Another good choice is the iWork suite which I use all the time. Also textedit is an amazing program that works well w/ word and comes free with your mac. And while this isn't a word processor per se, OmniOUtliner is great for students and it comes free with your mac. The latest version of AppleWorks - (formerly) the most popular program on the Mac - is really several applications in one. It gives you six core capabilities (and a number of combinations thereof): word processing, spreadsheet, database, presentation, drawing and painting. License: Free Updates Developer/Publisher: Apple.
Such is Microsoft's marketing clout that most people – even Mac owners – immediately think of Word when considering an application to craft letters, tenders, articles, and other types of text documents. However, despite being the most prevalent choice, Word isn't necessarily the best, and so this group test conducted by MacFormat magazine explores five varied and generally impressive alternatives along with Microsoft's giant, to discover the most suitable application for you. On test are Mellel 2.5, Microsoft Word 2008, Nisus Writer Pro 1.1, OpenOffice.org 3, Pages 3.0.2 and Scrivener 1.11. Ease of use A sign of a good application is if it's intuitive enough to pick up easily.
With the exception of Scrivener and, to some extent, Mellel, it's pretty obvious how to get going with all of the applications on test, but it's only once you start digging into more advanced features that the differences emerge. Mellel's bizarre interface left us nonplussed, and it's easy to get lost in its maze of options. Even with its exhaustive documentation, we often became disorientated, and the application's inability to undo past save points proved a big drawback.
Among Word, OpenOffice.org, Pages and Nisus Writer Pro, the streamlined offerings from Apple and Nisus win out. It's just far more obvious how to use them. Nisus also adds various widgets that enhance usability and nudge it ahead of Pages.
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By comparison, OpenOffice.org is aping an aged Word, and Word itself, despite some interface refinements, feels cluttered and overbearing. Scrivener presents a different way of working, based around projects, but its fantastic tutorial and tidy interface means it scores highly. Mellel 2/5 Microsoft Word 3/5 Nisus Writer Pro 5/5 OpenOffice.org 2/5 Pages 4/5 Scrivener 5/5 Layout and styles This category encompasses each application's ability to create styles for ensuring document-wide visual consistency, along with the kind of DTP-style layout capabilities that many users of word processors require these days.
In terms of layout, Word and Pages get a kick-start via their selection of good-looking built-in templates. Word has improved since Office 2004, and now provides more scope for precision layout and effects, but this was always Pages' virtue, straddling the divide between word processing and DTP. The current version is no exception, and its superior interface nudges it ahead of Word.
Both apps are fine at styles, too, although Word's interface is often needlessly complex and fiddly. With Pages, the ability to easily select all instances of a style is a nice touch, although it pales beside the supreme elegance of Nisus Writer Pro. The latter offers similar features to Pages, but creating and editing styles via its sidebar feels far more intuitive. Mellel impresses with its range of style-oriented features, although it loses ground due to limited layout options. Mellel 3/5 Microsoft Word 4/5 Nisus Writer Pro 4/5 OpenOffice.org 3/5 Pages 5/5 Scrivener 2/5 Structuring work Mellel was primarily designed for authoring academic and technical texts, and its Outline pane is fantastic, offering a clear and concise overview of your document. Elements can be promoted, demoted and rearranged via clicks or drag-and-drop, and it's one of the few elements of Mellel that feels utterly intuitive. Its robust tools for headers, footers, cross-referencing and outlining reflect the kind of project Mellel is best for authoring.
By comparison, Word's outline view, while offering similar functionality, feels dated and clunky, although its various single-click options for inserting structural elements (headers, footers and so on) enable you to give documents a certain amount of visual panache with minimal effort. Oddly, OpenOffice.org's Navigation pane felt superior to Word's equivalent tools, enabling fuss-free restructuring. Instead of headings, footers and the like, Scrivener offers the means to split documents into sections and then combine selections on the fly, making it the ideal app for arranging and rearranging a lengthy text. Mellel 5/5 Microsoft Word 3/5 Nisus Writer Pro 2/5 OpenOffice.org 3/5 Pages 2/5 Scrivener 5/5.
I saw an ad on the web for yet another Mac word processor. How many ways do you need to write something on your Mac? A few dozen, apparently.
I made a list of all the Mac word processors I knew, then did a search online and came up with a dozen more. Word processing is alive and well on the Mac. Here’s a list of 10 of the best, some free. Is your favorite on the list?
