I have OSX panther? 10.3, does it come with any office type applications. I need to type papers, and in a pinch for any kind of word type application. does apple bundle even a basic notepad/wordpad type of thing on here atleast? thank a bunch
I have OSX panther? 10.3, does it come with any office type applications. I need to type papers, and in a pinch for any kind of word type application. does apple bundle even a basic notepad/wordpad type of thing on here atleast? thank a bunch
I have OSX panther? 10.3, does it come with any office type applications. I need to type papers, and in a pinch for any kind of word type application. does apple bundle even a basic notepad/wordpad type of thing on here atleast? thank a bunch
Textedit will get you most of the way, so long as you don't need to footnote or are organised enough to keep track of your own endnotes. It even has rudimentary style support now, and open/save of basic Word documents (not perfect by any means, but good enough). And of course it takes advantage of the system-wide spell-checking. You might want to install Devon's WordService to add some of the missing functionality, in particular word counts. It adds some stuff to your Services menu (Application name > Services).
If you want something a bit more complicated there are an amazing variety of cheap/free word processors for Mac OS:
Free word processors
Wordperfect Mac stopped development 5/6 years ago, but still runs perfectly well (albeit in the Classic environment), and has the benefit of being a full-featured word processor which is free. Much the same as on Windows, so far as I'm aware. The linkage from the Corel website seems to have disappeared, but this is a mirror. Don't forget to apply the OS8/9 patch.
RagTime Solo Strictly a page presentation application, this is free for personal non-commercial use upon application. Haven't used it extensively, but it looks pretty usable...
OpenOffice Mac only runs in the X11 environment, is dog-slow, and isn't quite finished yet by any means, but hell, it's free, and its Word open/save support is non pareil.
AbiWord has recently released the first betas for OS X of this excellent cross-platform wordprocessor. Still very beta though, so I'd stay away from it.
Cheap word-processors ? Shareware
Mellel is my personal favourite at the moment. I used it to write my law honours thesis, and now I'm using it to write my history honours thesis. Support for page, paragraph and character level styles, with internal variation of each and multiple footnote/endnote streams are its cooler features. Basically, has all the functionality I need (other than a nice XML-ish file format, but they're planning that apparently and the recently-improved RTF engine will do in the time being) for not very much (US$29); it's had a very aggressive development schedule for the last two years, and the biggest criticisms levelled at it tend to be that it's poke-your-eyes-out ugly. I'm not sure I agree with this, but apparently it's insupportable for some. So far only includes integration with Bookends for footnoting, although you can always use the RTF scanning thingy with Endnotes to achieve the same effect.
Mariner Write is the favourite of many more people; in many ways it has all the functionality anyone ever uses from Word, with a fairly similar interface, for much less money, and much less processor/memory overhead. US$69.95, although I think there are EDU discounts.
Nisus Writer Express had a cult following as it's previous incarnation, Nisus Writer under the Classic OS. The current OS X version is much stripped down, but certainly worth a look. US$59
Cheap word-processors/office suites ? commercial
ThinkFree Office is a pure Java office suite... the only comments I've ever heard are basically to the effect that it is slow... US$49.95
AppleWorks is the doyen of the Apple wordprocessors, descended from the late, great ClarisWorks. I grew up with this Office Suite (it includes a wordprocessor, spreadsheet, drawing module, painting module, database and presentation module), and have a great deal of affection for it. It does virtually everything you'd actually want a word processor to do, but it hasn't been updated in ages. On the other hand, if you're just writing academic papers, it should be more than good enough, unless you use change-tracking or comments or any features like that... Good support for opening/saving Word/Excel files, acceptable footnote management, support from some of the bigger bibliography tools, a reasonable (although far from optimal) style management system... pretty good. Cheap if you're a student.
I have OSX panther? 10.3, does it come with any office type applications. I need to type papers, and in a pinch for any kind of word type application. does apple bundle even a basic notepad/wordpad type of thing on here atleast? thank a bunch
I like Nisus Writer Express. Small and fast as well as easy to use. Does not have nearly the number of features of Word but who the hell uses that stuff anyway. I have never felt limited using this one. There is a 30 day demo and after that it costs 59.95. Give it a look.
