Microsoft Word often drives me nuts: it has such a huge feature set that I am often at a loss to type simple letters and memos without those features getting in the way (by auto completing words I don’t want or popping up list managers and formatting that I don’t want either).

So, I’m always on the lookout for an easy-to-use word processor with just the feature set I want. Apple’s free TextEdit is pretty good, as is Google’s online Writely. Writely is the simplest of all the packages I’ve looked at lately including OpenOffice.org Writer and Apple’s Pages, but it suffices for maybe 80% of what I need to do, and has the further advantage of being available anywhere there’s a net connection, complete with my saved docs.

Writer and Pages have the advantages of desktop software – like better integration of the spellchecker and a longer feature list. Pages even does InDesign-like page layout in conjunction with a large collection of templates. I usually find myself trying to push the layout options to the max, so should either just get used to the templates as is (but then, your stuff looks like everybody else’s) or just use the word processor. Evaluation will continue… stay tuned…

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