I love TextEdit too, guys, and use it for just about everything, but it's hard to deny the fact that TextEdit is not a full-featured word processor.
If you're doing any serious, long-document writing involving page numbers, headers, footers, the need to break your writing into sections that can be easily traversed, not to mention the ability to jump to different parts of a long document quickly, TextEdit just doesn't cut it.
It's embarrassing actually just how few good WPs are out there for OS X. All are either clunky, sort of decent (or not so decent) Carbon ports, or Cocoa apps either in infancy and/or with abysmal interface issues.
Hope this problem gets addressed by someone (if not Apple) soon....
It's silly they don't include AppleWorks with "Pro" machines. But that aside, it really wouldn't take much to make TextEdit into a truly usable app... I did a quick little Word.doc test with Word98 for Mac that included some basic stuff to see what exactly it could do.
If it could do all the basic stuff I included it'd be pretty useful. As is, its pretty much just SimpleText that can (sort of) read word documents. At the very least a way to do bulleted text would make it much more useful.
EDIT: hrm another test.... if you save the word test doc out from TextEdit as a word doc it wipes out any of the original word-formatting it couldn't read, with the exception of the page break. If you cut and paste an image into your TextEdit doc it wont let you save that image in word doc format, you have to use rtf.
Comments
If you're doing any serious, long-document writing involving page numbers, headers, footers, the need to break your writing into sections that can be easily traversed, not to mention the ability to jump to different parts of a long document quickly, TextEdit just doesn't cut it.
It's embarrassing actually just how few good WPs are out there for OS X. All are either clunky, sort of decent (or not so decent) Carbon ports, or Cocoa apps either in infancy and/or with abysmal interface issues.
Hope this problem gets addressed by someone (if not Apple) soon....
Get it here
If it could do all the basic stuff I included it'd be pretty useful. As is, its pretty much just SimpleText that can (sort of) read word documents. At the very least a way to do bulleted text would make it much more useful.
EDIT: hrm another test.... if you save the word test doc out from TextEdit as a word doc it wipes out any of the original word-formatting it couldn't read, with the exception of the page break. If you cut and paste an image into your TextEdit doc it wont let you save that image in word doc format, you have to use rtf.