Tuesday, July 18, 2017

Your Favorite Mac Word Processors

Josh Centers and Adam C. Engst:

Over 800 TidBITS readers responded to our survey of 21 apps, submitting close to 4000 votes. We found that Microsoft Word still dominates the landscape for word processors, but our readers wholeheartedly recommend several alternatives.

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Although they received far fewer votes than Microsoft Word and Pages, Nisus Writer Pro and Scrivener earned the top ratings from TidBITS readers, likely due to their focus on niche audiences with serious word processing needs. Nevertheless, even though Microsoft Word, the 800-pound gorilla of the word processing world, is often reviled, it didn’t fare too badly in user ratings, outpacing alternatives such as Nisus Writer Express, LibreOffice Writer, and Apache OpenOffice Writer.

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As a professional writer and professional Mac user I find it astonishing there's no cloud-based word processors in the list. Google Docs, for example, or Dropbox Paper. But this is a larger problem within word processing, which remains a very conservative industry. It's ripe for disruption. Even Apple got it wrong with Pages, which could've been built from the ground-up to be cloud.

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