[X Newbies] Alternatives to Word/MS Office

[marina]

  >Nah, not a misunderstanding.  Just a difference of viewpoints.  People
  >underestimate the effort required to communicate with other people.

This is sooo true. I for one think I always do my best to explain as 
clearly as "possible", and often realise that my messages arrive 
completely garbled to the receiver(s). English not being my native 
language doesn't help, of course - but thank you for bringing up this 
important aspect of the issue. If specifications and feature 
descriptions were clearer (=less marketing, more technical 
information), I suppose we'd all find it easier to understand 
beforehand whether a certain piece of software will meet our needs or 
not.

But then maybe it's not in any vendor's interest to make sure their 
potential customers understand before buying.... (oops sorry - end of 
whinging!)


  >If you plan to SHARE your documents with other people so that they can
  >EDIT them (assuming that many of these other people are Windoze users),
  >use of lots of M$ Office features, and avoid as much as possible any
  >compatibility problems with 3rd-party Word .doc reading/writing, then
  >you might have the valid need to buy M$ Office v.X.

I confess I am still stumped.  Taking into account my "sharing" needs 
only - and I've had no problems, so far, sharing documents from my 
Mac with Windoz users - what exactly makes MS Office v.X a better 
choice than MS Office 98, which I already have and can run as a 
Classic app?

I am sure I am missing something important here. Please bear with me!


  >But I think it's more important to
  >first find out your needs, current and future.  Only after this step can
  >you look at what word processing apps that best fit your needs.

Excellent point, and very well put. Sharing <complex documents> with 
Windowz users so that they can further edit is not a requirement. My 
requirements, as far as sharing documents with other people is 
concerned, are only limited to the following:

1. Opening custom Word style sheets created by Windoz users, and

2. Returning to these Windoz users, so that they can further edit, 
documents that are formatted using these style sheets.

I call this "draft sharing", and the only complexity in this type of 
documents are "raw tables" (i.e., tab-delimited text, using one or 
more of the paragraph or inline styles of the template). So far, I 
have been able to achieve this very satisfactorily using Office 98 on 
Mac OS 9.2.

More complex formatting requirements (headers/footers, page/section 
numbering, footnotes/endnotes, fully formatted tables etc.) only 
apply to documents where further editing is not required - so in a 
way, I believe I am in a privileged position here. What I am trying 
to understand, is whether I'll have to rely on Word for this, too, or 
whether other and better options are open.

I beg to disagree with those who think "Word is the best option 
available", full stop. Having used it for many years, I find it a 
nerve-wrecking tool, which wants to "do everything for me" with no 
consideration for my real needs. For instance, I have files where 
I've had to re-apply styles for bulleted and numbered lists many 
times over, because Word had decided (on its own) to swap bullets and 
numbers. And uncountable times I've had to manually edit the text to 
leave enough space for footnotes. To me, these are serious defects 
for a professional word processor - and as far as I know, these 
defects are common across all versions of Word, both for Mac and for 
Windoz.

So thank you for suggesting alternatives - I will check them out, and 
if some of you know of any "serious defects" that make any of these 
alternatives "not an option"... I would really appreciate to know :-)

Thanks,

marina