Applications

Top alternatives to Microsoft Word

There are tons of better options than Word, no matter what you want it for

July 28th | Tell us what you think [ 0 comments ]

Microsoft Word 2007's simplified 'ribbon' toolbar offers fast and efficient document formatting â�� but cheaper tools are available

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At the moment one piece of word processing software dominates the market: Microsoft Office Word. Word has been through many incarnations, and with the latest version the designers have gone back to the drawing board and attempted to give customers what they really want: an application that they can use to create documents without wading through menus to locate a feature.

This has been a relative success, but if your writing is specialised, you need to write in a language other than English or you're just strapped for cash, there are many alternatives available.

Free software

The biggest drawback with Word is that it can be expensive when bought as a standalone application or as part of Microsoft Office. However, a superb alternative called OpenOffice has been developed by the open source community. The Writer component of this suite now has a feature set that's comparable to Microsoft Word, but is completely free to download.

Non English languages

Multilingual versions of Word exist, but if you're looking for a dedicated word processor that can handle non-Latin alphabets, Global Writer and Universal Word 2000 support right-to-left languages such as Arabic and Hebrew, as well as dozens of other languages.

Dagesh Pro IV is a specialised Hebrew-English word processor that runs with all versions of Windows. If you're a Mac user, Nisus Writer is a well-developed multilingual word processor for the Mac OS. You can buy multilingual word processors from Languagesource, as well as keyboards to match the language of the word processor you're using.

Specialist notation

The layout of complex scientific notation is usually the province of high-end apps like FrameMaker, but there is a specialised word processor that can handle this task with ease. LaTeX, based on the Tex system, is a typesetting program that gives the user incredible control over every character's position on the page. If you lay out newspapers or magazines and use InDesign, then the InCopy word processor is a superb application that integrates into your InDesign workflow.

Scriptwriting tools

Budding film and television screenwriters have a number of specialised word processors to choose from, including Sophocles and Screenplay. Novelists, too, are spoiled for choice when it comes to customised word processing.