Mellel 6 released (Mac only)

Posted by MadaboutDana
Dec 19, 2023 at 10:08 AM

Well, anyone working with corporate clients more or less automatically has to use Word. Over the years, I’ve tried replacing Word with other soi-disant Word-compatible apps (StarOffice, OpenOffice, LibreOffice, SoftMaker Office…), but have inevitably come across issues with all of them (although I’m in the process of taking another look at the latest version of SoftMaker Office).

And yes, Word is infuriating. As it continues to evolve, new bugs continue to crop up. I’m currently having problems with one of the most basic functions, Search, which is ridiculous. And you can’t comment on headers or footers, or on footnotes. Which is also ridiculous. It also has a nasty way of suddenly crashing out completely, which is actually quite impressive – very few apps crash out as thoroughly as Word, but Microsoft does at least follow up with a rather appealing little “Sorry about that” message.

But at the end of the day, it’s the industry standard. It shouldn’t be, just as VHS shouldn’t have been the standard for video cassettes back in the day. But here we are.

Ah, when I look back at the joys of using WordPerfect 5.2 on MS-DOS – I remember writing an entire manual for some Atari music composition software on that, complete with multiple columns, box-outs, headers, footers, table of contents, index, and all sorts. Oh, and the computer I used was a Toshiba laptop (TS1000, I believe) with a battery life in excess of one hour. No Internet back then, of course; we all used CompuServe or (if we were very cutting-edge) Yahoo. I was a bit of a WordPerfect demon. Goodness, how time flies!

Dormouse wrote:

>
>Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>I am sometimes forced to use MS Word, and everytime I do I think, “could
>>they have made this any more user un-friendly?” I can usually figure
>out
>>what I need to do, but navigating the ribbons and menus and dialog
>boxes
>>is the stuff of nightmares. I don’t use it enough for any of that to
>>become second nature.
>>
>>I work for a publisher, and wear many hats, that includes design and
>>layout of the books. I’d much prefer getting the manuscripts in plain
>>text. Word encourages authors to try to do their own layout, which I
>>then undo when I pull the text into InDesign. It’s a waste of their
>time
>>and makes more work for me.
>>
>>Sorry, this is a bit off the track of Mellel.
>>
>>Steve
> >Not sure why you’re forced to use Word. Presumably you have a docx file
>which you could open with any Mac-friendly WP like Mellel. idk why a
>writer would be mucking about with layout directly rather than using
>styles which would be a one click change; I assume they are at least
>using headings and one of the outline modes. And Word is happy to save
>as .txt if you only want the text.
> >Personally I spend very little time in ribbons or menus, but like most
>things - including plaintext editors - it can be complex if you are
>unfamiliar with it. The difference with most (all?) plaintext editors is
>that any feature you are looking for is almost certainly available and
>it’s just a question of knowing how to activate it. Certainly it’s not
>an easy program for occasional dabbling unless you are trying to
>implement a common standard workflow.