[SoftwareMaven]

I mean, what do you use on a Mac to compose documents? Word.

No. I use Pages (part of Apple's iWork) for almost everything. If I need Word comparability, I open LibreOffice.

Given how seamless the iWork experience is becoming between iDevices (which will be including Macs), how much cheaper iWork is, and how much better the iWork user experience is (they don't have 20 years of feature-cruft littering the interface), there is absolutely no reason for a home Mac user to use Office and few reasons (usually an iron-fisted corporate IT group) for a corporate Mac user to use it.

[evilduck]

Google Docs for me on OSX. The no-hassle availability anywhere without an install covers 95% of my document creation needs, the fact that everything's autosaved to the cloud and can be collaborated on, versioned, and exported keeps me coming back, and I don't have to worry about software version compatibility with anyone I share with which is a killer feature.

Anything that requires style or aesthetics gets drafted in Google Docs and then imported into Pages or Keynote for finishing touches, both of which are lightyears ahead of Word or Powerpoint in that regard (at least for 2007/Win 2008/OSX MS Office releases).

[Total_Meltdown]

Google Docs is Office's closest competitor, but not outside individuals and small organizations, simply BECAUSE it's all stored on "the cloud". BitBucket and GitHub have the same problem. It's not that they're not good products, it's that there are many, many, many very large companies that want to keep their data to themselves.

And by the way, being "encrypted" on the cloud doesn't usually mean what most people seem to think it means. Example: http://www.informationweek.com/news/storage/security/2295006...

[eropple]

No. I use Pages (part of Apple's iWork) for almost everything. If I need Word comparability, I open LibreOffice.

And if you need to do something remotely complex, neither works. Pages is decent for the very baseline word processing; OpenOffice is good for very little of anything.

The overwhelming majority of people use Office because what you call "cruft" is what other people call "important".

[ugh]

Overwhelming majority? I doubt it.

I have no doubt at all that there is a small minority of people who absolutely cannot do without some feature of Word that no competitor offers. But that’s a minority, not a majority.

The reason why I’m using Word, why my parents use Word, why my friends use Word (despite not needing any feature it has over Pages or OpenOffice) is that everyone else is using it. Importing and exporting from Pages or OpenOffice to Word is just no fun at all but necessary if you live in a world where everyone uses Word. I don’t want to run that particular type of gauntlet.

(I so enjoy all the times when I don’t depend on anyone else and can create a presentation with Keynote. It’s a dream. But an impractical dream if you are working together with people who use PowerPoint.)

[eropple]

I can't find the link offhand but I recall it being said by someone affiliated with Office that pretty much everyone uses about 20% of Word's features. The difference is in which 20%.

You might have a set of feature needs that Pages covers. I know that pretty much everyone in my company (that is, management and project people--engineers could get by with whatever, that's not a big deal) couldn't use Pages, and their needs are not extreme or out-there.

[SoftwareMaven]

My experience the vast majority of the time trying to get people to change away from Word is not that Pages doesn't have the features they want, but that they have to learn a new way to do it in Pages.

This is not to discount that as a valid issue. Taking time to learn new software is time taken away from the real business of the company.

I think Apple could help itself by having a rather large "I used to use Word, how do I do XXX in Pages?" help section inside of Pages (and Numbers and Keynote, though Keynote probably needs it less).

[geedee77]

This is an old concept that Microsoft themselves used in early version of Excel. I remember that there was a way to get early Excel to use the same commands as Lotus 1-2-3 which, I think, was the main spreadsheet application at the time. I'm going back 25 years though so apologies if my memory is not what it used to be!

[Umofomia]

I believe this is an article you were looking for (written by Joel Spolsky): http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html

The gist is that even though most people only use 20% of the features, everyone's 20% is a different set of features. So by creating a 'lite' version of your software, you actually end up alienating a lot of your users.

[JonnieCache]

What you're talking about is the 80-20 rule: 80% of people only need 20% of the featureset.

It's an incidence of the Pareto Principle, and dates back to 1906.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

[heyitsnick]

No, that's not what he's talking about.

[SoftwareMaven]

I disagree. The usage of features in Word undoubtably follow the power law, so there is undoubtably somebody somewhere who does use any particular feature, but the vast majority of people don't use them.

Pages doesn't have all of the functions and if you can't live without a particular function, it is obviously not a good replacement. However, for the vast majority of users, it has all the functionality that they will ever need and then some, without worrying about getting lost in menus of functionality that they will never care about.

[jimbobimbo]

Someone said some time ago: all people use only 5% of Word features at a time - the problem is that these are DIFFERENT 5% for everybody.

[rimantas]

I don't think Word is a best example for that. I'd say the wast wast majority of Word users use very basic features. I've seen my share of documents where spacing and centering was done using spaces…