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need wordprocessor

G

glennyboiwpg

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Feb 16, 2007
262
0
Hey all,

I need a wordprocessor for my mac, and I was wondering what everyone things of pages?

I was going to buy pages 06 but that was in nov and I thoguht that 07 would come out at macworld... well it didn't, and i'm sick of waiting.

I want pages, because I want to support mac software, and I don't belive that a word processer should be 399-->500 dollars.

Suggestions?
 
What will you be using pages for? do you need to be Office compatible? (yeah i know Pages supports .doc but i have never had the confidence in the results of exporting to it.)

There is always NeoOffice which you can get for free while deciding to purchase iWork.
 
I use a text editor like Textmate for most of my writing needs.

It's powerful and fast and allows me to write without putzing around with formating (or fighting the auto-formating). Then I either throw the text in LaTex to make a pdf, or Pages / Word.

Pages is nice and it has some really slick features when it comes to handling graphics, but it bogs down on larger documents.
 
I tried neooffice... was never impressed with it.

Not a big fan of the open source solutions out there. looks like an old port of office from the win 98 days.
 
glennyboiwpg said:
I tried neooffice... was never impressed with it.

Not a big fan of the open source solutions out there. looks like an old port of office from the win 98 days.
Click to expand...

For the documents i write I would use NeoOffice over Pages any day.

Don't get me wrong it is good but it is not ready yet to have embedded spreadsheets etc. etc. That is why i asked before what type of document are you intending on producing.
 
xUKHCx said:
For the documents i write I would use NeoOffice over Pages any day.

Don't get me wrong it is good but it is not ready yet to have embedded spreadsheets etc. etc. That is why i asked before what type of document are you intending on producing.
Click to expand...


The doc i'm thinking of writing at the moment is a resume.
 
I have had good experiences with Pages 2.0 with day to day sorts of things. It is also a great program if you need a combination of images and text in your document. However, if you need the program to perform more technical word processing tasks it will show its limitations quickly. For my academic writing I use Mellel. It is a great little word processor -- I haven't written anything in Word in over a year. If you were doing high school or undergraduate papers Pages would work well, but if you work with documents intended for publication you would do well to try a more robust word processor.

Platonist
 
I tried some of the earlier versions of Mellel. It looks very nice, and appears to be especially well-suited for right-to-left languages (the publisher is in Israel). Definitely worth a look, if you're open to non-maintream solutions.

As for Word compatibility, I don't see how NeoOffice is going to be any better at it than Pages, or any other word processor that has to reverse-engineer Microsoft's file formats to achieve compatibility. File compatibility even between versions of Word isn't perfect!
 
Mellel

I highly endorse Mellel (msWord free for a few years now)! Mellel is truly a wonderful program. It may take a little while to break msWord habits and to learn how to use Mellel's Style paradigm for fast and efficient formatting (PAGES also uses Styles), but your efforts will be rewarded.

If you need a bibliography program use Bookends, vastly superior to Endnote. Vastly!

Mellel + Bookends = a happy scientist (me).

Mellel, http://www.redlers.com/
Bookends, http://www.sonnysoftware.com/

Cheers.
 
glennyboiwpg said:
I tried neooffice... was never impressed with it.

Not a big fan of the open source solutions out there. looks like an old port of office from the win 98 days.
Click to expand...

In the latest version (2.1) they changed icons etc to make it look really nice :)
 
open office for Mac

Here is another suggestion.

Open office. It is a great suite of powerfull office apps, wordprocessor, spreadsheet, database, presentation apps.
Its completely free, but the only thing with the Mac version currently is that it doesn't yet run under the Aqua interface, but needs the Mac version of X windows, (comes with your Mac OS X install disk, but usually not pre-installed)
A full blown Aqua version is still in development, but the X windows version is not bad at all. It seems to work quite nicely, and is compatible with MS office.

:apple:
 
k2k koos said:
Here is another suggestion.

Open office. It is a great suite of powerfull office apps, wordprocessor, spreadsheet, database, presentation apps.
Its completely free, but the only thing with the Mac version currently is that it doesn't yet run under the Aqua interface, but needs the Mac version of X windows, (comes with your Mac OS X install disk, but usually not pre-installed)
A full blown Aqua version is still in development, but the X windows version is not bad at all. It seems to work quite nicely, and is compatible with MS office.

:apple:
Click to expand...
NeoOffice is based on OpenOffice and is a Java port, so there is no need for X11, it is MUCH nicer :)
 
I use pages for document produced for myself, but I have NeoOffice installed for its better compatibility with Word documents produced elsewhere with the more fancy features of Office.

I find Pages easier to write with and format, I think it is that it forced me to move to 'styles' so my documents feel neater even if they aren't.
 
furious said:
Is pages good at publishing? What I mean is does it handle formatting better than MS Word.
Click to expand...

Yes.

The default behavior of Pages forces you to use styles, which makes you documents look better. When I compare Pages and Word, formatting is the one area where Pages blows Word out of the water. Its handling of styles, autoformating and images is great. It's refreshing to be able to put an image exactly where you want it and align multiple graphics.

That being said ... if you want REALLY good looking output, you need LaTeX. No question. The best part is that it's free and easy (once you get over the initial learning curve).
 
Thanks. I was doing a report it was only 16 pages but by god word would not do what I expected. All I need was two different contents pages. One for the report and one for the appendix. It could not be harder. So I ended up having to have a single contents page. It was so frustrating.

Last time i looked at LaTeX I could not find a OSX version. Was I not opening my eyes? or is it MacTeX?
 
Angrist said:
The default behavior of Pages forces you to use styles, which makes you documents look better. When I compare Pages and Word, formatting is the one area where Pages blows Word out of the water. Its handling of styles, autoformating and images is great. It's refreshing to be able to put an image exactly where you want it and align multiple graphics.
Click to expand...

I think you must mean "templates." Pages does default to offering a selection of templates when you create a new document, but this is only the starting point. Creating custom templates is one of Pages greatest strengths.

As for styles (paragraph and character), Pages handles that task better than any word processor around, AFAIK -- pull out the style drawer and define and apply. Couldn't hardly be easier.
 
k2k koos said:
Neo office? Thanks, I'll give that a try. And I agree, Pages also is a great word processor with excellent formatting features etc.:apple:
Click to expand...

I use Pages to take notes in school and NeoOffice when I need more advanced features :)

NeoOffice is usually one step behind OpenOffice (now it is version 2.1, while OpenOffice is v2.2)
 
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