MacMost Now 24: Word Processing Alternatives

Gary Rosenzweig looks at alternatives for casual users to Microsoft Word. These include Pages, Nisus, Papyrus, OpenOffice, ThinkFree, AbiWord, Google Docs and others.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video transcript available soon.
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Comments: 5 Responses to “MacMost Now 24: Word Processing Alternatives”

    Ian
    17 years ago

    Hi Gary, thanks for another great show.

    There are more of them out there than I thought and I'll take a look. I'm surprised you didn't mention NeoOffice which I used regularly and is especially for the Mac. However now I use Leopard and I've heard NeoOffice is not yet compatible with Leopard and I've decided not to risk it yet.

    Personally I am most interested in spreadsheet software. Due to the cost of Office (and it's about $500 in the UK), I'll probably be getting iWork '08 for around $108 here. Do you know of any others? I'm a ThinkFree user which is the best one for features but it's not working all that well on Leopard. I may switch to Zoho. Also take a look at editgrid.com, but they seem to have a problem recognising merged cells in uploaded documents.

    Ian

    Call Me Yo Daddy
    17 years ago

    Come on Gary, I can't believe you failed to mention the best and I mean the best by far out of all the other options you mentioned, NeoOffice! And to Ian above, NeoOffice has long been compatible with Leopard and I'm running it flawlessly. Compared to NeoOffice, OpenOffice really isn't the best recommendation. NeoOffice is far better optimized on a Mac and uses a native environment approach on a Mac. OpenOffice unfortunately requires X11 and NeoOffice does not. Also NeoOffice offers many more features and is more compatible with Microsoft Office than OpenOffice. Too bad, many will miss out.

    rosenz
    17 years ago

    See, now THIS is what the comments are for. Viewer feedback, community sharing, follow-up info and all that. I had tried NeoOffice a long time back, and it was pretty slow. I'll give it another try when I get a chance.

    Matt
    17 years ago

    If you are looking for Online Word Processing Alternatives, try Springnote.com
    The quality of the service is superb... and it is very usable.

    Call Me Yo Daddy
    17 years ago

    Thanks Gary for the reply. It must have been quite some time ago when you last tried NeoOffice. It runs great on my MacBook (Leopard/4GB RAM).

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