Which one to choose? In this guide, we discuss the best word applications for Mac as well as tell you a little secret - you can get access to the top five writing programs for Mac without buying them. There are well-known paid word processors Mac users love such as Ulysses and MS Word, but there are also brilliant free solutions that can match your workflow. This is why one of the most ubiquitous tools on every computer is a word processor. Some write them, others edit them, yet others just look at them.
Instead of headings, footers and the like, Scrivener offers the means to split documents into sections and then combine selections on the fly, making it the ideal app for arranging and rearranging a lengthy text.Write undistracted and edit texts on the fly with Ulysses.
Oddly, 's Navigation pane felt superior to Word's equivalent tools, enabling fuss-free restructuring. Its robust tools for headers, footers, cross-referencing and outlining reflect the kind of project Mellel is best for authoring.īy comparison, Word's outline view, while offering similar functionality, feels dated and clunky, although its various single-click options for inserting structural elements (headers, footers and so on) enable you to give documents a certain amount of visual panache with minimal effort. Mellel was primarily designed for authoring academic and technical texts, and its Outline pane is fantastic, offering a clear and concise overview of your document.Įlements can be promoted, demoted and rearranged via clicks or drag-and-drop, and it's one of the few elements of Mellel that feels utterly intuitive. Mellel impresses with its range of style-oriented features, although it loses ground due to limited layout options. The latter offers similar features to Pages, but creating and editing styles via its sidebar feels far more intuitive. With Pages, the ability to easily select all instances of a style is a nice touch, although it pales beside the supreme elegance of Nisus Writer Pro. The current version is no exception, and its superior interface nudges it ahead of Word.īoth apps are fine at styles, too, although Word's interface is often needlessly complex and fiddly. Word has improved since Office 2004, and now provides more scope for precision layout and effects, but this was always Pages' virtue, straddling the divide between word processing and DTP. In terms of layout, Word and Pages get a kick-start via their selection of good-looking built-in templates. This category encompasses each application's ability to create styles for ensuring document-wide visual consistency, along with the kind of DTP-style layout capabilities that many users of word processors require these days. Scrivener presents a different way of working, based around projects, but its fantastic tutorial and tidy interface means it scores highly. By comparison, is aping an aged Word, and Word itself, despite some interface refinements, feels cluttered and overbearing. Nisus also adds various widgets that enhance usability and nudge it ahead of Pages.
It's just far more obvious how to use them.
Even with its exhaustive documentation, we often became disorientated, and the application's inability to undo past save points proved a big drawback.Īmong Word,, Pages and Nisus Writer Pro, the streamlined offerings from Apple and Nisus win out. Mellel's bizarre interface left us nonplussed, and it's easy to get lost in its maze of options.