[comp.sys.mac.apps] WriteNow vs. Word

khester@cs.utexas.edu (Stewart Kevin Hester) (02/13/91)

	I recently received a promotional offer to purchase WriteNow for $89
and I would like some advice from net-land.  Although generally knowledgeable
about Mac things I am a long time Word user and have not kept up with
competing word processors.
	In the literature it lists many awards from various Mac publications,
however there are no recent awards - is there a reason, have they not kept
pace?
	Any comments about WriteNow (particularly in comparison to Word) would
be helpful.

khester@cs.utexas.edu
Kevin Hester
	
-- 

S. Kevin Hester
khester@cs.utexas.edu

derek@coco2.albany.edu (Cinderella Man) (02/14/91)

In article <1085@dimebox.cs.utexas.edu> khester@cs.utexas.edu (Stewart Kevin
Hester) writes:
>
>        I recently received a promotional offer to purchase WriteNow for $89
>and I would like some advice from net-land.  Although generally knowledgeable
>about Mac things I am a long time Word user and have not kept up with
>competing word processors.
>        In the literature it lists many awards from various Mac publications,
>however there are no recent awards - is there a reason, have they not kept
>pace?
>        Any comments about WriteNow (particularly in comparison to Word) would
>be helpful.

        WriteNow is a small, fast word processor that's aimed at the low-end
(MacWrite, MS-Works) of the market.  Pitting it against Word in a features
war would be silly:  WN does not do outlining, indexing, table of contents,
any special symbols, handle in-doc postscript code, or a host of other
special functions that Word can perform (such as DTP features or calculations).

        But what it does, it does well.  It is MUCH, much cleaner and easier
to use than Word.  It requires one-quarter the memory, operates much faster,
and crashes less often (in my experience).  I find its header, footer, and
footnode handling to be intuitive and more true-to-WYSIWYG than Word's (unless
you're in the abominable "Page View" mode).  Its spell-checking is fast.
Its menus are well laid out.

        I use Word at my office, where it's standard, but I own WriteNow for
home use, where Word would be overkill (not to mention heavy on disk space).
I have never had a problem with the program, and T/Maker (NeXT?) gives you
some extras with the program to make it more useful (a thesaurus and a
date cdev, I can't remember the others right now).

        Hope this is useful...

>S. Kevin Hester

                                                Derek L.
--
and the word was heard and it was absurd...