[X4U] Consumer Reports

[Randy B.Singer]

David Flory said:

>Again I wonder why people swallow Microsoft's propaganda that you  
>have to have Word to work with Word documents. 

I'd be surprised if any Mac user uses Word just because Microsoft tells 
them that they should!  8-{D 

>There are several  
>pieces of software that handle Word doc just fine.

"Just fine" is a matter of perspective.  It's been a while, but I tested 
all of the Mac word processors available on the market.  If you exchange 
Word documents with any complex formatting at all in them, using anything 
but Word means that you will often be very disappointed by how poor the 
document looks when you open it. 

I haven't tested the latest versions of AbiWord and NeoOffice-J, both of 
which use the same Word translators.  I understand that the translator 
for these word processors has been improved, but I would still be 
surprised to find that it has been improved to the point where having 
Word available to open Word format files is entirely unnecessary.

In any case, speaking only for myself, I don't use Word simply because it 
is good at opening Word files.  I use Word because it is currently the 
only high-end word processor available for the Mac.  With the passing of 
WordPerfect/Mac and with Adobe failing to port FrameMaker to OS X, Word 
has no competition in its class on the Mac.  Nothing else on the Mac 
comes close to Word's capabilities.  (Which is not to denegrate anyone 
else's favorite word processor.  It's just that none of them are high-end 
products in the same class as Word.  But if something else meets your 
personal needs and you are happy with it, that's great.)





Randy B. Singer
Co-Author of: The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th and 6th editions)

Routine OS X Maintenance and Generic Troubleshooting
http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html