[X4U] Re: Office 2008 thread

[Zane H. Healy]

At 11:07 AM -0400 8/5/07, Jon Warms wrote:

>1) Word 2004 is the best medium-to-heavy duty word processor
>I've seen. I started with WordStar years ago, migrated to WordPerfect
>on the Mac (sorry to see it go), used early versions of Word (some
>were very good, some not so good), and now Word 2004. It was
>good on my Powerbook  and it's even better - and faster - on my
>2GB MacBook.

You're showing your age if you admit to starting on WordStar! :^)  I 
gave it a try and promptly went with Word Perfect V4.2/DOS.  The joke 
of this being, I then started using the Borland programming language 
products which used the WordStar keybindings.  I still use 'joe' and 
my Unix text editor of choice which uses those same keybindings. :^)

>3) Don't forget the Intel Macs can run XP or Vista just as fast as the Dells
>can. You now have the option of running one Mac word processor for
>most of your work, and then using Word 2007 or whatever under Parallels,
>Boot Camp, or Fusion for the special jobs.

Interesting point, this will allow people to run WordPerfect if they want to.

>I'm using XP Pro and Parallels. If I need a Windows program, I'll just use it.
>No need to look for a Mac equivalent (though I do).

I'm still on my G5 2x2, and hoping to get a couple more years, at 
least, out of it.  However, this is one thing I'm looking forwards to 
when I finally make the jump to an Intel Based Mac.  I have a few 
programs that I need to use, where there simply isn't the market 
share to have a Mac version.  Well, there are also a couple games.

I've been following the Office 2008 thread with interest since I 
accidentally started this flamefest.  I've also finished giving three 
of the alternatives a try (I'd already tried Pages).  Here are my 
thoughts on these four solutions (five added Abiword).

Apple Pages -- Apparent dislike of OpenType fonts, if this was 
corrected, I would would give serious thought to switching.  If not 
for the font issues, this is the one that comes the closest to 
opening one of my key MS Word documents correctly.  Also somehow some 
of the fonts get changed when opening the word document.

Tex-Edit Plus -- No spell checker built in, like the hierarchical 
font menus, but they sure slow things down.  There is also the font 
box like used in Apple pages as an option.  Near as I can tell won't 
open MS Word documents.

Nisus Writer Pro -- Not fond of how they do the draft view.  The font 
menus are best described as MS Word like, with the font box like used 
in Apple pages as an option.  Looses some formatting when opening 
that same MS Word document.

Mariner Write -- The hierarchical font menu is actually fast.  There 
is the font box like used in Apple pages as an option.  Looses some 
formatting when opening that same MS Word document.

Abiword -- Almost forgot this one.  I've been quite impressed with it 
on Linux and Irix when I've used it.  When we got my wife's Mac Book, 
we had to wait to get a copy of MS Office till this last week (had to 
wait for the program we got it through to be restarted), so as a 
result I installed Abiword.  I never tried it out, more than to type 
in some basic text, but all the buttons on the menu bar were all 
whacked out, not displaying right.  My wife was very happy to finally 
get MS Word installed.  I can't comment the aspects I reviewed the 
others on.

I consider myself a "light weight" Word Processor user.  My key 
metrics are font handling and spell checking.  I also care about how 
lists are handled and font shading.

Of the five of these, I think that "Apple Pages" is the one that I'd 
be the most likely to move to.  I'm anxiously awaiting the next 
release of Apple iWork, and MS Office 2008, I will take a close look 
at both.

	Zane



-- 
| Zane H. Healy                    | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary)    | OpenVMS Enthusiast         |
| MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet)           | Classic Computer Collector |
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