So you just got your new Mac with all of it’s great bundled programs like iLife, mail, Address Book, iCal, Safari, iSync and a bunch more but hold on a sec… Where did the Word Processor go? Yes there are some nice trial versions of Microsoft Office and Apple’s iWork but they don’t last forever, 30 days to be exact! Oh here’s one - Text Edit, lets just say Text Edit is a very basic text editing program like the name says and will be under-featured for most users.

Luckily you have a few choices:

Option A.

• Give the trial Word Processing versions a try and buy one or the other when your 30 days is up. Microsoft Office is about $200 (education version) and comes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage. Microsoft Office for Mac offers the most compatibility with the PC world.
• Apple’s iWork is under $100 and comes with Pages for Word Processing and Keynote for Presentations. iWork makes presentation and documents look stunning and is very Mac like and easy to use.

• Download a free Word Processor, that’s right I said free! There are several Free Word Processors available but I just want to focus on two that are relativity easy to install and don’t require any helper applications like X11.
• Lets start with AbiWord. AbiWord is a true cross platform Word Processor, it doesn’t include any Spreadsheet or Presentation software but is very compact at about 30MB and launches quickly sporting a clean interface with useful tools. AbiWord offers limited MS Word compatibility.
• NeoOffice is a bigger (just over 300MB) and more full featured Office type Word Processing solution that includes Word Processing, Spreadsheet, Presentation and Drawing programs. NeoOffice is based on Open Office and is very MS Office friendly.

We hope to at some point offer a more extensive review of each of these programs, for now I would have to recommend NeoOffice because it seems to be the most full featured and Microsoft Office compatible. NeoOffice can be a bit sluggish to launch and run but everything looks quite good and formats the way you would expect. Another key advantage with NeoOffice is that it is also available as an Intel Native Download!

AbiWord would be best suited for the person who doesn’t need to be as MS Word dependent and is looking for a nice compact Word Processor.

Why not give them both a try and decide for yourself…

• AbiWord
• NeoOffice

Author - Michael Kaye