Comments
Originally posted by avalon409
I have OSX panther? 10.3, does it come with any office type applications. I need to type papers, and in a pinch for any kind of word type application. does apple bundle even a basic notepad/wordpad type of thing on here atleast? thank a bunch
TextEdit
Try the following options:
Format > Wrap to page
In the preferences: Show ruler
Originally posted by avalon409
I have OSX panther? 10.3, does it come with any office type applications. I need to type papers, and in a pinch for any kind of word type application. does apple bundle even a basic notepad/wordpad type of thing on here atleast? thank a bunch
Textedit will get you most of the way, so long as you don't need to footnote or are organised enough to keep track of your own endnotes. It even has rudimentary style support now, and open/save of basic Word documents (not perfect by any means, but good enough). And of course it takes advantage of the system-wide spell-checking. You might want to install Devon's WordService to add some of the missing functionality, in particular word counts. It adds some stuff to your Services menu (Application name > Services).
If you want something a bit more complicated there are an amazing variety of cheap/free word processors for Mac OS:
Free word processors
Wordperfect Mac stopped development 5/6 years ago, but still runs perfectly well (albeit in the Classic environment), and has the benefit of being a full-featured word processor which is free. Much the same as on Windows, so far as I'm aware. The linkage from the Corel website seems to have disappeared, but this is a mirror. Don't forget to apply the OS8/9 patch.
RagTime Solo Strictly a page presentation application, this is free for personal non-commercial use upon application. Haven't used it extensively, but it looks pretty usable...
OpenOffice Mac only runs in the X11 environment, is dog-slow, and isn't quite finished yet by any means, but hell, it's free, and its Word open/save support is non pareil.
AbiWord has recently released the first betas for OS X of this excellent cross-platform wordprocessor. Still very beta though, so I'd stay away from it.
Cheap word-processors ? Shareware
Mellel is my personal favourite at the moment. I used it to write my law honours thesis, and now I'm using it to write my history honours thesis. Support for page, paragraph and character level styles, with internal variation of each and multiple footnote/endnote streams are its cooler features. Basically, has all the functionality I need (other than a nice XML-ish file format, but they're planning that apparently and the recently-improved RTF engine will do in the time being) for not very much (US$29); it's had a very aggressive development schedule for the last two years, and the biggest criticisms levelled at it tend to be that it's poke-your-eyes-out ugly. I'm not sure I agree with this, but apparently it's insupportable for some. So far only includes integration with Bookends for footnoting, although you can always use the RTF scanning thingy with Endnotes to achieve the same effect.
Mariner Write is the favourite of many more people; in many ways it has all the functionality anyone ever uses from Word, with a fairly similar interface, for much less money, and much less processor/memory overhead. US$69.95, although I think there are EDU discounts.
Nisus Writer Express had a cult following as it's previous incarnation, Nisus Writer under the Classic OS. The current OS X version is much stripped down, but certainly worth a look. US$59
Cheap word-processors/office suites ? commercial
ThinkFree Office is a pure Java office suite... the only comments I've ever heard are basically to the effect that it is slow... US$49.95
AppleWorks is the doyen of the Apple wordprocessors, descended from the late, great ClarisWorks. I grew up with this Office Suite (it includes a wordprocessor, spreadsheet, drawing module, painting module, database and presentation module), and have a great deal of affection for it. It does virtually everything you'd actually want a word processor to do, but it hasn't been updated in ages. On the other hand, if you're just writing academic papers, it should be more than good enough, unless you use change-tracking or comments or any features like that... Good support for opening/saving Word/Excel files, acceptable footnote management, support from some of the bigger bibliography tools, a reasonable (although far from optimal) style management system... pretty good. Cheap if you're a student.
Originally posted by avalon409
I have OSX panther? 10.3, does it come with any office type applications. I need to type papers, and in a pinch for any kind of word type application. does apple bundle even a basic notepad/wordpad type of thing on here atleast? thank a bunch
I like Nisus Writer Express. Small and fast as well as easy to use. Does not have nearly the number of features of Word but who the hell uses that stuff anyway. I have never felt limited using this one. There is a 30 day demo and after that it costs 59.95. Give it a look.
bob Nisus Writer Express link
I see staphbaby already beat me to the punch
Originally posted by Cam'ron
doesnt appleworks come already installed? i have it pre-installed on my emac.
Some do some don't. On a "pro" machine like my PowerBook, no. On a consumer machine like an iMac or an eMac, yes. YMMV
avalon409 if you are at a college or university you can often get MS Office for pennies on the dollar. My campus sells a legal burned copy for $20.
Originally posted by Scott
Some do some don't. On a "pro" machine like my PowerBook, no. On a consumer machine like an iMac or an eMac, yes. YMMV
avalon409 if you are at a college or university you can often get MS Office for pennies on the dollar. My campus sells a legal burned copy for $20.
Yeah, at my campus it's $7 for Office 2003, Windows XP, Office X. Pressed copies too. Great deal.