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

Office compatibility

Although using an alternative to Word is fine, there's a chance you'll occasionally need to open, edit and save documents created using Microsoft's application. And results proved variable with the DOC and DOCX files we tested.

Every app bar Mellel managed to rip text from our documents (Mellel was fine with DOC files, but stumbled when confronted with DOCX), although Scrivener managed nothing further. Nisus Writer Pro also grabbed tables (if not their styling) from DOCX files and made a stab at including images and layout from DOCs, but generally messed things up.

Surprisingly, OpenOffice.org lags behind Apple's Pages. Neither application got things entirely right: both were confused by Word template cover pages, and while Pages floundered with text styles, OpenOffice.org couldn't correctly deal with image styles and placement. DOCX-wise, however, Pages' blunders were less of an issue.

In terms of exporting back to Word, advanced styling could still be lost occasionally, but again Pages nosed in front of OpenOffice.org.
Mellel 0/5
Microsoft Word 5/5
Nisus Writer Pro 2/5
OpenOffice.org 3/5
Pages 4/5
Scrivener 1/5

Mac integration

One reason for using a Mac is interface consistency. You expect things to work in a certain way across every application and for common conventions to be adhered to. Microsoft sometimes pays scant regard to such things, but the latest Word is an improvement.

On the face of it, Word finally looks and feels like a Mac OS X application. A pity, then, that once you get away from the main window, Word appears transitionary, with inconsistent dialogs, an ignorance of common Mac shortcuts and a lack of support for built-in services. OpenOffice.org sadly apes Word in these regards, not least in its inability to use C and the up and down arrows to jump to the start and end of a document.

Elsewhere, Mellel uses Mac OS X conventions and widgets, but presents them in a way that's akin to an unholy union between iTunes and BBEdit. And of the other three, there's very little between them – Pages, Nisus Writer Pro and Scrivener all show an admirable understanding of Mac conventions, with Scrivener fractionally doing so in the most pleasing manner.

Mellel 2/5
Microsoft Word 3/5
Nisus Writer Pro 5/5
OpenOffice.org 2/5
Pages 5/5
Scrivener 5/5

And the winner is - Pages 3.0.2

Two applications fall at the first hurdle in our race for the word processor crown. Mellel excels at document structuring and cross-referencing, but it's too idiosyncratic and clunky to recommend, and OpenOffice.org's standout property is its lack of a price tag. For a free application, it's mightily impressive, but you get what you pay for.

Next down – and it pains us to say this – is Scrivener. To be fair to Scrivener, it's not really a word processor and is the odd one out here. Strictly speaking, it's an authoring tool whose output should be sent to a word processor for final layout. Indeed, this is made clear in the software's blurb. So if your needs are purely text-based, it's the best application on test – the relatively low rating is purely down to its lack of layout capabilities and Office integration.

Of the final three, Microsoft Word is steadily (but slowly) improving. The interface is better aligned with Mac standards, the layout features are improved, its range of templates is decent, and the Home and Student edition of Office 2008 for Mac is surprisingly reasonably priced. The problem is that Nisus Writer Pro and Pages beat it in some key areas.

For pure writing, Nisus Writer Pro is the better application, and we wholeheartedly recommend it for such tasks. However, this group test was about a wider range of needs, and for that, Pages edges it, with its mix of efficiency, elegance, tools and features. As far as the interface goes, it may have the advantage of being privy to all things Apple, but in the age of the Leopard there's really no excuse for not integrating with Mac OS X.

Final verdict - Pages: 4/5

Pages edges it, but Nisus Writer Pro is a worthy runner-up and Scrivener comes recommended for bashing out text.

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First published in MacFormat, Issue 203

Now read 20 Mac apps you can't live without

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