Two questions, really.

Firstly, has anyone here used Mellel who can attest to its quality?

Secondly, as a college student, will a spiffed-up word processor be useful to me, or will TextEdit suffice? (I'd hate to pay $35 just for word count.)

I already have Stone Create, but it's a pain to have to do that weird copy-paste-link process for every new page.

Is there something wrong with MS word and Pages?

OneSadCookie Wrote:Is there something wrong with MS word and Pages?

Umm...I own neither? Pages is $80, Word 07 is $50, Mellel is $50 and more Mac-ish than Word? (All are less with edu. discount, but I didn't look up by how much.)

I guess I'll get Office for free at school, but I don't really look forward to using it. I've always hated how it spaces paragraphs by default, and it's ugly with loads of unnecessary crap.

Didnt try it but this might be good : http://www.bean-osx.com/Bean.html

Najdorf Wrote:Didnt try it but this might be good : http://www.bean-osx.com/Bean.html

Ooh, I like that. It really is a glorified TextEdit, which is nice, but it doesn't have headers and footers.

Actually, I used TextEdit for a lot of my school papers (essays mostly). It's simple and efficient if you really only need basic word processing features. I only used Word when needed for fancier formatting. Your milage may vary.

Skorche Wrote:Actually, I used TextEdit for a lot of my school papers (essays mostly). It's simple and efficient if you really only need basic word processing features. I only used Word when needed for fancier formatting. Your milage may vary.

Yeah, I wrote everything in it for all of high school, but one of my later papers, which was 40 pages and needed page number headers, got annoying to keep up. All I really want is TextEdit with word count and headers/footers.

You can do word count with the command line, and as for college papers Tex is pretty much the standard.

NeoOffice? OpenOffice? (Although I can't recommend OpenOffice unreservedly, as I've had it crash hard enough to completely corrupt X11...)

sealfin Wrote:NeoOffice? OpenOffice? (Although I can't recommend OpenOffice unreservedly, as I've had it crash hard enough to completely corrupt X11...)

Give this a couple of [large units of time] to mature and then... you'll still be stuck with a MS Office '03 carbon copy.

I picked up Office for Mac at school for no more than 10USD.

Pages is 50USD with the standard academic discount, which I feel is totally worth it if you can swing it.