[X Newbies] Alternatives to Word/MS Office

[Eugene Lee]

On Sun, Jan 25, 2004 at 11:37:14AM +1100, marina wrote:
: Eugene Lee wrote:
: >
: >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?

It sounds like M$ Office 98 does the job without much problems.  I can
only imagine three reasons for upgrading to M$ Office v.X:

1) Running M$ Office 98 in Classic consumes enough system resources
(e.g. too much memory or CPU) to significantly slow down your Mac.

2) Running M$ Office 98 in Classic is unstable and crashes often enough
to be a problem.

3) You receive documents from newer versions of Office that cannot be
read by M$ Office 98.

: >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

This could cause problems if the Word style sheets created by Windoze
users (from newer versions of M$ Office) cannot be understood by your
older version of M$ Office 98.  See Reason #3 above.

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

No problems here.

: 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.

If it works, you should stay with running M$ Office 98 in Classic.

: 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.

Most of these complex formatting requirements are standard features that
have been around for many years.  I don't believe that your requirements
depend on any advanced features in M$ Office v.X.  So M$ Office 98 seems
good enough.

: 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 :-)

I've run into some problems you described with M$ Word.  It is a pain to
use at times, with so many layers of complexity added over the years.
My suggestion (this will take some work) is to list all of your complex
formatting requirements.  Then, with your selection of potential M$ Word
replacement apps, use each app and try to create a document using all of
those requirements.  If the app cannot, drop it from your selection.  If
it can, export it to a Word document.  Then if M$ Word can read that
document, keep that app.  If it cannot read the document, drop the app.
By the time you're done, you should have a list of Word-replacment apps
that will meet your needs.  And the work you've done will give you the
hands-on experience you need to determine which app you prefer to use.


-- 
Eugene Lee
http://www.coxar.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/