John Naughton had a request from a friend for an alternative to MS Word on a Mac. John pointed him in the direction of TextEdit (Windows users, think WordPad), which comes built into OSX. One issue with this was the lack of a wordcount function, which was soon sorted by an extra little bit of software.
I’ve been doing some digging into Mac word processing, and here are some other options:
- AbiWord – standalone wysiwyg word processor
- NeoOffice – Mac friendly port of…
- OpenOffice – the open source MS Office challenger
- TextWrangler – for pure text editing, no frills or fancy fonts!
Incidentally, I also came across this page, which might prove useful.
NeoOffice is marvellous, and OpenOffice.org doesn’t currently have a great Mac version so the NeoOffice repackaging is probably the best option there (if you are looking for free). Alternatively Apple’s Pages in iWork is lovely. For raw text editors, I played with Smultron and then TextWrangler before Al Wood put me onto TextMate, which is just fantastic… but you really need to buy the book to get the most from it, it’s just so powerful.
Yep, I definitely want to give NeoOffice a go, the only thing that is stopping me at the moment is some stuff I read about it not agreeing with Leopard, which is the version of OSX on my MacBook.
Intriguing. I haven’t seen any issues with NeoOffice on Leopard. Works for me…