And people who email you .docx attachments should be boiled alive in a vat of their own urine! BWAHAHA!

Big, long, complex writing: Word has a lot going for it.
Short missives and copy for web use: a text editor is fine.

For myself, I miss the wonderful middle ground that was WriteNow!

Oh, you are serious…nevermind…sorry..

Aside from the dumbass ribbon, poor default settings, and confusing buried menus, Word remains one of the most powerful word processors with feature sets that you simply don’t get elsewhere.

If you routinely type extremely technical documents in the hundreds, if not thousands, of pages, then you will see the limitations of the competitors. Those who whine about Word or Excel have a very hard time explaining what product can completely replace it for serious authoring & spreadsheet work …. as illustrated by the juvenile comments above. I think most people agree that PowerPoint is a clunker of a product that is horribly misused, but that’s another story.

If all you do is fill out short forms and type short letters, or if your chief concern is how “new” the product is, then pick whatever word processor you want. You’re not in the market for the industrial product.

Example: Spotify has out-Appled iTunes. iTunes will probably improve because of it.

I’m a Mac person that deals with windows folks every day and exchange word docs frequently. It’s a fine solution.

Maybe thats why there isn’t a close competitor.

The word processing templates are separate from and totally incompatible with the layout templates. You have to decide which approach you ‘re going to take before you start a document. Strange, but once you understand that (and I think most users never figure that out), Pages is a great way to build good looking documents.

Seriously – that thing is SLOW. Try filling up multiple sheets with massive tables, with lots of lookups and formulas – this thing CRAWLS. I’ve witnessed Excel run in Rosetta WAY faster than the native Numbers.

Not to mention that it lacks a lot of things – I’ve been particularly missing the ability to format a cell depending on values in OTHER cells, not just the same cell.

Overall, Numbers has most of the needed functionality, but it’s so slow that it reminds me of running… pretty much anything… on my old IIVi.

B

However, the article is about the fact that people use a program to make and send the files in, while they could have just put it in the body of the email. The formatting in most publications differs from the formatting in WOrd anyway so there is no added value in sending it in Word format, or Pages for that matter.

The sw industry should get their act together and make an email client already that works like it should: Manage the mails nicely like Mail or Outlook AND make sure ther are 2 markups: plain text for just in case and HTML for the rest of the world. The latter should then just work on any browser and not the way Outlook or Mail creates messages, because Outlook does not always get it right and Mail……Mail is just a laugh…..It tries to send out two versions and not one of them contains any sensible formatting code.

For mine I had to run a Mac emulator (vMac maybe? I can never remember unless I’m doing it) and run System 7 and Word 5.1 within it, save them in Word 5.1, copy them to a virtual floppy which I mounted in Leopard (Snow Leopard and Lion don’t support that format of virtual floppy anymore), then copy them over to my Lion machine to open in Word 2011. Quite a workaround.

See my comments above about grammar checker.

Talk about the most obscure file format.

I get them from college students I work with. Then I have to explain that just because it is on every computer on campus, it is on damn few computers in the real world. Then I have to teach them about PDF.

Outlook XP…. On windows XP.
They were so happy to intro a IM program windows communicator 2007 last year!

Nobody uses it, and what’s even worse.. It’s not even updated for the 2007 version lol. There are two more patches MS released after the one we use, sad.

Annoying as Hell.

People have their choice of tools for the most part and it’s not up to others to criticize them for their choices. You’ve got an SUV or a new Fiat? Your partner is blonde? Who am I to condemn you for your choice (as my brunette wife and I ride around in our Toyota)?

and Pages is soooooo much cheaper than word.

For the simple reason that you never know what a word doc will look like when someone else pulls it up. PDF’s are nice and clean and always work as intended

and of course, iWork to create all my PDF’s
I do use excel in bootcamp because there’s simply nothing else that will handle certain engineering functions I need.

Other than that and a little bit of skyrim, everything is done in Pages, Numbers, or Keynote on the Mac OS X side

You have “authors” who do not understand the fundamental basics of the defacto standard product in their profession. Are these children? What is your hiring process? Perhaps adding a short test to your process might sift out the idiots from the competent.

LaTeX…!!!???!

OMG….ROFL

I’ve done a lot of writing over the years, beginning typing math theses with an IBM electric and Hermes portable in the 60s, moving up to an Apple II (eventually using Wordstar), then MacWrite. I used to love MacWrite. In the 90s and early aughts I was doing technical writing in places that used Macs. Nisus was our app of choice. Now that I’m retired, I use Bean for much of my writing, Pages for publishing, and that’s about it. Both these apps can and do open .doc files.

I always felt that if the tools we are using got in the way, then they were no longer tools. To launch Word and see its monstrous ribbons and menu bars and other space-wasting doo-dads was a horror for creative writers. Sure, there’s a need for something that will create a ToC and index, do footnotes and endnotes in a variety of styles, as well as having a bucket full of stylistic tools, but they need to stay below the page and not get in the way of the basic job at hand: Writing.

Been blessedly Microsoft- and Adobe-free for years.

YMMV, of course. This is just one professional writer’s experience and choice.