I am a Dual OS Household Again!

[lagilman]

Ok, technically, counting Android, I'm a 3 OS household, but nevermind. Wolfe the Dell is back in-house, allegedly and reportedly fixed of his pre-existing mental twitch (he would 'forget' how to find his hard drive periodically, which made him useless to me).

Of course, in the process the free sample of Word expired. So now I have Word for Mac on the laptop (Archie), and a PC with no word processing software. I really don't want to buy another copy of Word..... I suspect OpenOffice and I might try a trial re-negotiation. But if anyone has a better suggestion...?



Originally Published at Practical Meerkat: A Blog. You can comment here or there

Comments

[shui-long.livejournal.com]

Open Office is a bit clunky, but it does work (more-or-less equivalent to Word 2003, which is an advantage if you don't get on with the Word 2007 "ribbon").

If you don't want a full office suite, then Abiword (http://www.abisource.com/) is worth considering - lightweight but adequate stand-alone word processor, no great learning curve for Word users, and will import and export in MS Word format.

For other free options, you might find Gizmo's freeware reviews helpful:
Office Suites (http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-office-suite.htm)
Word Processors (http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/word-processor-replacement.htm/)

I don't know if you've tried Scrivener (www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php) on the Mac, but the version for Windows has now been released.

[neko-san.livejournal.com]

Sadly, no. I rather love UltraEdit as a text editor, but I don't know how useful it would be for just writing text (as opposed to coding perl, python, R, .xml docs, in addition to writing bits of text).

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

You might try LibreOffice. It's a fork (schism) of Open Office; and currently it's better.

[cepetit.myopenid.com (from livejournal.com)]

Both LibreOffice and OpenOffice are worthwhile alternatives to MS Office. However, you should completely ignore the so-called "compatibility" options for the most-current MS file format (.docx), especially if there's any possibility of both a Mac and a Windows machine having to edit the file. Instead, save and work with everything as RTF.

I narrowly prefer OpenOffice to LibreOffice because after the fork, OpenOffice fixed a longstanding bug for documents that contain both left-to-right and right-to-left editable texts that are not in the same font family (e.g., a true Arabic or Hebrew font instead of the extended Arabic or Hebrew characters built into the full Arial — vowel dots only begin the problems...). LibreOffice still has the same bug.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Softmaker Office for Windows. I love this thing. I came to it because it's cross-platform, Windows/Linux, and stayed because it's just right. It's blindingly fast (compared to Word or OpenOffice), utterly stable, it'll read and write to any format... I've written dunno how many novels with it over the last decade, and never lost a word. I think there's a trial edition on the website, if you want to have a look at it.

[lagilman]

Does it work with Mac? if it crosses over, I may be in love...

[desperance.livejournal.com]

My memory was that it did, that there was a Mac iteration, but the last time I checked I couldn't find one, so I'm guessing that they've dropped that. Sorry... (But I'm sure it'll save into a Mac-compatible format...)

[lagilman]

grrr. I tried downloading the free trial, and it didn't finish and now the site won't give me the link again....

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Acch. Also grrr. Sorry, don't know what that would be about.

[lagilman]

I switched to another browser and tried again - it seems to have worked. Will give it a test run tomorrow...

[lagilman]

Trying. Liking. But why do they make it so difficult to find a word count? Sheeesh.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Um. Stops you looking too often/obsessing about it? ... Whoops. Too late. (I dunno. Over the years I've got used to three-clicks - tho' it's only two after the first time, it remembers you're on 'File/Properties/Statistics' - but I do remember its being a shorter path in other WPs.)

[lagilman]

Bah. I like being able to look up and at a glance know where I am. I am spoilt.

I need to figure out how to modify the toolbar, is all. *nods*

[lagilman]

argh. when I switch from rtf to docx, it decides to semi-randomly shift plain text into bold/italics. This... is very annoying in 90,000 word document.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Aargh indeed. (I guess they haven't got the docx filters refined yet; I'm sorry, I didn't know that, never used docx...)

[lagilman]

Madame Agent reports the same result in .doc.


Meh. *sulks*

[mtlawson.livejournal.com]

OpenOffice or Google Docs. The local school district went with Google Docs for the simple reason that you can easily go cross platforms with it, which is big given that you've got a student body that has Macs, PCs, and LINUX (well, some geeks have LINUX anyway). The other reason --it's free-- was a big factor as well. The only drawback I can see with Google Docs is that there isn't an equivalent of Office Publisher on it.

[lagilman]

I tried Google Docs an wasn't impressed. I can see where it's useful when collaborating (I've used it a few times for that) but in daily long-form use, it wasn't easy enough to open-and-go.

[mtlawson.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I can see where that would be a problem. Students and teachers wouldn't stress the app in a way a writer would.

[mtlawson.livejournal.com]

Actually, it just occurred to me that you could send an e-mail to Google pointing out the limitations in Docs from your standpoint. If they're a company that listens to potential customers, they'll follow up on that.

Unfortunately, too few companies actually do that sort of thing...