Switcher Question: If not Word, then what?

I will back up some earlier comments. MS makes a terrible operating system, but darn good (if bloated) office suite. I work at a place that was Lotus and wordperfect based, and we are moving to Office, because it is a better product. I really like Outlook. I really like Access (and am quite upset I need VPC to run it on my Macs). Windoze is just annoying/bad/evil, whatever you like. Oh, and the fact Gates keeps trying to run the whole world, don't like that either.

I still love to use AppleWorks. I think it was at its peak with ClarisWorks 4, but there really isn't another word processor or office suite product that truly integrates the different facilities of the app properly. I have never had to do anything that AppleWorks couldn't do for me, and I think it works well (admittedly, AppleWorks 6 is a little long in the tooth - it's still a carbon app) - for that matter, I don't think there's anything I need to do that Claris 4 couldn't do for me. I guess beyond that it becomes a question of what you "like" better, and there really is no sane argument either way there. Except, that I personally really like using AppleWorks.

I'm a XML/DocBook geeky type too. I like XMLMind, I think it's the best thing out there for content-centric XML, but I wish there was something slick and Aqua that was just as good. (XMLMind is Java and consequently, not as pretty and sometimes a little slow and clunky.) I'm starting to think of chucking it all and going to LaTeX, but it just doesn't seem like it should be that hard. I did find Mellel the other day and am going to try it out, it looks promising.

so just use Word! i don't really understand why people assume that apple users hate *everything* microsoft. Office X is great, Word is great, wouldn't use anything else. I just hate microsoft's sh1tty OS, and i love Apple's elegant machines - objects of beauty all of them.

This might be over the top nerdy/geeky, but I use a XML/DocBook editor, which works amazingly well, if you care to deal with the overhead of learning the World of DocBook. http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/ The really nice part of this is that files are all XML and play nicely with version control systems like subversion, perforce, etc. With the right stylesheets + FO processor (nerdspeak very high here), you can create all sorts of quality output (PDF, RTF, HTML, etc.) And XML blah blah...eh, I like it.

Hey, Mellel looks pretty cool and the price is right. I'll give it a beating and let you know how it comes out.

Four suggestions: Nisus Writer Express: http://www.nisus.com/ Mellel: http://www.redlers.com/mellel.html Ulysses: http://www.blue-tec.com/ CopyWrite: www.bartastechnologies.com I'd rather use any of these than Word *or* Pages, although Pages isn't too bad. Nisus has the best Word compatibility, in my experience.

Mariner Write? http://www.marinersoftware.com/ Mellel? http://www.redlers.com/ I haven't used either extensively, but they seemed nice.

I stick with Word. I don't like it; I'm not happy about it. But for editing Word docs that have any formatting to them, that's what I use. For just text, try TextWrangler? Opens and saves Word docs natively. I was at an Apple store a couple weeks back and fired up Pages. Definitely a page layout program. I can see how it's cool and useful and stuff. I cut my teeth on PageMaker back in the day, so until the layouts and styles are a lot easier to create and manage... Actually forget it, I'll stick with InDesign.

I'm considering Pages but since there's no way to see what it's about without buying it, I'm going to wait until there is more "unspun" information about it. I too get the impression that it's more layout-oriented and I'm sure it's a great application, but if I were to shell out the cash (small amount as it is) and find out that it's not what I'm looking for, I'm going to be pissed. For example, it's compatible with Word documents, but can I just double-click a word file, edit it, and then hit command-s and send it back to it's author, or do I have to save-as and make sure I select Word from some format menu? I know this sounds like a pissant complaint, but do this 100 times a day and it gets old (or worse, forget and have someone freak out when they get their document back in a format they can't read). I'm sure Pages kicks ass, but without being able to test it, I'm going to have to wait.