and ponders in A Computer without Word?: But the real question is: Do I need Microsoft Office on [...]
Maria,
Having used Pages for a while, I must say that I was entirely satisfied except for a couple of things that I may as well take for granted in Word: the ability to have ctrl-s save in a pre-determined format (in my case .rtf) without having to choose “export,” and the blue screen with white text. Pages’ inability to give me the former eventually pushed me back to Word (the latter was inconsequential in this decision). Now, I use Word for word processing and Keynote for presentations. Other than this (major) shortcoming, Pages is a complete word processor. Good luck and let us know your decision.
In answer to Tom B about tracking changes in Word, the latest version of NeoOffice has a much improved version of the same and with useful print-out options as well (see under Edit menu ‘Changes’).
One can open and save any version of MS-Word not to mention saving as a PDF (ask Word to do that!). That said, very complex formatting in Word, Excel or PowerPoint does not always translate perfectly but lightly formatted documents open reasonably reliably.
My ingrained MS-Word habits took a bit of time to change but after a week or so there was no way I was going back – and all for the price of donation that one could afford or feel was appropriate – just brilliant.
In upcoming version of Microsoft Word, they plan to host the app online so there’s no need to install it on your machine.
So the question is… would you pay for an online version of Word? I don’t think I’ll be the first customer.
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