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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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.

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.

Ulysses from The Blue Technologies Group

Scrivener from Literature & Latte

CopyWrite from Bartas Technologies

My favorite is Scrivener.

CopyWrite supports change tracking.

For versioning? Try plain UTF-8 and Subversion…

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.

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.

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. ;-)

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.

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.

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