(no subject)

[devi]

Does anyone know of a good downloadable word processor that will run on a Mac (OSX) and get on well with Word files? Or is that a tall order?

Edit: I've downloaded OpenOffice and will be upgrading to Panther as soon as possible. Thanks to everyone for your help!

Comments

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Very important question: does it have a word count feature?

[smorgasbord.livejournal.com]

It does on Windows. So it is very unlikely that the Mac version does not.
Goto File->Properties and the word count is on dialogue box along with characters, paragraghs and lines.

[zandev.livejournal.com]

Yes, File->Properties->Statistics does give a word count on the Mac version.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Looking good so far.

I don't *like* Word, but I use it because a) agents use it, b) publishers use it, c) lots of little magazines (though not Smoke, kudos there) use it, d) the school where I work (which is the only place I can print stuff out) uses it. Sigh. So the next question is, could Word read an OpenOffice file? And if so, how badly will it get mangled?

[smorgasbord.livejournal.com]

Sorry that is where things get more difficult. It is possible to save as RTF and edit that in word but any clever formatting will probably be lost. Or you can save as a PDF and print that out most places.

[smorgasbord.livejournal.com]

Whoops I am wrong. There is an option to save as word file (95, or 97/2000/XP) but I am not sure that I have ever trusted it enough to use it. :(

[http://users.livejournal.com/_corpse_/]

The simple answer is kinda. Native Open Office docs can't be handled by Word (what, support the competition?), but Open Office can save as Word docs.

So you just keep everything as docs and it should be fine.