Of all the applications we use on our Macs, word processors may be the category with the broadest definition, and the most personal of anything we do on the Mac. What is a word processor? Is the popular text editor a word processor? Is Apple’s TextEdit, included in OS X, a word processor? Let me say no to each. Arguably, BBEdit is a text editor, not a word processor.
There is a difference. Generally speaking, a text editor is used for creating code, whether it be HTML, CSS, PHP, or some other programming language. Text editors, at least traditionally, don’t fall into the category of word processors because of different objectives and functionality. One writes code, the other writes words.
What about TextEdit? I won’t include that on the list, though it is popular and used by many Mac users as a poor man’s substitute for Microsoft Word or Apple’s Pages. Why isn’t it a word processor? It’s very short on features and ease of use, and is put to shame on both counts by even free word processors. For this list I’ll also avoid including Word and Pages. Both are popular, both are used as word processors, and adequately so.
What else is out there? Even I’m surprised at what I dug up, both from the standpoint of flexibility and features, as well as the breadth of usage. #10 – Bean Full screen, uncluttered word processors are all the rage today. Among them is the simplistic but effective. It’s more than TextEdit and far less than Word or Pages, not even giving you footnotes or pre-defined style sheets.
It’s only partially compatible with Word’s file format. Did I mention it’s free? #9 – Schreiben If you like free, fast, and simple, you’ll like. It opens and saves in RTF and Word files, including Open Office documents and Word 2007. More features than TextEdit, nice full screen mode, no learning curve. #8 – Scrivener If you write for a living and Word or Pages doesn’t cut it for you, and research is important, then needs consideration.
It’s an outliner, a project cork board, exports in most popular formats, has a full screen mode and great at managing multiple writing projects. #7 – CopyWrite Needless to say, writers who get paid to write are picky about their tools. Like Scrivener, is as much project manager as word processor. It comes with a full screen editor, notes drawer, project export, and a somewhat simple but efficient writing mode ( the word processor). #6 – Jer’s Novel Writer Very popular among the novel hopeful is.
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Far more than a basic word processor, Jer’s Novel Writer is loaded with writing features for writers. There’s an automatic outliner, a full screen mode, margin notes, word count, page count estimates, chapter organization, and a database which makes searches a breeze. #5 – Story Mill Writing for a living often means writing stories. Enter the new from Mariner Software. Story Mill is elegant, highly Mac-like, and features something writers truly love—a timeline view.
Track scenes, characters, locations, and the whole creative process. #4 – AbiWord If free is your game, but you want more features than most, is an excellent open source choice.
This is an elegant, though somewhat antiquated word processor full of multi-platform goodness. It’ll run on Macs, Windows, Linux, and more esoteric operating systems such as QNX, Solaris, or FreeBSD. AbiWord handles many file formats from Word to HTML, Word Perfect to RTF, and more.
The feature set and price make it a good choice for the casual non-pro writer. #3 – MarinerWrite Few word processors really feel like a Mac app that’s designed with the user in mind. MarinerWrite, like NisusWriter’s versions, has that good old Mac feel. Feel is one thing, functionality is another. Should feel cramped with all the features, but isn’t.
Mariner seems to specialize in writing tools, including dictionaries, and (StoryMill). #2 – NisusWriter Actually, this is a tie between. Both are popular, both have been around awhile. Express is more limited in features but still does basics like bullets and numbering, tables, floating graphics, widow and orphan control, glossaries, hyphenation and much more, including the ever present full screen mode. NisusWriter Pro does all that and more, including full infringement on Microsoft Word’s feature territory. Comments, mail merge, table of contents, indexing, bookmarks, line numberng and much more.
If you write for a living, NisusWriter’s twin offerings are a good example of elegance and feature set. #1 – Mellel Billed as the word processor for Mac, is for writers what Excel is to accountants.
Fast, elegant, loaded with features that writers, researchers, document makers, creative and technical writers truly love. Mellel is highly dependable, compatible with many document formats, can handle documents of over 1,000 pages, comes with automatic back up, style sets, templates, keyboard shortcuts, an outliner and multiple views. All the basics are included in my favorite word processor, too, from pages and section capability, to auto titles, hyphenation, even right to left writing capability for Hebrew, Arabic, Persian and other languages. Word processors may be the most personal of all Mac applications. We like what we like, what we’re comfortable using, and what gets the job done.
Changing word processors is like leaving town in the dark. It’s not a comfortable experience. What did I miss? What’s your favorite Mac word processor? Share your experience with other readers in the Comment section below.