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Microsoft Word is the most used piece of software on the planet, but that doesn't mean it's the most loved. In fact, many users enjoy using Word about as much as they do weeding a prickly bed of roses. If you're a Mac enthusiast who finds Word a thorn in your side, take heart. There's an alternative program called Nisus Writer. It offers 90% of Word's features, but at $100, it sells for about one-third the price of Microsoft's word processor.
Nisus Writer, published by a small company in Southern California, has just released a long-awaited upgrade. Fans may be disappointed by the lack of new features, but Nisus Writer 6.0 is nevertheless powerful and easy to use. In fact, on the Mac platform, it's the last serious challenger to Word. And while Microsoft feigns ignorance about Nisus, it seems to be impressed enough by Writer to have added many of its best features to the last two versions of Word for the Mac. These include unlimited undos, multiple clipboards, a thesaurus and dictionary, and the ability to link one document to another.
Nisus has long been an innovator: Its word processor was the first, for example, to let you write in several languages within the same document. But Writer does have some glaring weaknesses. Nisus' small staff has struggled -- and failed -- to improve the way the program handles tables and multiple columns. Nisus doesn't include an outlining feature, nor does it let you create live links to Web sites from within documents. Word does all of these things well.
That said, Nisus Writer is an outstanding program. It's simple to learn and use, and you can easily customize it with your own features. Also, the program is fast and stable, which can't be said of Word. One of the biggest knocks against the Microsoft program is that it's crash-prone and sluggish, especially with large documents. I can personally testify that both charges are painfully true.
TALKING BACK. Despite Microsoft's imitation of some of Writer's features, Nisus still has a few tricks all its own. One is the ability to read back what you've written, which is great for proofreading. Microsoft included a text-to-speech feature in Word 98, but it didn't work well. The feature was yanked in Word 2001 (part of Office 2001, available for the Mac only). Nisus also lets you save as many as 10 different items at the same time on separate clipboards. You can edit any clipboard -- adding new text or changing fonts and color -- and then paste the contents of each separately. Microsoft added a multiple clipboard feature to Word 2001, but its version is crude compared with that of Nisus.
There's one trick Microsoft hasn't even attempted. Nisus lets you simultaneously select and edit words or sentences that aren't adjacent to one another. For example, you could copy the first and last sentence of a document at the same time and then paste them together in one paragraph in a new document.
Such great innovations, however, seem to be a thing of the past. In the latest version, Nisus has added only a handful of new features -- such as contextual menus, the automatic expansion of glossary abbreviations, and a grammar checker -- and many of them are about playing catch-up with Word. Sadly, the grammar checker doesn't work any better than Word's. What does work well, thank goodness, is an enhanced ability to create files that Word can read, and vice versa. Without such a feature, Nisus would be useless in a Word-dominated world.
Despite all of Nisus' word processing firepower, many longtime users are unhappy with version 6. The disgruntled are roughly divided into two camps -- those who wanted a good tool to create tables within a document and those who were hoping for a built-in outliner. Nisus won't say whether these features will be added in future versions. But it does say that Nisus will be rewritten to work with Apple's jazzy new operating system, OS X, and it promises that the rewrite will include lots of new, high-powered features.
So is Nisus for you? I'd say yes if you write lots of long documents, such as books, reports, and theses. And no word processor is better at handling multiple languages within a document. At the very least, Nisus is worth a try. You can download a trial version for free at www.nisus.com. And, if you're hooked, Nisus is knocking $50 off the price if you trade in an old version of AppleWorks, WordPerfect, or Word.
Haddad, Atlanta-based correspondent for Business Week, is a long-time Apple Computer buff. Follow his weekly Byte of the Apple column, only on BW Online Edited by Thane Peterson
Copyright 2000, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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