Such is Microsoft's marketing clout that most people – even Mac owners – immediately think of Word when considering an application to craft letters, tenders, articles, and other types of text documents.
However, despite being the most prevalent choice, Word isn't necessarily the best, and so this group test conducted by MacFormat magazine explores five varied and generally impressive alternatives along with Microsoft's giant, to discover the most suitable application for you.
On test are Mellel 2.5, Microsoft Word 2008, Nisus Writer Pro 1.1, OpenOffice.org 3, Pages 3.0.2 and Scrivener 1.11.
Ease of use
A sign of a good application is if it's intuitive enough to pick up easily. With the exception of Scrivener and, to some extent, Mellel, it's pretty obvious how to get going with all of the applications on test, but it's only once you start digging into more advanced features that the differences emerge.
Mellel's bizarre interface left us nonplussed, and it's easy to get lost in its maze of options. Even with its exhaustive documentation, we often became disorientated, and the application's inability to undo past save points proved a big drawback.
Among Word, OpenOffice.org, Pages and Nisus Writer Pro, the streamlined offerings from Apple and Nisus win out. It's just far more obvious how to use them.
Nisus also adds various widgets that enhance usability and nudge it ahead of Pages. By comparison, OpenOffice.org is aping an aged Word, and Word itself, despite some interface refinements, feels cluttered and overbearing.
Scrivener presents a different way of working, based around projects, but its fantastic tutorial and tidy interface means it scores highly.
Mellel 2/5
Microsoft Word 3/5
Nisus Writer Pro 5/5
OpenOffice.org 2/5
Pages 4/5
Scrivener 5/5
Layout and styles
This category encompasses each application's ability to create styles for ensuring document-wide visual consistency, along with the kind of DTP-style layout capabilities that many users of word processors require these days.
In terms of layout, Word and Pages get a kick-start via their selection of good-looking built-in templates. Word has improved since Office 2004, and now provides more scope for precision layout and effects, but this was always Pages' virtue, straddling the divide between word processing and DTP. The current version is no exception, and its superior interface nudges it ahead of Word.
Both apps are fine at styles, too, although Word's interface is often needlessly complex and fiddly. With Pages, the ability to easily select all instances of a style is a nice touch, although it pales beside the supreme elegance of Nisus Writer Pro.
The latter offers similar features to Pages, but creating and editing styles via its sidebar feels far more intuitive. Mellel impresses with its range of style-oriented features, although it loses ground due to limited layout options.
Mellel 3/5
Microsoft Word 4/5
Nisus Writer Pro 4/5
OpenOffice.org 3/5
Pages 5/5
Scrivener 2/5
Structuring work
Mellel was primarily designed for authoring academic and technical texts, and its Outline pane is fantastic, offering a clear and concise overview of your document.
Elements can be promoted, demoted and rearranged via clicks or drag-and-drop, and it's one of the few elements of Mellel that feels utterly intuitive. Its robust tools for headers, footers, cross-referencing and outlining reflect the kind of project Mellel is best for authoring.
By comparison, Word's outline view, while offering similar functionality, feels dated and clunky, although its various single-click options for inserting structural elements (headers, footers and so on) enable you to give documents a certain amount of visual panache with minimal effort. Oddly, OpenOffice.org's Navigation pane felt superior to Word's equivalent tools, enabling fuss-free restructuring.
Instead of headings, footers and the like, Scrivener offers the means to split documents into sections and then combine selections on the fly, making it the ideal app for arranging and rearranging a lengthy text.
Mellel 5/5
Microsoft Word 3/5
Nisus Writer Pro 2/5
OpenOffice.org 3/5
Pages 2/5
Scrivener 5/5
Language aids
Spelling and proofing tools comprise spell-checking, grammar checking and auto-correction. The first is most important, while grammar checks are never particularly accurate, but are mildly useful for flagging occasional obvious errors, and auto-correction can be either amazing or infuriating.
A greyed-out grammar box, lack of auto-correction and problems checking pasted text got Mellel a big red squiggle here, but every other application on test fared well. Pages clumsily splits grammar and spellchecking into different panes, but redeems itself with plentiful options and strong auto-completion.
Word matches Pages punch for punch with its excellent options, but then falls out of the ring for using proprietary dictionaries rather than the system one.
The star pupil, though, is Nisus Writer Pro. It lacks a grammar checker, but attention to detail elsewhere makes up for this. Highlighted words and current language are shown in a clear interface, while its live thesaurus, auto-correction, keyboard shortcuts and speed give it top-scorer status.
Mellel 2/5
Microsoft Word 4/5
Nisus Writer Pro 5/5
OpenOffice.org 3/5
Pages 4/5
Scrivener 4/5
Your comments (3) Click to add a new comment
romans
June 15th 2011
3. Word processors for Mac, I like brian12 above have come to the same conclusion, I use large documents, and they're difficult layouts Mellel stands out to be the best of the bunch. Had 25 years experience, useing Wordperfect MS Word Openoffice on Linux and I have arrived at Mac software.
SC
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brain12
February 15th 2009
2. Frankly, this review is unfair and actually wrong. The reviewers made some serious flaws in evaluating the text processors. I am using Word for more than 20 years. Since I have switched to Mac I started to use MS Word, too. First I used the Office 2004 version which was quite unstable and relatively slow (compared to the Windows version). Thus, I was searching for a more suitable program for Mac. Thus, I tried Pages, NeoOffice, OpenOffice, Nisus Writer, and Mellel. Comparing all text processors from the viewpoint of someone who is writing a lot of scientific text, Mellel is far the best and most stable text processor. For those who are not convinced use a longer document (e.g., 100-1000 pages which happens to be the case if one writes a book) Mellel does a fantastic job. Import the same text file into Word (Office 2008), Pages, OpenOffice, NeoOffice or Nisus one quickly notices that all other WPs do have their problems. OO and NeoO crashes down (from 500-600 pages they cannot manage this size, especially when some figures are embedded). Pages digests it quite good and Word 2008 is good too. However, use a longer text document with aprroximately 10 medium size figures, Word 2008 will slow down and may hve problems. Thus, Word 2008 is not usable for master thesis and dissertations. But Mellel is unbeaten. Even if one used figures and tables, Mellel does a fantastic job. Footnotes, outline, formatting, dictionary, hyphenation and autotitles is excellent in Mellel. For people like me writing a lot, Mellel is the best WP. Word 2008 has been improved with the new updates and the new Pages version is also much better. But for a serious writing Mellel is unbeaten. No doubt there are some features which are not optimal in Mellel (no commentaries, only RTF format data exchange, no text wrapping around figures) but most of these features are not that important.
After reading this review I was stunned how the reviewers came to their conclusion. What have they done here? I personally use Mellel, Word 2008 and the new Pages version for different tasks. Word mostly for file exchange or for forms, Pages for writing short manuscripts. Mellel is the best for writing longer manuscripts especially for scientific text and books. Even for letters I use Mellel because of the unbeaten hyphenation tool making hyphenation as versatile as possible.
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watcherzero
December 21st 2008
1. Its interesting to claim that MS Office interface is improving when the majority of PC users would say its declining in ease of use and accessibility by burying what you need behind fancy graphics and tabs.
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