What app should i purchase as a basic word processor, similar to Word

Question

hello new to Mac, what is a word processing system compatible with Word for school reports? Thank you

Answer 1

schmidt.mad wrote:
what is a word processing system compatible with Word for school reports?
The important word here is "compatible". How compatible?
Remember that you meet here people from all parts of the world, who've gone to many different schools and in times very different from yours. They may not be at all familiar with what your school requires; of course, different schools may have different requirements. I know of a school where instructors comment on reports, and expect students to reply, using the "Track changes" feature. But this feature, indispensable for them, may be of no interest to you.
So, how compatible? Full compliance with "Track changes", for instance? Is there any math involved? Or just the ability to open Word docs, even if page breaks, and other features will be lost? The more detailed you are, the more accurate the replies will be.
The most compatible is… Microsoft Word. You can pick up the student edition of Office 2011 (Mac) for USD 90 from Amazon -- maybe cheaper elsewhere.
Next in compatibility are OpenOffice, LibreOffice, and NeoOffice. They are very similar, because all descend from the StarOffice suite, and their word processing modules offer high degree of compatibility with Word, but not full compatibility (for instance, "Track changes" is not entirely compatible).
NeoOffice is the most Mac-like, but you have to pay a (relatively small) fee to download it. The other two are completely free; LibreOffice seems to be under most active development at present, so that's the one I'd choose, but they're pretty much interchangeable in terms of features. Although both OO/LO are 'native', in the sense that X11 is no longer required, their interface (buttons, palettes, lists, some menus) feels strange and rather rough, and that's because, unlike NeoOffice, by and large they don't use specific Mac interface features (Aqua).
There are a good many other Mac word processors. Most offer the ability to open (or import) and save as (or export to) the Word format, with varying degrees of success. In most cases, the more complex features in Word, such as page breaks, footnotes, fields, formulae, are not well supported or not supported at all. For instance, Pages, which has already been mentioned more than once, is reasonably compatible with Word, but its manual warns,
"Because of text layout differences between Microsoft Word and Pages, an exported Word document may contain a different number of pages than its Pages counterpart. Also, special typographic features and some graphics may not display as well, particularly those using transparency (alpha channels). Tables and column layouts may not export identically."
So, what you need to do is to make a list of Word features you will need your word processor to honour, figure out your bugdet, and then check which one of the many Mac word processor best fits your needs.