Overburdening your toolbar
My favorite newspaper reports on a customer survey by Microsoft on the usability of MS Office. (The article is vague about where, if at all, this survey may be available and since I’m on the road I don’t have the time to chase it up.) The survey, according to the report, found that nine out of the ten most requested features for Office already exist in the most popular application suite. While Word 1.0 had around 100 features, the current version has around 1,500. Little wonder that users can’t find what they’re looking for, and are overwhelmed by what they do find.
MS Word is the workhorse for word processing on both the Windows and the Mac platform, and I use it all the time, but it is simply not a good application for anything beyond a few pages (in my experience, around 20 with footnotes) or anything that includes tables. Thankfully there are alternatives; on the Mac, my word processor of choice is Mellel, which is terrific and outputs to RTF, but for anything longer I would always use LaTeX (using the iTeXMac front end). Beware, however, of one tiresome problem: neither have any easy way for collaborative writing/editing, not even in an author/reviewer setup. (Short of using some sort of versioning control or outputting to PDF which can then be marked up with the full version of Adobe Acrobat, there doesn’t seem to be an easy way out of this.)
Technorati tag: apple
Well my choice goes to Apple Pages. Everybody used to say that it’s not comparable to Ms Word (they’d do different kind of services) but I don’t agree so much. I am using it everyday on its place for writing articles and little essays and I don’t miss Ms stuff at all. Why you didn’t mention it? Ciao Tee
Comment by Cicciosax — September 19, 2005 @ 11:45 pm
I do like Pages but there are a few things that really make it very difficult to use as a word processor (as opposed to basic page-layout app) — for one, the missing word count, which is a killer when you’re editing something down or writing it up to a specified word count. (Then again, Mellel can’t use the OS Dictionary panel [Is this true or am I missing something?], which can be debilitating too, and the LaTeX implementations I’m using also don’t have an obvious way to count words. But yes, you are right, I’ve even used Pages to fix Word documents, which is more than a bit ironic.
Comment by Administrator — September 20, 2005 @ 9:36 am
Hehe I guess I solved your problem: open your Apple Pages, go in the setting palette then document settings, then information. You’ll have word, type, graphic, counting.
Consider that so explained it looks like it’s complicated, while, in the Apple Pages interface, it’s one of the most easy stuff to get, since the setting palette is always open, while the document settings menu is the first on the options.
As for me the real annoying problem with Pages is that you can’t use synonyms and contraries’ dictionary like in MS Word. I avoided the ostacle using an online dictionary.
Comment by Cicciosax — September 20, 2005 @ 10:12 am
Hehe I guess I solved your problem: open your Apple Pages, go in the setting palette then document settings, then information. You’ll have word, type, graphic, counting.
Consider that so explained it looks like it’s complicated, while, in the Apple Pages interface, it’s one of the most easy stuff to get, since the setting palette is always open, while the document settings menu is the first on the options.
As for me the real annoying problem with Pages is that you can’t use synonyms and contraries’ dictionary like in MS Word. I avoided the ostacle using an online dictionary.
Comment by Cicciosax — September 20, 2005 @ 10:13 am
You are of course absolutely right — there is a live word count in Pages, and I’ve even used it in the past. I don’t know what I was thinking when I wrote that!
In any case, the biggest drawback for me with all of these solutions is the lack of an easy way to collaborate, which is a real hassle.
Comment by Administrator — September 20, 2005 @ 10:24 am