MacMost Q&A Forum • View All Forum QuestionsAsk a Question

Is There a Free Word Processor Program for the MacBook Pro?

Have a new MacBook Pro and want a good word processing program
—–
Dan

Comments: 5 Responses to “Is There a Free Word Processor Program for the MacBook Pro?”

    11 years ago

    The free word processing program that comes with your Mac is TextEdit. Don't be fooled into thinking it is a simple text editor, though. In rich text mode you can do most of the basic things you would expect word processor to do.
    See http://macmost.com/using-textedit-for-casual-word-processing.html
    Beyond that, you can get Pages for only $20 from the Mac App Store. Then you have a very rich full-featured word processor and layout program. See http://macmost.com/tag/pages for a lot of videos on Pages.

      Graeme Ingram
      11 years ago

      Hi Gary, is Text edit compatible with Windows/Microsoft software ?

      Cheers Graeme

        11 years ago

        Actually, yes. You can create plain text files (.txt) and rich text (.rtf). They can both be read by programs like Microsoft Word on Windows. And TextEdit can actually open up Word files -- it can't handle many of the things inside them (like special elements or layout), but it can at least get to the words inside of a basic document.

    John M. Hammer
    11 years ago

    Bean is free, and is basically TextEdit-Plus. http://bean-osx.com

    iText Express is free, available in the Mac App Store, and even offers footnoting! If you're doing any academic or scientific writing, you need the ability to footnote.

    If you're willing to spend a few dollars, spend twenty and get Pages from the Mac App Store, as Gary suggested. I also like Byword, which is great for Markdown and for composing text before importing into a "real" word processor for formatting and layout.

    Simon
    11 years ago

    Alternatively Neo Office, Open Office & Libre Office are full office suites which contain a word processor component.

    http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/index.php

    http://www.openoffice.org/

    http://www.libreoffice.org/

Comments Closed.